Script Revisions Quotes

Writing a film is like building a brick wall. You have a plan, and you have the blocks. Then, somebody says, 'I think we'll take this stone out of here and put it over there. And while we're at it, let's make this stone red and that stone green.'

I was briefly in the original version of 'Tombstone,' but I didn't make the final cut because that movie went through a couple of different permutations.

With television, sometimes the writing is continuous and happening at every moment, and you'll get new pages at the last moment. We have to incorporate that into what it is that we're doing.

You have to write a lot of scripts to get any scripts that are worth making.

My scripts are always heavily noted. If I can take a director to one side and say, "Do you mind if we try this?," a few days before, that's usually a better way of doing it then on the day.

On TV, you never know where it's going. They may even lie to you about where it's going. You never really know because the scripts come in every couple of weeks or so.

In TV, you usually don't get a chance to fix anything. It's always easier to cancel something than fix it.

I've never made a show that goes right on the air and is perfect. People don't remember, but the original 'Goldbergs' pilot was poorly received, and I had to retool that for ABC, where it eventually became a hit.

I think it's a bad habit for an actor to change scripts because that's not your job. You're not a writer, necessarily - although there are some actors that are good at it.

A script is a very rough material in a way. Whatever questions you might have regarding the script, you might find the beginning of the answers in the book.

We go through, I think, six different drafts of each script. And then my shooting it is roughly, you know, fifteen percent of the total work that gets done on a show. Then it's all post-production animation after that.

Back then, it was more or less we couldn't change a line in our script. We weren't allowed to change lines. Today, actors change everything and won't do parts. It's very different today. Back then, the producers were in charge. Today actors are more in charge.

I very rarely read a script that I don't feel I want to change a lot.

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

I've worked on so many films where the script is one thing and then, somewhere down the line - on set, sometimes - it changes, and there's zero I can do about it.

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

TV is the place for writers to live. This is where you have creative control and you're constantly writing. 'Twilight' had almost a TV schedule to it. I was constantly working on these projects. There was not a whole lot of lull but I've gone onto other feature projects that's like, 'Okay, I'll get back to you on notes.'

With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.

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

Usually with something like 'The 100,' because you're working so much and every day, and they'll change the drafts quite quickly, we'll go through maybe, like, 12 different versions of the same scene over a week. So there is no point in learning it on a Tuesday when on a Thursday it might be completely different.

You don't improvise with a Cameron Crowe script.

Televison is time bound. Whereas a movie has time. You can't write a script for television and keep it for one year.

When people slave over those scripts and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for them, they don't usually want you to add farts.

I don't know why directors sign on to these projects and completely rewrite everything.

My experience is that's rare - that you have a script that is... what they call 'film-ready.'