John Patrick Shanley Quotes

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

I didn't write 'Snow White' for any class, but I got bitten by the screenwriting bug and wrote a couple of scripts in my spare time instead of going to keg parties or something.

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

The only thing approaching art in a movie is the script.

Whenever you write script without a director, you put in things that point toward a style in which the story will be told, a subjective style.

I just want to write movies. And I try very hard.

Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.

My approach to making movies is different than other people, because I just write a lot of screenplays. I'm constantly writing screenplays.

When you're writing for a show, you're writing part of the script. You have to tell the story.

To make a great film you need three things - the script, the script and the script.

I want to write and direct a movie one day.

The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.

I'm currently trying to direct my own material.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.

I like films to be complete in their written form.

Personally, I read a lot of scripts.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.