Rajkummar Rao Quotes

I really kill myself on titles, although 'The 5th Wave' seems like an obvious title, doesn't it? You don't know how long that took me.

The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.

I almost didn't name Butt-Head 'Butt-Head.' I came real close to calling him something else.

The green-light meeting, when I first started at Paramount, would consist of maybe three or four of us in a room. Perhaps two or three of us would have read the script under discussion.

I find getting the first draft down to be the biggest challenge. Every word, every punctuation mark, every plot point is a decision. It's much more fun to play with something that already exists.

Whatever you do, whatever you come up with, whatever you decide on, you can go with it, and if the director or the execs, they like it, then you'll stick with it. That's a good thing, as opposed to having something that's already written.

Stories often take their own course once you start to write them, especially when you have the benefit of a writers' room and a team of people augmenting and adding to the material.

There's always somebody you can call and go have lunch with and just talk out an idea. And it's great, because I need that. It's part of my writing process, to early on sit people down and say, 'Alright, this film I'm working on...' and I tell them everything I have.

I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.

On 'Mr. Robot,' because I run the writers' room and know every decision behind every line of dialogue, I'm able to be nimble and adapt with the scripts and the moments. I never have to question what I'm doing as I'm directing the actors or going through the scenes.

In the past, I'd been sort of a fan of writing a coat hanger of a script, and something I could hang ideas off of.

I take time with my films and I want to work on every script properly before I move on to something else.

I think it's important to say typing in the computer is like the last, last phase of my writing process. That's kind of the fun part. Well, it's all somewhat fun, I suppose. But usually what happens is I think about a movie for at least a year - maybe a couple more - and I don't put anything down.

I really want to write another novel, and I am trying to come up with what the story will be. As I learned with 'Groundswell,' I can't force it; I just have to wait for it to come to me.

As a director you have to live and breathe that one story for 8 months completely. I like variety, if I write extensively I get a writer's block so I do something else to beat the boredom and then get back to something I've already done.

Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.

I really love being a part of the creative process. I love having an opinion that gets heard, and then it's all up for discussion.

That's what's so wonderful about collaborating: your idea can explode and become something else.

There are producers, like the late Geoffrey Perkins, who have truly great ideas that will fire up your synapses and show you that handing in your first draft is not the end of a horrible process, but the beginning of a beautiful one.

My two bits here are that writing is a solitary job but there are times when one needs to discuss the work, and see what's working and what's not.

I think of myself as more additive than initially creative; I don't come up with the stories.

I have a shoebox: for ideas, fragments, snatches of conversation I hear. I scrawl it down, throw the scraps in the box. Every time I start a new script I start picking through the pieces. Suddenly you get five pieces together and think: this is almost the first Act of a movie, if I flesh it out a bit.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

I never punched in anything when I recorded Imaginaryland. Where the title came from is a whole other story.

Really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is, "What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?" Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops.