Adaptation Challenges Quotes

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

I've never read a script that I've loved equally and differently to the book.

Princess Rose should indeed be a TV movie, assuming something doesn't go wrong. I don't know how good a movie it will be, because the way movie folk think is different from the way writers think, and I distrust what isn't done my way. This is what I call a healthy paranoia.

I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.

It's never easy to adapt a book, especially as the author, because it's as if you're chopping off appendages. It really feels painful to decide what has to go.

When I moved from Independiente to Atletico Madrid, I was only 18, and I found it hard to adapt. But what surprised me most about moving to England was how fast the game was. I like it, but it is so quick.

Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.

Only one time in my career I had that feeling [that this is not gonna get made], it was for this movie [Life of Pi]. It was right before we started the physical pre-production. I pre-visualized the whole ocean part before we made the movie, I was that prepared. At one point they seemed to want to drop it because it was really risky. The budget we proposed was a lot higher than they expected, they wanted to [drop it]. After all, it's a philosophical book and a literature property, it's not Batman.

My theory in the '90s was that I didn't want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee 'Sense and Sensibility' was beautiful, but other ones, I didn't think justice was being done. It's not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

I'm left handed and I'm playing a right handed kit... That's why everyone thought, 'Wow, he's a genius,' but all I was doing was trying to play backwards... It's one of those mad accidents, you can't learn it.

It's just that... working on 'Green Lantern,' I saw how difficult it is to make that concept palatable, and how confused it all can be when you don't really know exactly where you're going with it or you don't really know how to access that world properly - that world comic book fans have been accessing for decades and falling in love with.

Interestingly, I never thought I'd do an adaptation. I've also been quite against them. I think trying to translate one medium to another is wrong. I never really felt that books fitted into film. Generally people are disappointed, aren't they?

I've made movies that were adaptations and I've been kind of frustrated by the process because, you know that old axiom, 'It's never as good as the book'? It's often true because nothing competes with your own imagination. When you're reading a book and you imagine something in your head, nothing's going to compete with that.

I could never be a part of an adaptation of a film where there's pressure to not disappoint the immense fan base. In those cases, they often wind up with filmed books on tape, quite uncinematic. Having said that, I'd say all the adaptations I've done are quite faithful to the original... You have to pick and choose which storylines and plot threads, because you don't have the time to kill in the film as they have in novels. All those pages with detours and plots and different storylines. But films add a lot, and you gotta keep it moving.

I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here [in America], and be happy.

My biggest struggle was probably having to move from the Dominican to the United States to go to high school. Moving to Michigan, the weather, the language, I didn't speak English at all. That adjustment for me was difficult at the beginning.

At the time, The Hotel New Hampshire was John Irving's favorite adaptation of his work, which meant a lot to all of us who worked on that movie.It's amazing to me that that was a studio movie. That was a summer studio release! If that doesn't tell you how much the business has changed, nothing will.

Many of the comedies I had made in Sweden were slightly based on semi-autobiographical experiences, so adapting novels was a very different experience.

It's almost like an optical illusion, 'The Hobbit.' You look at the book, and it is really thin, and you could make a relatively thin film as well. What I mean by that is that you could race through the story at the speed that Tolkien does.

Most of the time, I don't think movies of TV shows are a great idea. It's worked a few times, but usually, I think that what's on TV works on TV.

It's easy in a novel to be completely unambiguous about the relationship between animal and daemon simply by stating it outright; whereas you get very few opportunities to do this in an elegant way in a film.

It's a difficult thing when you try and make a film of a book that you really love. You have about two hours to tell the story, and it's never going to be enough.

Lots of movies don't kind of work as well as they do on the page.

I couldn't settle in Italy - it was like living in a foreign country.