Storytelling Differences Quotes

Often in the past, there have been authors that were deeply disappointed in their adaptation, but that's because they haven't accepted the fact that a movie is a different thing, and it can't possibly be the same as the book.

When you read the book, you paint the picture but when you adapt a book then the audience will, by and large, say the book was better and every filmmaker knows this.

Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.

It's not a natural translation, transition, to take something from stage to screen. Onstage your action is communicated through the spoken word primarily, and on screen it's communicated through pictures. So it's always been kind of unnatural to take something that lives on the stage and turn it into moving pictures.

Coming back from doing 'The Hobbit,' you think 'Sherlock' is realistic, but of course, it's not that realistic.

An author entices the readers with their words, and it is painful for them to even lose a sentence. But films and books are two different mediums and should be dealt differently. What works in a book might not work for a film. When I saw 'Anna Karenina' on screen, I didn't like it at all, whereas 'The Godfather' was legendary.

Honestly, there are so many things about structuring a story for film and telling a story for film that are really different from doing radio.

Film is much more visual, a scene is typically a lot shorter, you're dealing with a lot more characters, a lot more locations, and you're able to rely on things that you just can never do on the stage.

I couldn't enjoy 'A Dance With Dragons,' unfortunately. Of course, I enjoyed it, but it was the first of the books I read as a writer on 'Game of Thrones,' so all I could do is think, 'We're going to have to shift that,' 'We won't be able to afford that,' or 'That's a great scene.'

You see a comic, and you're like, 'Oh wow: the Riddler has been drawn this way, and he's been drawn that way.' There are tons of looks, and his personality changes based on who's writing them.

You know, comics and movies, even if you take a comic and turn it into a movie, we can't all be Joss Whedon.

For more than three years, I'd been part of a complex and frustrating dance as my nonfiction, fact-based material was translated from book to movie by scriptwriters whose visions, goals and sensibilities often were quite different from mine.

You're able to do things in novels: introduce subplots, other characters, thematic layers and so on, in a way that you simply can't in a movie. A movie really has to choose its battles.

My wife and I have this discussion all the time. Her primal influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Mine are Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit and T.H. White. So, we have certain structural differences in form and content right off the bat!

If you've ever compared a film to a novel it's based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It's inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie's needs get served.

I mean, we shoot differently, we cut differently, our stories are different . . . I'd say that every single thing is different except for the fact that you watch it on a TV or a computer or a phone, just like you do with everybody else's content.