Source Material Quotes

Remakes have been done forever. People talk about 'Scarface' and don't even know it was a remake.

A lot of us got into the industry because of 'Star Wars,' and we all have this love of the original source material.

From what I understand about Shakespeare - which isn't a lot - there was no copyright law when he was writing. He sampled at will, and it wasn't seen as a bad thing.

The actual and valuable material of all human utterances —is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

I think it's counterproductive for actors to come to the set with well-thumbed copies of the book their film is adapted from.

I don't like to use the word 'remake', I think reinterpretation is a better word. It's just a matter of respecting the source, and then trying to make your own film, and trying not to be inhibited by being so beholden to every single thing... We respect the source, but we make changes to it.

I'm a huge Marvel fan, and the fact that they take the liberties that they do in filmmaking - I think, if anything, that it dignifies the comics, and it says, 'Yeah. This is a strong enough, robust enough source. We can bend it; it's elastic. It's bouncy.'

If you go back and watch 'The French Connection,' it's been cannibalized so many times. There are certain movies like that, where you see the original and think, 'This isn't so great.' And the reason it isn't so great is because everyone has copied it.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

You usually get a script and you tell people what the story's about, and they have no idea what's going on. Whereas with an adaptation, you come into it, and it seems like everyone you talk to has a million opinions on the cast and the way the story should be told.

I always felt once it goes into movie land, the book belongs to someone else.

With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.

It's a challenge to turn a book series into a television series; you need to keep people on their toes, but you also want to be true to the source material.

I extract what I consider the best material from different sources. But often the material I perform comes from a very strange location in history, which are minstrel shows.

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

You either ignore the comic book and make a great movie or you stay very close to the comic book.

I always say, I'm certain I changed 'Watchmen' less than the Coen brothers changed 'No Country for Old Men.' I'm certain of it. But you don't hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It's like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.

'Inherent Vice' was a novel that already existed, and in 'Steve Jobs,' I was playing a real person; in those situations, you do feel an added pressure to please.

A lot of period pieces we see are adaptations of novels - we always know the story.

I don't tend to be a nitpicker when I'm watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that's very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn't have done themselves.

I don't have a specific message for 'The Grace of Kings' and the sequels in mind other than wanting to challenge some of the source material I was working from as well as some of the assumptions of epic fantasy.

People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.