I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn’t play, it has a poignancy to it.
If you come into any creative project without questions, you’re gonna bore yourself, and it’ll show on the page.
If Clark Gable had a Facebook page, there would have been a ‘Gone with the Wind 2.’
We don’t give importance to Page 3 or to appear at all the events. Our focus is on our kids and our home.
And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you’ve written and you’re like, ‘Hmm, there’s half a page that’s good here.’ Then you throw out everything else.
Find like-minded people who are on the same page as you, and then lift each other up.
I try to research or make up for myself what happened in any character’s life. From when he was born until the first page of the script. I fill in the blanks.
Back in 2004, Kellie Overbey handed me her play ‘Girl Talk’ to read. I fell in love with her brutally delicious humor and the fearlessly deft way in which she drew her characters. They jumped off the page and begged me to give them a space in which to stomp around.
Of any guitarist, Jimmy Page was my biggest influence. I wanted to look, think and play like him. Zeppelin had a heavy influence on Rush during our early days. Page’s loose style of playing showed an immense confidence, and there are no rules to his playing.
If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.
In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don’t listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn’t look good on the page.
Previous presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon.
With about a dozen assorted ongoing conflicts in the news every day, and with the stories becoming more horrific, the level of sadness becomes unbearable. And what becomes of our planet when that sadness becomes apathy? Because we feel helpless. And we turn our heads and turn the page.
I feel as though my career really hit its high point when I was cast as a supporting actress in ‘American Wedding’. I thought the script had a lot of depth and intelligence, and it really just jumped off the page.
Don’t do or say things you would not like to see on the front page of The Washington Post.
No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.
I will say that comic books are not the easiest things to translate to film, number one. Even the most well meaning of filmmakers find what’s acceptable on the printed page is very difficult to bring to film.
I don’t care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
A page a day means I need to focus on a gag a day, and that’s great for laughs but bad for plot, and I’m primarily a plot guy.
I live in the moment. I can turn the page and move on.
I remember going to the audition for ‘Corrie.’ I wasn’t an actor – what they’re often looking for in these rooms is a character, not what’s on the page. They want to see what you are going to bring. So somehow, I got the job on ‘Corrie.’ For the first time in a while, someone really believed in me.
When you’re doing that you lose your focus on the discipline of the business, and how you train people at Hamburger University, and everybody gets on a bigger, different vision, and they’re not on the same page.
You shouldn’t marry unless the both of you are on the same page on a lot of things. Life is going to deal you blows, and you have to be together. Your values and priorities have to be on the same page; otherwise, it won’t work.
From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.
A lot of productivity is capturing ideas. I use a wiki – it’s more valuable than e-mail for running a company – and I have a page for every person with whom I interact frequently.
Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.
I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It’s a meeting on the page.
Any time you read a book and get attached to the characters, to me it’s always a shock when it goes from page to screen and it’s not exactly what was in my head or what I was imagining it should be.
You can’t teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.
So on my screenplay, on the left-hand side of the page, I will put all the ideas that refer to the scene next to it so I have some sort of pictorial reference.
In the account book of the Great War the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five millions, or eight? We ourselves know not.
It would absolutely suck if you paid a few bucks for a book only to find that on the first page it said, ‘Once upon a time they all lived happily ever after’ and the rest of the book was blank.
My favourite authors are John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer. Grisham rapidly established himself and now completely owns the legal space of fiction writing, something I want to do in financial space. I like Archer because he keeps his readers engaged: every chapter is a page turner, and he keeps his writing simple.
I get the ‘The New York Times’ and ‘Los Angeles Times’ thrown at my door every morning. I’ll read the front page of ‘The New York Times,’ then the op-eds, then scan the arts section and then the sports section. Then I do the same with the ‘L.A. Times.’
I want to know why I read as a child with such a frantic appetite, why I sucked the words off the page with such an edge of desperation.
Sometimes I have thought that a song should look disappointing on the page – a little thin, perhaps, a little repetitive, or a little on the obvious side, or a mixture of all of these things.
Examine our every action through the lens of how we would feel if it were to become front page news.
The Sun in London ran a front page declaring my bum a national treasure. I really did laugh at that. Its not like it can actually do anything, except wiggle.
What I personally gravitate toward tends to be fantasy, medium dark – not too dark – fairy tales and sci fi. Stop-motion takes something on the page that’s really dark and adds a little sweetness to it, a living toys realm.
It almost hurts me to walk down a road and have people grab my hand and ask for my autograph and not sit and talk. When I’m finished I’m not going to be on the front page, but I’m going to be just as happy without the publicity.
Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, ‘I have to be in this movie.’
On my Wikipedia page, it used to say I was born in Belfast, Ireland, then it said Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then it said Belfast, U.K. So there was a little war going on about where Belfast is located.
Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend; it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a ‘like’ button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page.
If I’ve written five pages by hand, out of those five pages, one page might be worth saving. The rest is crap. I have to throw it away. It’s like I need eight hours to do two hours’ work.
Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.
The flaw of an amateur is to assume what’s in our head is what’s on the page.
Let’s not kid ourselves. You pick up ‘The Washington Post’ and find O.J. Simpson on the front page; ‘serious journalists’ covered Anna Nicole Smith.
There’s a project that I started at HHS called the Health Data Initiative. The whole idea was to take a page from what the government had done to make weather data and GPS available back in the day.
When I got the script for Memento, I read it and I got killed off on page one and I fired my agent.
Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There’s nothing that says I can’t write a page of full stops. There is no ‘should’ involved, although you wouldn’t know that from literary reviews and critics.
