Top 212 Screenplay Quotes

There’s this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn’t really interest me. To me, it’s kind of like saying, ‘Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.’ Well, you don’t.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

I definitely want to do more movies, and I’m also a writer, so I have a few screenplays that I’m working on, one of them based off my one-woman show that I used to do in New York. Two of the screenplays I’ve written by myself, and then I’m also working on one with my writing partner, Tom Riley, who’s in London.

During all of my writing career – this includes when I was writing plays and my other screenplays – I don’t recall ever writing a negative character, which does not mean that my characters aren’t flawed or do not make mistakes. In actual fact, they all are quite flawed.

I just really loved films and thought I should be writing screenplays.

In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that’s implied before it and the line that’s implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.

For me, when working on a film or play or television show, everything for me starts with the screenplay and I am devoted to that and that is what I work from. Any research I do or any preparation I do on my own is all ultimately in service of that.

Nine months after we submitted the original screenplay for ‘The Attack,’ the studio that was involved pulled out. I’ve been told that ‘you don’t write in a French way; you can’t make these multicultural films.’

When I started writing the screenplay for ‘The Queen,’ about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer, begged me not to put Tony Blair in it.

When I was asked to read a screenplay about Margaret Thatcher, I think I felt immediate apprehension.

It’s much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that’s how we view it, I think.

If you’re writing a screenplay, you need to be prepared to let go: there’s a good chance the words you write aren’t going to be the ones that end up on screen.

Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who’s writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.

I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out.

I do have some theatrical background. I’ve written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don’t read is screenplays.

I write screenplays that don’t get made and pilots that don’t get picked up, and I re-write other people’s movies, and those are all different kinds of fees.

My experience is, I do a table reading, and it’s literally like it’s written in colossal neon lights what’s wrong with the screenplay.

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 would love to write a screenplay for ‘Badlands’ one day. I don’t think I could ever have the patience to do it; I don’t even have the patience to write songs. I write some of the shortest songs ever because I don’t have the patience.

The few times I’ve tried to write original screenplays, it’s a difficult process because I just don’t feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast?

My God, there are so many mediocre screenplays out there.

I’ve learned to sell my music, I’ve learned to direct, I’ve written screenplays… All of this fulfilled my artistic needs but also put food on the table.

I want to release another CD this year, finish writing a screenplay, and make another short film.

I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.

Every time I read it, I realised ‘Bajirao Mastani’ must be made. It’s such a powerful screenplay.

When I met Judd Apatow, he told me I should start writing screenplays. They’d be really bad at first, but the more I did it, the better I’d get.

I do have screenplays I’ve written that never saw the light of day, but I don’t usually go back to them. When I’ve told a story, I want to tell another story.

When you’re writing a screenplay, it’s like you’re dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it.

Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It’s like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they’ll crystallize into a pattern.

I can’t imagine writing a screenplay where I didn’t feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.

Most screenplays I receive are boring, and some are straight-out bad.

If I get lucky and I can choose, I would always choose a really good story and screenplay, even if I don’t know the director. If there’s a good screenplay, there’s a chance that something good is going to happen.

I’ve wondered if ‘Harry Potter’ would have been as big if it was ‘Harriet Potter.’ Now that I’ve written a screenplay – and raising a son in particular – I’m looking at story content and realizing how limited women are onscreen.

I would say, A, you can’t really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it’s something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.

Screenplays are the currency of Hollywood.

A good book or movie or screenplay should be emotionally satisfying. When they’re done, you want people to breathe a deep sigh and say, ‘Wow.’

‘Juno’ really changed things for me and I get a lot of screenplays come in now, but I like to self-generate and I like to kind of pursue my own ideas. And I think the more personal the better.

I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but (for me, at least) there doesn’t seem to be any other way to start writing a script.

Maybe I was just born in the wrong era, man. I’m a bit of a throwback to the days of black and white movies. Those guys back then, they had a certain kind of directness about them. A lot of the screenplays, the plots were very simplistic – they gave rise to a type of anti-hero that maybe I suit better.

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There’s even reverence to a screenplay.

I have an imagination that will go in any direction it is prodded. I pride myself on being able to become enthusiastic about anything: If you tell me to write a screenplay about cucumber farms, I’ll swallow hard, and in 48 hours, I’ll be in love with cucumber farms.

Even Dopehri,’ if somebody has a bit of imagination, the way it’s written, they will be able to see that it’s a screenplay with dialogues.

I don’t assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It’s a very different world. There’s a craft involved in storytelling, and it’s a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.

A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is – a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing.

When I directed the third ‘Insidious’ film I loved it so much that I decided this is what I want to do from now on. I don’t even think I would write something as a screenplay now with no intention of directing it.

I wanted to direct long before I’d even written a screenplay.

The time it would take me to write a screenplay it would take me the time to make two films. I would rather make the movies, and I’m a better moviemaker than I would be writer.

‘Basha’ is the best screenplay in my career.

I want to work with Will Ferrell. I want to do, like, an action-comedy with him. How do I get the project for that? It’s killing me. I’ve got all these great ideas, and the hardest thing is getting the material, the screenplay, you know.

I’ve written close to 20 screenplays and 100 sketches – I know exactly how to do them. They’re judged by set criteria that I know.

Right when I moved to L.A., I started writing. I wrote some screenplay. I’m sure it’s terrible. But I wrote a screenplay by myself. When I first moved to L.A., I had no friends. I didn’t know anybody. I just sat in a little studio apartment, and I wrote a screenplay.

I’m a very slow screenwriter. It takes time for me to write a screenplay. Also, I feel it’s not my strength.