Editing Quotes

If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.

If you think about filmmaking as an entire spectrum, starting with the writer and ending with maybe the marketing department, the actor's contribution is a rather slender band.

The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying.

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.

I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.

I'm going to make a long speech because I've not had the time to prepare a short one.

Directing a film requires a different set of skills. It is a difficult job, and I am happy being an actor.

The creative process for a musician is very different than for a filmmaker. I have an idea, and I can pretty much execute it.

I spent my 20s making film after film, often in very adverse conditions. You'd fly back from somewhere - Beirut, the Falklands, South Africa - on Saturday, and you'd have 24 hours to cut your film, and it would go out on Monday night.

I love having made a movie.

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

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Shooting a movie should be fun! It's not a real job. It can be hard, but at the end of the day, we're dressing up and playing pretend.

HBO spends almost a month perfecting an episode. They shoot at the same speed that you would shoot a major motion picture, and they give you all of the things that you need to succeed. They really do support their artists.

I think it's important to say typing in the computer is like the last, last phase of my writing process. That's kind of the fun part. Well, it's all somewhat fun, I suppose. But usually what happens is I think about a movie for at least a year - maybe a couple more - and I don't put anything down.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

People sometimes think that a video pops out of my head with no more work than extracting a booger. Every video is a challenge (an exciting one, sure, but a challenge.) Every collaboration is complicated.

I spent the entire morning inserting a comma; I spent the whole afternoon removing it again.

I wanted to do a film for a while, but I never found a script that I felt I was going to be the right person for; because if you've never made a film, you're not taught how to make a film, and you feel like you lack skills.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.

Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.

When you make a film, everyone wants to define it.

Filmmaking in general is my second career. I thought that writing wasn't practical, so I went to business school and got an MBA, and I worked three years in grant management.

It takes two years to make a good film.