By the time someone gave me some samples of standard screenplays I was already beyond that stuff, because I was not only a tinkerer in ways to do things, I'd started from Dylan Thomas. As a screen dramatist he was a very intense visualist, with great timing and fluency.
I don't card out my screenplays ever. I just have an idea I just sit down and write I don't edit. Sometimes the first draft will come out at 200 pages. I think and think and I go, "um this story is about the brother that appears on page 178. " I go back and I rewrite.
No screenplay is possible, unless you get some attachment from somebody who's going to get it made.
Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.
I've come to find more satisfaction and enjoyment in writing screenplays over the years because that's what I do primarily now.
I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.
Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.
When I graduated college I needed to make money while I was pursuing acting, so I read screenplays and made a living writing coverage on them for studios.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I wrote spec screenplays. I was really poor, and I thought I was just gonna do this for a while to make a little money so I could write novels. I thought movies were a second-class art form. I condescended to it - I didn't know enough to know it was really gonna be hard.
Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels. He loved talking to audiences. He liked writing screenplays. He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and inventing
In the past, I'll admit, I've enjoyed being compared to the protagonists in my screenplays.
I never could have written the screenplay because I would have been forced to learn new software and I can't learn one more thing.
When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.
I find reading screenplays difficult, as they're only a roadmap for what a movie might end up being.
Most screenplays depend primarily on the vision of a director.
I was originally casted to be in the Superman movie but I read the script and realized that it was mysteriously similar to my screenplay for Zach Braff the Movie.
If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.
The first thing to look out for after your first big success are drugs and screenplays.
I'm completely surrounded, not only my father, but also my three brothers, and Sergio, my husband, all four of them work in film. Some are writers, or directors, or cinematographers, all of them. I'm surrounded by men that make films, so much that at some point I felt there was no more room in the family for another filmmaker. For many years I was only working as novelist or writing screenplays for others to direct.
The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays. . . is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.