A Quote by Melissa Rosenberg
With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.
Related Quotes
When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.
Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in.
Writing is like listening to a melody line in my head. Note by note, it knows where it wants to go. I follow it and lay it down. I can pare it, shape it, and polish it later...My job is to take down the dribs and drabs - to free-associate, if you will, knowing that the associations have their own plans for where we're going with all this.
Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.
I remember my dad working with me on breaking down my script and writing out a back story for my character and all that stuff.
When you start out as an actor, you read a script thinking of it at its best. But that's not usually the case in general, and usually what you have to do is you have to read a script and think of it at its worst. You read it going, "OK, how bad could this be?" first and foremost. You cannot make a good film out of a bad script. You can make a bad film out of a good script, but you can't make a good film out of a bad script.
It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script; I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.
...With stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down.
I don't pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.
I definitely take notes, but I feel like sometimes if I take too many notes, it kind of bogs down my mind a little bit. So, I just write down stuff that I need to remember for the game.
When I got the script for Thelma & Louise, when I met with the director, Ridley Scott, I said, "I don't want to do a revenge film. I'm not interested in doing that moment in the script after they shoot the truck, where it says they jump up and down and they're real happy about it".
I have learned to pare down what I do and still be effective and strong in a role.
Whether it's a lower or higher budget project, a TV show or a film, the words on the page are the same to me and I approach the work in the same way. My job is to lift the character from the page, whether it's a TV or film script.
I meet Susan [Saradon], and she was amazing. We sit down to go through the script [Thelma & Louise]. I swear, I think it was page one - she says, "So my first line, I don't think we need that line. Or we could put it on page two. Cut this ..." And I was just like ... My jaw was to the ground.
I've never seen or heard of a mob sitting down to read a film script.
I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.
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