Lena Dunham Quotes

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold.

I don't think I write differently when I'm writing a screenplay, as opposed to a stage play or a teleplay. Maybe if I were in a film class and there was time to think about it, we could point out differences.

I believe when you're writing film or television, you can't rely on a crutch or rule that exists outside of the narrative of the film.

TV has a longer narrative, and TV's more like short stories. So there's less rules with TV; you can make it a little bit different. [With] movies, the medium has more constraints, so it was just about what stories are the most cinematic and the best resolution.

This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.

I know how to write. So I am not totally at the mercy of filmmakers, but it's not a bad point.

At the end of the day you do have to write a short novel beforehand, called a script, before you can make a movie.

I tried to write a TV series, and then I discovered first of all that I love writing more than anything on this earth, and that you could write exactly as well as you want to.

"Prison Break" has been a really great experience because of the writers. I think that in television, you can have great directors, really good actors, but if it's not on the page... I think a series lives and dies in writing.

Writing screenplays is very freeing from what you can do in comics in a lot of ways. You can change things around. I can take great delight in writing 40 pages, then just pressing delete and getting rid of it and not thinking about it ever again. Whereas in comics, if I had put that kind of effort into it, I couldn't go on.

I'm a moviemaker, not a documentarian. I try to hit the truth.

Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.

The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker... But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

As a screenwriter I'm often writing in genres where there have been thousands of movies; whereas when I direct movies they tend to be in between genres. They tend to have a little bit of a genre to them, but they're really about the people, and they're people we haven't met before.

Writing grew out of the pleasure of escape. My novels are very much outside of my personal experience. That is why I love writing fiction. It allows me to leave my existence and inhabit other lives.

Obviously, television is a writer's medium, so you get a lot more power and authority. With a film, the discipline is having a beginning, middle and end, and having it work in a specific space of time.

I didn't like writing just articles and things. So then I wandered around. I tried my hand at film and television and that was a worse fit because I don't really have a mind for that.

I'm basically a writer, it's who I am. I direct and I like theatre directing very much. But I've done 17 movies, they don't say 'Let's get Garry, he'll make a helicopter shot,' they say 'Get Garry, he'll fix the script.'

What I wound up doing, which I think is really journalistically dubious, is changing the order of some of the things I did, so that the things I ended up struggling with the most wind up being two-thirds of the way in.

I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.