A Quote by Danny Strong

Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie. — © Danny Strong
Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie.
Until now, I've not done a project where the produce, rapper and singer has never worked together like this before, and I had a chance to try a variety of styles.
I never want to write something until I know every scene in the movie. I don't want someone hiring me and then me not being able to write it. Which is always a fear. So I like to figure it out, know all the characters, and know almost every scene in the movie before I start writing.
I've never done a studio movie, let alone worked for a network. Every one of my films has been independently financed.
Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.
Ever since I worked on 'Buffy', it's always helped me to find a genre container for something, and I was like, 'Oh, this is where the movie melodrama has gone to. It's gone to YA.'
Any project that you shoot, it's never going to be completely finished the way that... I don't think I've ever worked on anything where every scene has been kept in the order that it was originally in, or that it hasn't been cut down in some way.
Ghost Team approached me. They said, "Hey, it's mid-October, do you want to go shoot a movie on Long Island for three weeks about stupid people chasing ghosts?" I had never done anything like that before. It's kind of a mock-horror movie. What I didn't realize was the whole thing takes place at night, as a horror movie should, and so I didn't realize that we'd be working until 6 in the morning every night, or morning.
The reason everybody is so amazed and enamored with me right now is because I have worked every angle, I have worked every formula, I have worked every equation, I have seen every club, I have seen every performance, I have seen every joke, I have studied, I have done my job. That's why I'm good. It's not because I got up one night and decided I wanted to tell some f - -ing jokes.
I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.
I am inspired just by the way a scene can be interpreted by the actors. It can make a huge difference on the type of music that you write. It's best for me if I don't work at all on a project until the movie is shot and I have some sort of edit in front of me.
My dad always taught me to never be satisfied: to want more and know that what is done is done. That was his way of seeing the game. You've done it, now move on. People might say, 'Well, when can you enjoy it?' But it worked for me because, in the game, you need to be on your toes.
'Baby's Day Out' is maybe not a great movie, but... No, I've enjoyed and learned things from every project I've worked on. That was an important step in my career at ILM.
I do think reading is the best practice for writing, along with writing all the time. I actually never liked writing on my own or in school until I'd had my blog for a while and realized I'd been writing every day for years.
There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another.
I remember the few times that happened to me in writing, where you basically start writing and you look at the clock and six hours have gone by and you're, like, "Whoa! What the hell just happened?" And that piece ends up in the final product even though the final product is three years away. It doesn't get rewritten. It came out the right way. But that's happened to me so few times in my life.
It's very funny because every time I make a movie, and I've heard this re-echoed by other filmmakers and actors I have worked with, you kind of feel like you're naked again. You have to figure it all out from scratch, as if you had never done it before.
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