Best 77 quotes in «screenwriting quotes» category

Plays are nearly always about the consequences of events while films are usually about the events. The what-happens-next factor is essential in film.

Screenwriting is like poker; in the end, you have to go all in.

Screenwriting is made of brevity.

Simply by eliminating description, the screenwriter can work his way through the entire plot in a single morning, leaving the afternoon free for screenwriter leisure activities such as drugs.

That which is cool is driven by the soul.

Shit, you shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize.

The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.

Storytelling answers questions and solves mysteries.

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters' arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

The answer to the question, 'where's the drama?' is another question: 'what's the problem?

... the midpoint of each film is the moment when each protagonist embraces for the first time the quality they will need to become complete and finish their story. It's when they discover a truth about themselves.

There are far too many screenwriters who have made themselves honorary “secret” members of the Audience Protection Society (APS). Of course, they’re easy to spot, which makes their membership in this group anything but secret. They write as if they are duty bound to protect their readers from the nastiness of ruthless drama. The way they see it, if they’re going to go to the trouble of creating loveable and attractive characters why throw them to blood-thirsty apes, or have them face a fate worse than death? They tell themselves that such actions would offend their audience’s sensibilities, but really it’s their own fears and prejudices they can’t cope with, not to mention those nagging insecurities concerning their ability to write credible characters in the grip of extreme emotion. They’d rather be dead than write cheese.

The personal screenplay- where you dive into the terrifying depths of your soul, unearth the most intimate details about yourself, and put it on paper for the world to see. Proceed with caution, for madness lies ahead.

There's a story you write, there's a story you shoot and there's a story you cut.

The Hollywood process is a living thing and you get used to that.

The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.

To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message.

Transform into your dream.

Vulnerability is not a weakness, it strengthens one and allows one to be okay with ones emotions. Be in touch with yourself. Be yourself!

Walk into the unknown with what you know in your heart.

Want a role? Fuck a screenwriter.

There is magic in the old and magic in the new; the trick is to successfully combine the two.

We encounter truth within.

What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.

When asked if he had a special feeling for books, critic-turned-filmmaker Francois Truffaut answered, "No. I love them and films equally, but how I love them!" As an example, Truffaut gave the example that his feeling of love for "Citizen Kane" (USA, 1941) "is expressed in that scene in 'The 400 Blows' where Antoine lights a candle before the picture of Balzac.' My book lights candles for m any of the great authors of this world: Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Angela Carter (UK), Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (India), Janet Frame (New Zealand), Yu Hua (China), Stieg Larsson (Sweden), Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Naguib Mifouz (Egypt), Murasaki Shikibu (Japan), and Alice Walker (USA) - to name but a few. Furthermore, graphic novels, manga, musicals, television, webisodes and even amusement park rides like 'Pirates of the Caribbean' can inspire work in adaptation. Let's be open to learning from them all. ("Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling," 2)

Watch movies. Read screenplays. Let them be your guide. […] Yes, McKee has been able to break down how the popular screenplay has worked. He has identified key qualities that many commercially successful screenplays share, he has codified a language that has been adopted by creative executives in both film and television. So there might be something of tangible value to be gained by interacting with his material, either in book form or at one of the seminars. But for someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, an architect of an original vision, the best book to read on screenwriting is no book on screenwriting. The best seminar is no seminar at all. To me, the writer wants to get as many outside voices OUT of his/her head as possible. Experts win by getting us to be dependent on their view of the world. They win when they get to frame the discussion, when they get to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to think about the game, whatever the game is. Because that makes you dependent on them. If they have the secret rules, then you need them if you want to get ahead. The truth is, you don’t. If you love and want to make movies about issues of social import, get your hands on Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network. Read it. Then watch the movie. Then read it again. If you love and want to make big blockbusters that also have great artistic merit, do the same thing with Lawrence Kasdan’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark screenplay and the movie made from it. Think about how the screenplays made you feel. And how the movies built from these screenplays did or didn’t hit you the same way. […] This sounds basic, right? That’s because it is basic. And it’s true. All the information you need is the movies and screenplays you love. And in the books you’ve read and the relationships you’ve had and your ability to use those things.

When a writer's heart is filled with the music of her soul, her words sing.

Without the author there is nothing.

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism. The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them. In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void. Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.

When is now.

Why does Kubrick always chill our blood, and make us huddled up scared stiff with eyes wide shut? Because even dead he's still "Shinnying" with his old hand and his eye-catching plots.

With prose, I know where I'm starting and I think I know where I'm going.

Work on your craft, whatever your medium. Determination is your illusion headway toward reality.

Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.

Whatever you do, let it be lovely.

I'm very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.

Writing turns everybody into wussies. Everybody quits.

I see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve.

It's possible for me to make a bad movie out of a good script, but I can't make a good movie from a bad script.

I've always been a writer, I've always been a storyteller, but I never thought about screenwriting.

Once you crack the script, everything else follows.

Songwriting and screenwriting aren't that different to me.

As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can’t help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer’s role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience’s needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn’t give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story.

All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.

[Making movies is] 80% script and 20% getting great actors. There's nothing else to it.

As a writer, you're the guy in the box. You're creating and you have these euphorias.

As screenwriters, we rip open our chests and bleed onto our work. Infusing it with our very souls.

Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.

Don’t just see brilliance… Feel it.

Don't just write a strong female protagonist. Be one.