Stan Lee Quotes

You need to know that going in, and you also need to be able to write all the time. So when somebody looks at you across the table and says, "What do you think about a movie where Miley Cyrus switches souls with a basset hound?" You need to be able to sit there and figure out how to make that possibly shootable.

Being producer you're still going to have to sell somebody who's going to give you the money on the idea and everything like that. But it does give you a little bit more control if you're thinking in that creative process; it gives you more control to tell the story you want to tell rather than sort of just reading a script that somebody else wrote and says, "Yes, please, you can hire me for this job." So it's a little bit more hands-on, a little bit more closer to the heart.

If I have an idea I want to put in a movie, I know what camera will make that look best, and I have ideas for future projects and stuff I'd like to build for those. I think it's just part of how I work, though.

Thinking visually is my starting point, and then the writing happens.

As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.

I'm pretty focused on what I do. I think directing is a very specific talent, and I'm not real big on putting puzzles together, which is basically what a film is.

With a film you go with the script that's already written. And I've never thought of a project, a film that would come from my own desire. I don't think I can do it. I need someone else's desire to be able to do something. With a record, it is completely different, it's a collaboration with another artist, but I'm willing to go into intimate places with no masks on.

I like to think that every movie emerges from the conversations.

A lot of times, when I'm approaching pre-production and my job, and trying to research and work on the script and whatnot it's always different.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

There is no difficult moment working together because when we start a new project, Dante starts to make all the sketches and I can see the vision of the movie and then I start my job.

Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.

Collider is a company that I formed with a movie producer, Alisa Tager, and we just wanted to create a place where writers could come and develop their ideas without a regard to limitations of form.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like.

To be a good director, you have to spend a lot of time on actual sets, but today, there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time in dark rooms writing a script, and they'll go in and tell the story to some suit at a studio who says, 'Okay, this is great, let's go.' But that doesn't necessarily mean you know what to do once you're on set.

Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.

When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.

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

The process of making a movie is what I love. I thrive on that. It's an exciting miracle, a mad adventure. I love being part of it.

Nelson McCormack on 'Killing Kennedy' was really terrific because I wrote the script, and he had some terrific ideas. We went over the script together, and I was with him on set. So it was a collaborative effort.

There is a director for a reason, because a director knows what's best for the movie. You just give your director as much as you can to work with, and hopefully, the decisions they make are going to be great.

The creative process on 'Margaret' was incredibly satisfying. I loved the cast; I had a great time writing the script. I liked making the movie. Believe it or not, I actually like editing the movie. It was all the rest of it that was such a nightmare.

A producer friend of mine from film school had read some of my early screenplays - some experiments I had done to see how fast I could write something.

When I started doing projects for TV, I made sure to participate in the brainstorming sessions.