Television Adaptation Quotes

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall.'

A while ago, I did a television adaptation of 'Bleak House,' and the character I played, as far as I was concerned, had no redeeming features whatsoever. I wasn't about to try to find any; I didn't need to.

I did a 'Children of the Corn' remake for Sci Fi Channel. I play the Peter Horton role from the original, and Candace McClure from 'Battlestar Galactica' is my Linda Hamilton.

People always ask us, 'When are you guys gonna do a movie? When are you gonna do a TV show?' And to me, that feels like such a step backwards from where are.

When I first read Margaret Atwood's novel 'The Handmaid's Tale,' it was Saudi Arabia as I knew it that came to mind, not a dystopian future United States as in the new television adaptation.

The ability of a television series to make adjustments is something you've got to take advantage of.

'The Blacklist' was really right place, right time. I read the script and met with Jon Bokenkamp, John Eisendrath, John Fox and John Davis, and we just hit it off. They understood that I was not so much trying to adapt to television, but adapt a cinematic style to the things that we were gonna do.

Most of the time, I don't think movies of TV shows are a great idea. It's worked a few times, but usually, I think that what's on TV works on TV.

When 'Rent: Live' was announced, I bugged everybody. The creatives, Fox, the producers, my team - I have to be Mark Cohen. It almost got to a laughable point for me. I was like, 'I have to be Mark Cohen.'

I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.

That movie [A Series of Unfortunate Events] told four books in two hours, and we have two hours per book. So we have eight hours to tell four books, and if people watch we'll get to tell more of them. There's only thirteen books, so there's only going to be two more seasons, but that allows for a lot of time to be in character and to maintain character.

'Doctor Who' is not as literary as 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' is - books have come out, but they are from the television episodes. So there is that difference... it's more scholastic.

I worked with Kathy Rigby, and it's a concept called 'Peter Perry': it's all of Katy Perry's songs telling the story of Peter Pan. Kathy was so sweet, and it was such a cool experience to meet her and work with her and use the set that I had watched on television for so many years.

Agatha Christie holds special personal memories for me because my mum, a television producer called Pat Sandys, had been the first person to persaude the Agatha Christie estate to put one of her stories on T.V.

Television theatre, as is implied in its name, should rely on adaptations of scripts written for the theatre.

Doing a TV show is different because it's more of a TV version of something. A more focused take on things.

I turned down all the requests for the rights to the books, for years, mostly because they wanted the rights to the characters, and to turn it into a TV series. This would have allowed them to do anything they wanted with the characters, and that just wasn't an option for me.

If you made a movie of 'Sharp Objects,' chances are that it would be a smaller film, but as a TV show, it can reach a lot of people.

HBO is turning 'Game Change' into a miniseries, and they've cast Ed Harris as my dad.

I felt, selfishly, that if there was going to be a TV show about 'Hannibal Lecter' whether I was going to be involved or not, I'd rather be involved. I wanted to make sure it was something I wanted to watch.

[Make a sitcom] was really the idea of Executive Producer Joe Roth who owned the property over at Revolution Studios and said he was thinking about taking it to TV. And after he said that he already had [writer/director] Ali Leroi on board, and that he was going after Terry Crews, to me it was a no-brainer. I said, "Let's put this together!"

'Blind Date' was based on an Australian show called 'Perfect Match', which I first saw when I was on tour there. And I couldn't understand why it wasn't on British T.V.

I think that the instinct that people have when they see a beautifully produced web series is that they think it must have been made for television and they just chopped it up and put it online.

I think that a movie of a TV show is really tricky, and I don't know if it's ever really been done well. Because it's really hard if you have a 22-minute show, especially something like 'Party Down,' where it's all contained at the party.

I had written three books [Games of Throne], at that point, and each one of them was better than the other. At a certain point, as the books were doing well, I started getting interest from Hollywood, from various producers and studios who were initially interested in doing a feature film. I met with some of those people and I had phone conversations with some of those people, but I didn't see it being done as a feature film.