Jessica Pare Quotes

'Justified' had such dead-on beautiful scripts that you didn't want to mess with it.

There have been times - and not just on 'The Newsroom,' but on 'The West Wing,' 'Sports Night,' 'Studio 60'... - where it was hard to look the cast and crew in the eye, when I put a script on the table that I knew just wasn't good enough.

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

I come out of TV. I come out of live television, BBC drama: that's where I started first as a designer, then a director. Then I went independent TV, then television advertising.

I read every draft of every episode of every series produced at FX.

Good scripts are hard to find.

Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.

I always write the script by myself.

The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.

If it's an excellent script, I enjoy it tremendously, the acting part of it.

Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain.

Hell, I ain't paid to make good lines sound good. I'm paid to make bad lines sound good.

I'm a writer; I've worked as much as a writer as I have as an actor, so I was in a script-note session at Imagine for a TV show I wrote that they were producing, and they happened to say, 'You'd be great as Crosby, do you want to do this show we're doing, 'Parenthood?'

In a movie, you work three months to tell a story that happens in two hours. In a Mexican soap opera, you work one day to make a story that's an hour and a half. So you can see the difference in the quality of the project.

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.

I've been lucky enough that in the U.K., I've done shows that have aired once a week. I make a show there that runs seasonally, and we make one episode a week, and that is great - the value of time. You can really think and finesse what you want to do.

Writing a really good screenplay is not easy. It can be a very punishing form.

The cool thing about 'Transparent' is that the show is funny but not like a sitcom is funny. It all comes down to the writing... The writers on that show are so good that you don't have to worry about anything. There are so many things that can go wrong making a TV show or a movie, but if the writing's good, that's, like, 95 percent of it.

We all have great faith in the writing team that puts together 'Heroes.'

Writing a script consumes so much of time.

Limited series ensure that we maintain the quality of the writing on the sets.

I usually just do, like, studio jobs, re-writes and stuff.

When you're trying to force things in a script, it seems like it's getting somewhere, but it isn't real or interesting. All the bad material you've written becomes an albatross around your neck. So I really don't like writing a lot of bad stuff, I prefer to just keep narrowing it down to stuff I think is solid.

If the script is not good, the film will not work.

The thing about our movies is, we write thirty drafts. That's a very detailed script. Which means that if you try to crank it out week to week in television, it's impossible.