Xavier Dolan Quotes

You have to listen to the movie while you're making it. I think that's important.

Pretty much, the writer's in charge in theater. Of course you're in charge with the director, but no one can change your words. People can give you notes, but you don't have to take them. In Hollywood you take them and you cash your check and that's your job. It's very different.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

When you're writing plays, it's possible to believe you don't have any real world skill. When you're adapting, it is really all about the mechanics, so you feel closer to, I don't know, an accountant or someone who has a body of information. It's not all about temperament.

Writing a film is like building a brick wall. You have a plan, and you have the blocks. Then, somebody says, 'I think we'll take this stone out of here and put it over there. And while we're at it, let's make this stone red and that stone green.'

Scripts are very different to books. They are blueprints for building, not the building.

The beautiful thing about theater is every night is an opportunity to incorporate what you discovered the night before.

You can write ten versions of a scene, and then, on the day, discover that something in the original scene worked. It's hard on writers. Hard on actors, hard on editors, hard on me, hard on the producers, who require patience and confidence. But I can't get to the end without going through this process.

Good musicals, a strange world, seem so easy. People say, 'Ohhh, it's magic.' Nothing's magic. A thing doesn't jell. Adapt. Change the rhythm. Shorten the scene. Rewrite the character. Maneuver the waters. Seeming easy is why so many shows aren't good.

Directing is so dope to me, man, 'cause it doesn't necessarily have to be your material. You're making someone else's material come to life. There's something amazing about that.

I really enjoyed writing the adaptation of 'Into The Woods.' I thought it was wonderful to not be the director, frankly. I really enjoyed that aspect of it.

I've never written anything that I haven't wanted to write again. I want to, and still am, writing 'A Few Good Men' again. I didn't know what I was doing then, and I'm still trying to get it right. I would write 'The Social Network' again if they would let me, I'd write 'Moneyball' again. I would write 'The West Wing' again.

'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

Each time I make a movie, it's a little bit like taking another course in something because there's an argument between these people that I don't necessarily have an answer to.

There's something about coming up with something out of nothing. I work with somebody else's creation already, and I just try to make it better.

Part of debunking the mythology of filmmaking is that we tend to want to locate it often in one person. And it's not one person. It's a collective, and it is a collaboration.

There have been days where I've had two writers' rooms or three writers' rooms going, and you walk back and forth. And then you sort of throw yourself on the sofa, and you go, 'Just talk at me for, like, 20 minutes,' and my brain will catch up with this particular story. But I find that exciting.

You're thinking about the physical consequences about what you're writing if you're going to direct it. If you're not going to direct it, then it's somebody else's problem, and they'll solve it.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B, and C.

It's a very different thing when you're creating the world as opposed to when you're just part of the world. I love the detail of it, the problem-solving of it, and I love working with actors.

I think everything you do, whether it's low budget things when you're first starting out or full feature films or when you're working with Hollywood, you're always learning, all the time.

As a director, you want to work with great writers.

Story is the primary factor any day. If I believe that a particular director would do justice to it, I will accept an offer.

Once you have a blueprint down, you start talking to all the other heads of department to see if and how they can help to execute what you've imagined, and so things change and evolve. And then you have to make it work within the budget and time frame, so things change even more.

So many Hollywood adaptations of really popular manga series just don't get it right, and for me what was really important was that if I was gonna do 'Naruto,' I wanted to actually work with Kishimoto and get a script to a stage where he would look at it and be excited about realizing it.