A Quote by Sam Shepard

I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you. — © Sam Shepard
I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.
A lot of actors choose parts by the scripts, but I don't trust reading the scripts that much. I try to get some friends together and read a script aloud. Sometimes I read scripts and record them and play them back to see if there's a movie. It's very evocative; it's like a first cut because you hear 'She walked to the door,' and you visualize all these things. 'She opens the door' . . . because you read the stage directions, too.
The one thing you know when you're shooting a script - and I've been on a lot of sets - is space is in a script, and the distance between the page and the stage is so enormous that it is unbelievable how even the brightest people can misread your intent or not see it altogether. Scripts have air in them. Scripts are supposed to leave things up to interpretation, but people can misread things enormously, so sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to put on the screen what you had in mind.
When I write my scripts, there's a point at which if I'm not starting to see them visually, I feel like I'm kind of cheating. So my scripts are laden with a lot of visual description, which makes them not so much fun to read - I kind of weigh them down.
I want as many people to see the show [Hamilton] in its musical theater form as possible before it's translated, and whether it's a good act of translation or a bad act of translation, it's a leap, and very few stage shows manage the leap successfully.
I read a lot of scripts, but few of them stand out to me.
You start out with scripts pre-written, with no specific actor in mind, so you've got to build a character on top of that foundation. It's not just lifting words off the page, it's constructing a history around them as well.
Just besides how smart Aaron Sorkin stuff is, really, is how visceral it is, how sensual it is. Not sexual, sensual. Always tactile. When you read his scripts, the scripts read fast and the words almost jump off the page.
I read a lot of scripts, so I know by page 25 if I like it or not.
I loved the tone and the characters. They're all very different and they're all very typical for their time. When you read the screenplay you feel like meeting them and getting them off the page and on to the screen.
I get a trickling few scripts that I'm lucky enough that some of them are great. I don't get loads of scripts.
Any good movie or script usually, if they're doing their job, gives the highest platform possible for an actor to leap off of, and that script was very high up there. It was a very smart, tight script. There was a lot of improv, as well, once we got to the set, but a lot of the original script was also in there.
No matter what I've published - and you can look it up, I've published quite a lot in science, quite a few books too - none of it's very important. All will be forgotten and in a few years time will be a few comments in eight-point type in footnotes at the bottom of the page somewhere.
It's hard to find scripts that know what they are from page one to page 115.
You always have to speak good about the projects you do and you have to see the beauty in them. Sometimes you see them and you're happy with things, or maybe the process was nice and you enjoyed it, and you were happy with that. But when everything gathers - you liked the scripts from the very beginning, the directors, your friends - but then you see the result and you like it - it's beautiful.
There are very few parts, and very few scripts, that acknowledge women as sexual beings, or simply just recognise that women have desires.
I cut a lot of cringy sex stuff and a lot of stuff I thought was too personal. I think secret gardens are very special. I think we all have to have them. I think the secret of memoirs is keeping those parts of yourself off the page, which makes what you do share more valuable.
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