Last month, I wrote an article in Writing Tips entitled 7 Steps to Writing a Screenplay. This week, I found some quotes about movie scripts from directors to be quite interesting and amusing. It’s always intriguing to see what’s in the mind of a creative genius. “Take 10.”

1. “The script is what you’ve dreamed up–this is what it should be. The film is what you end up with.” – George Lucas

2. “Scripts are what matter. If you get the foundations right and then you get the right ingredients on top, you stand a shot… but if you get those foundations wrong, then you absolutely don’t stand a shot. It’s very rare–almost never–that a good film gets made from a bad screenplay.” – Tim Bevan

3. “Audiences are harder to please if you’re just giving them effects, but they’re easy to please if it’s a good story.” – Steven Spielberg

4. “I wouldn’t know a good script if it bit me in the face.” – Tim Burton

“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. It sometimes takes me three or four days to get into a head space where I can do that and if I get interrupted at any point I have to start over. So I couldn’t be one of these staff writers who hang out, does a long lunch, goes back, and writes six pages in the afternoon.” – James Cameron

6. “I have always credited the writer of the original material above the title: Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or John Grisham’s The Rainmaker. I felt that I didn’t have the right to Francis Coppola’s anything unless I had written the story and the screenplay.” – Francis Ford Coppola

7. “There’s nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.” – Richard Attenborough

8. “There’s no question that a great script is absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie to succeed.”
– Sydney Pollack

“There are three things that are important for a film. Number one is story, number two is story, number three is story. Good actors can save a bad script and make it bearable, but good actors can’t make a bad script good – they can just make it bearable.” – Mark Strickson

“A terrific director and filmmaker named Alexander Mackendrick said that scripts aren’t written, they’re rewritten.”
– Martin Scorcese

What’s your favorite quote? In the same way, these quotes are all over the place so are the different genres and story lines. Now that you see it’s not what you say but what you do… Find those darn keys and start typing! Cut!

Thank you for your continued readership and support. Until next week…Blessings and Peace!

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