Whit Stillman Quotes

Not every script that rolls in is ready to shoot. Few are, actually. So you go back and work on the thing.

Every script always goes through rewrites so that everyone loves it.

I always get quite close to my script because I work quite hard on them.

I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.

I've rewritten a lot of the scripts I've done. 'Little Shop Of Horrors' was a complete rewrite, but I didn't touch the dialogue. Essentially, I'm a very good editor.

It doesn't help anybody to put out a bad script.

I did three or four weeks of work on 'Godzilla;' it wasn't a page-one rewrite or anything like that. The term is 'script doctoring,' is what I did on it.

I do a lot of screen re-writing.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.

Writers are first directors. When directing our own scripts, we would have a better vision and clarity than directing the stories penned by others. I personally think that a writer's job is tough than a director's.

Writing a script is hard, I've discovered.

I write an actual script rather quickly - a draft will take me two weeks - but I write a lot of drafts. My big thing is I don't re-read. When I write, I never re-read back. I'll send it, because if I re-read back, it will cripple me.

There are certainly things in live broadcasts that I've done that I wish I could have gone back to edit and make better. It's hard, because you want it to be perfect, and it just isn't. Even in the edited ones, it's not everything you want it to be - but it's closer.

I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never plotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.

Finding a good script is really difficult and the scariest thing of all is when they say about a script that's not right, "we will fix it.." It's like before you get on the Titanic and you see a big hole. In process, it's too late.

To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over.

Formula: Second Draft = First Draft minus 10%.

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

I can’t write five words but that I change seven.