Jay Roach Quotes

When I first did 'The Fast and the Furious', I didn't want there to be a sequel on the first one. I thought, 'Why would you rush to do a sequel - just because your first film is successful?'

You just can't put a '3' after the title of the film. If you have a franchise that has worked, it does not mean that you can go on making it.

I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue - I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

'Step Brothers 2' would have been fun, there's no doubt about it. Maybe someday. Does that idea age? I don't know. It all depends on how the movie ages.

I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

'Independence Day,' ever since we did it, there's been enormous pressure to follow it up.

I want to do 'Company of Heroes 2,' if they do it. It depends on how the movie performs, but they hope it will perform well. They have a franchise on their mind, and if it's a franchise, man, I'm going to be a very happy person.

I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together. I do have the final scene, but that really is an epilogue. It's not part of the plot.

Other than Peter Jackson doing 'Lord of the Rings,' I don't get it when filmmakers follow up a movie with a sequel to the same movie. God bless 'em if they can be up for it, but that would drive me insane.

We don't know if there is a 'Tremors 6.' If there is, we're not sure what that is yet. I know what I would like to see as 'Tremors 6.' Because I've been with this a long time. I have specific desires along those lines. But clearly, we have left the door open for a sequel.

Since 'Main Hoon Na' is a cult film, if I want to make a sequel, the story has to be good!

A sequel is going to be a pressure no matter who directs it. A sequel is only made when the original film works.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

The story [for the western genre] is everything. Whether it's a book or a screenplay, the story drives everything. And if you just go out and try to make one by putting on boots and jumping on a horse and riding off... If you don't have the material, the characters and the things to overcome and conflicts that give life to drama, you don't have it.

While I am usually in despair when a movie abandons its plot for a third act given over entirely to action, I have no problem with the way Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets ends, because it has been pointing toward this ending, hinting about it, preparing us for it, all the way through. What a glorious movie.

The reason why people don't get called back to sequels is because they did badly in the original [movie].

Plot is the knowing of destination.

The poem has to bear the weight with image, language... the screenplay with dialogue, plot.

To this day, people ask me where is Austin Powers 4? I don't have that answer, it so hard to come up with a story that deserves an encore like that.

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end.

Working on the plot/story idea for my next novel ... It always takes time.