Story Adaptation Quotes

'Troublemaker' is not an adaptation of 'Metro Girl' or 'Motor Mouth.' It is an original story. The hardest part was probably trying to keep the sound true to the novels. I always write in first person, and it was important to us that the readers of 'Metro' and 'Motor' be comfortable with the change over to a graphic novel.

Piper reads the scripts, and we email a lot. Most of her comments are on the more technical side, like "This wouldn't happen. This is against the rules." She's been extremely respectful of our taking her story, and then veering left with it and taking it in its own direction. But, I always want her involved because she's the mother of all this.

What Peter Jackson proved with 'Lord Of The Rings' movies is that you could make various changes, and you could pull things around, but as long as it was in the spirit of the storytelling, and because he made The Shire so real, the fans forgave him for the changes.

I was too lazy to start a whole new story, so I just stuck a princess into the story I was working on... and The Princess Diaries was born!

In the Emperor's New Clothes, they got a different celebrity to do each voice. They drew up a picture of each character and then each actor wrote their own part.

Oh yes, I've been approached to do all sorts of nonsense. How about a remake of 'West Side Story?'

I am not interested in doing a film on the basis of a good story. I want a proper screenplay.

That Hollywood 'LotR' movie really sucked, and was a true turn-off. That's what Hollywood always does, even to good stories.

Way back before the 'Alex Barnaby' series was first published, we were talking with Dark Horse then about making it into a graphic novel of some sort. We just couldn't get it together at the time; we had too many projects going on. We weren't sure how we wanted to bring it forward.

I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.

When I write and develop things myself, I might work for a while on a script from a book, and then I go back and read the book and go back into it to see if I lost something: is there something there?

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me. So when David Fincher comes along and wants to direct 'The Social Network,' when Bennett Miller comes along and wants to direct 'Moneyball,' or when Danny Boyle wants to direct 'Jobs'? Hallelujah. I want them directing it.

Typically, when you sell your story rights to a movie production company, they can do whatever they want with it. The writer is typically not involved anymore.

To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.

When I first heard 'A Christmas Story, the musical,' I thought, Oh, that could be really good. It just felt like it fit. Some films lend themselves well to other formats, some don't, but there are so many fantasy sequences in the film, and Ralphie's such a dreamer as a character, I thought they could really lend themselves to being set pieces.

I'm encouraging these women, like Cheryl Strayed, to take the jump to writing for the screen. She is adapting her book Tiny Beautiful Things for us. They're infinitely capable of tackling the format.

Because you're telling a story, and I'm sure people fifty years ago would tell the same story differently if they were telling it to you today. Because the time is different. The film is the work of today's audience.

You know, really, it's not easy taking a 20 year story and condensing it into two hours. But they did a fantastic job of really being able to capture, you know, what that community went through, what these what these real people in that community went through to bring the story out for the rest of us.

I like the 'Keystone Kops' storyline. It didn't actually go quite the way I wanted to, but it was another great way to show how different life was in these two different corners of the DCU, being on the ground in these different areas.

When Hollywood sees a good story about a man who sells confidence, they see themselves and they like it.

There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.

Novels are very different than films and I love to see someone else's imagining of my story.

Though the Grimms kept about 100 of the tales from the first edition, they changed them a good deal.