I've been involved with some huge studio projects that have been bloody awesome. It all starts with a great script, doesn't it?
I was sent the script [of Havenhurst ], and I was out of town at the time, so I did a site meeting with Andrew [Erin]. It was so bizarre. I was staying in a hotel at the time, and the night before the meeting with Andrew, I learned there was a ghost in the hotel.
Having just read the script [Havenhurst] and then add having seen a ghost, I went to Andrew [Erin], and I was, like, "Okay, I have to do this movie. I just have to! I don't know why, but I just have to do it." And I ended up getting the role.
It was a great circumstance when I received the script of [Chloe] and Atom [Egoyan] said he wanted me to do it. I was inclined to say 'yes' immediately.
I was happy when I read the script [The Bourne Ultimatum ] - the first version they sent me - to see that before, there's some humanity too.
After playing Saffy in 'Ab Fab', I needed to take time out from acting to see if I really wanted to do it. I had been doing it for a very long time and I was being sent the same sort of scripts again and again.
I don`t like reading scripts very much. I like it better for someone to just explain to me what it is about this story.
The Lord Chamberlin was censoring scripts when I first came into the theater.
If you read a script enough, especially a good script - I try to read it 40 to 50 times before you begin so you get a sense of the arc: what happens before, what happens after, what happens during.
You have to write a lot of scripts to get any scripts that are worth making.
Sometimes, something seems dead, and then out of the blue, someone just figures out the way to fix a script and it goes.
In writing scripts now, having made a film, I'm much more conscious of what it means to shoot and edit a movie, and that affects the writing.
You're looking for the best way of shooting it, but sometimes the best way of shooting it is changing the script.
A film is a living thing. The screenplay is a guideline. You really need to have a good, sound script to know that you have a dramatic structure that's going to work thematically, and to know how one scene will got through another, and to get a sense of character.
We're all clichés, all following scripts that have been written and played out long before we landed the role.
I’ve always been better at informing the audience through images than through words, but I took on a script that was so dialogue intensive, that the words had to do all the informing.
Most of the guys like sticking to the script and doing just what's written. If they're exploring, they're exploring ways of doing the script.
You're often trying to fix a script by shooting it.
A lot of screenwriters have a drawer of unsold scripts that they cut their teeth on. I don't have one. Everything I've written, after my first spec, I wrote on assignment. Everything I've written was work.
A lot of our favorite comedies in general are usually directed by writers, whether or not they wrote the original script themselves.
What happens to me when I read a script, when something grabs hold of me, I start getting these flashes of people or places or things or images.
Even if the script's well written there's something about the life of an improvisation that resonates better than a written word, sometimes.
The script of 'Shogun' was so tight that you could not take a word out of a sentence, you could not take a sentence out of a scene, and you certainly couldn't take out a scene without putting ripples right through the back or the front of the overall story.
I wrote another wrestling film script. And we finished the shooting [with Lloyd Phillips]. But Henry Winkler came out with his own wrestling film, which did poorly. So the studios passed on ours, and it never got released.
I don't know how I absorb things, but I do. I just absorb them. I don't over read the script, and I don't really ever spend much time learning it.
