A Quote by Mike Flanagan

Whenever you take a general meeting, inevitably you run out of things to talk about, they'd always say, 'What's your dream project?' I would always pull out 'Gerald's Game.' If they knew the book, they'd say, 'Well, that's unfilmable.' If they didn't know the book it would take about 30 seconds of my pitch to say, 'That's not a movie.'
Most of the stats say that 90% of people who buy a book or check one out of a library would never get past the first chapter. To me, the title better say everything there is to say about the book.
When a movie based on a book comes out, people always say that the book is always better than the movie. So I'm always interested in reading the book, too.
You know, not every good book needs to be a movie, or a television series, or a video game. There's great work in those mediums, of course, but sometimes a book should remain a book. I still believe nothing tells a story with the richness and complexity of a good novel. When people say they think a book would make a good movie, they say this sometimes because, if it worked, they already saw all the images in the movie theatre that is in their brains. And sometimes that is the way it should stay.
I'd say the purest experience for the movie is not to have read the book because I think when you've read the book you're just ticking off boxes. I think that after you see the movie, reading the book is a cool thing. I always say the movie's not meant to replace the book. That's ridiculous. I'm a huge fan of the book.
In the United States, they always talk about subtitles, about chapters in a book without taking the main title of the book. They talk about a subtitle in a chapter and if you ask them about the headline, the main title, they say they do not know.
I would like to say that whites jumped right behind Malcolm X. They’re makin’ a book about him, it’s required readin’ in all colleges now, and they’re makin’ a movie about him, and projectin’ him as the leader and if you read his book and see the movie that’s comin’ out, it’ll make you hate Elijah Mohammed and the Muslims. Mainly, this is done to turn the black people against the real leader and I’d like to say that this is the way white people rule.
We worked on The Perfect Storm, and I'll never forget, Wolfgang Petersen would talk about a moment. Like a non-speaking moment, where we'd all be sitting around eating dinner, and it would probably last maybe four seconds on screen. But he would sit there and talk about it for about 10 minutes. He knew what piece of the puzzle that scene would be, and if it were six seconds, it would be too long. If it were three seconds, it wouldn't be enough. I'm always turned on with people's enthusiasm like that.
What happens at the average church or synagogue or mosque is that I don't know many priests or ministers or rabbis who say to their congregation, 'go home and talk about the religion at the kitchen table with your kids...talk about God, talk about what this is all about.' They say in general, come back on the weekend, we'll talk to you about it.
I got caught cheating a bunch of times, well now I'm not drinking but you think just because I say, "Oh I'm not cheating on you" that that's good enough? No! It's about action and I think it's the same way with God. It's about action, it's about the way you live your life and how you carry yourself and that's what God sees. I think people should take a page out of that book when they make their decisions and do things... and I think that the world would be a better place.
Whenever people talk about Don and I recording again, which almost everybody usually mentions, I always say 'Well, there's plenty of things that you haven't heard! Plenty of things out there to discover!'
When a Mormon knocks, they say, 'Can I teach you about Jesus Christ?' And if you say no, they'll say, 'Then how can I be of service to you?' So anybody who was smart would be like, 'You can take out my trash and mow my lawn.'
Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.
You always want to go out there with the best book possible, so I listen to what my editors say, and even if they don't know how to fix it, I always seem to find a way. 'Trust Your Eyes' is the best book I've written, and I don't know if I can do any better.
One of the things I noticed about the Trump supporters was a lot of projected fear. I can't tell you how many times a conversation went like this: "We've got to stop these immigrants, because it's terrible." I'd say, "Okay, what personally have you observed about this?" And there would be basically nothing in that box. And I'd say, "Where'd you get your information?" thinking they were going to say Fox. But they would always say, "Well, I get my information from all kinds of sources." Fox is kind of center-left to a lot of people now.
When you write a book, and you argue a problem is complicated and multidimensional, it's very easy to read a slice of that book and say, 'Well, this is the part that either confirms or really challenges my biases, so that's what I'm going to say the entire book is about.'
"Let's say we discover the gene that says the kid's gonna be gay. How many parents, if they knew before the kid was gonna be born, [that he] was gonna be gay, they would take the pregnancy to term? Well, you don't know but let's say half of them said, "Oh, no, I don't wanna do that to a kid." [Then the] gay community finds out about this. The gay community would do the fastest 180 and become pro-life faster than anybody you've ever seen. ... They'd be so against abortion if it was discovered that you could abort what you knew were gonna be gay babies."
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