screenwriters-from-los-angeles

"Before we wrote the screenplay, we tried to get the studios interested in the story. It was turned down everywhere. But again, after the screenplay was done, there was quite a bit of studio interest. We finally went with 20th Century Fox. Then they started having trouble finding a director. Either the ones they wanted weren't available, or wanted to go in such a different direction with the story that they were unacceptable. Finally, Richard Loncrane was hired. The first draft of my screenplay took ten months, which is a very long time. When I started working with Richard, I would fly to London or he would fly here. He had a wonderful, very exciting vision of the film, but at the same time, it might have exceeded what was possible. What you see on the screen today is maybe 75 script pages. The script Loncrane and I started shooting with in Iceland was 140 pages long."

"Ladyhawke goes back to when I was living in Paris for a couple of years and making a living translating. I read a lot of medieval literature and was very struck by poet Francois Villon's story of how he had been mistreated by a bishop. That started becoming the story of a little theif who had to go on a quest to redeem himself but was afraid to go on it alone. He needed someone's help, and there would be a price to pay for this. In my mind's eye, I saw a knight with a hawk on his arm, but I didn't know what the knight wanted or why the hawk was there. I first had this idea in 1970, but didn't actually write the screenplay until 1976, and the movie wasn't made until 1983. I wrote Ladyhawke on speculation, without being paid for it. I didn't have an agent, and couldn't get the studios to pay attention to it. When agents did read it, I couldn't find anybody at first who wanted to represent me or the screenplay. When I did finally find an agent, he didn't like Ladyhawke at all and wanted to send it to the Japanese because they did Godzilla movies."

"The space burial sequence now two-thirds of the way into the film was actually menat to be the first scene of the movie. Davidge is found after three years on Fyrine IV, but doesn't initially answer what he did there or how he survived. The story is initially told through flashback because I wanted to set up suspense by slowly uncovering what had happened to him. After the first public testing, Wolfgang decided that it wasn't right. I can see some of it, but I still think that's the best structure for the story. Plus I think they cut more out of the film than they should have. There's some stuff showing his relationship with his three friends aboard the battle station that I wish they would have kept in. I think it created a feeling in the first of the film that carried over to the ending. But I do think that the film has an epic grandeur and enormous emotional intensity to the two characters. That's what I wanted to do most and I think that got to the screen."

"The problem ... was that the original novella was not structured for film. It has big gaps in time and essentially starts another story two-thirds of the way through. This is when Davidge takes the young Drac back to Dracon and has to deal with their prejudice against him. We just didn't have the money for that. I had to create a new ending where Zammis is kidnapped by gypsy miners who use Dracs for slave labor. Davidge has to rescue him, and this leads to a new understanding between the two races. There was a good line in the film that got cut out, where Davidge's friends come to help him and run into a party of armed Dracs. The Drac who knows about Davidge and Zammis is about to shoot the friends when one holds his hands up and says "Hold it! I don't understand it completely either, but we're on the same side now!" I also wanted to have a scene at the end where Davidge is shown on Dracon at Zammis' acceptance ceremony. To be officially accepted into Dracon society and become head of your family line, you have to stand before the Council of Elders with your father. He introduces you by reciting your line's entire heritage. That's from the book and I wanted to make that a big scene, but it wound up as a matte painting because that's all there was money for. That's as close to the Drac culture as we could afford to come."

"I was happy with parts of the movie, although I thought that Rutger Hauer was a little too civilized for my knight. I had imagined someone more like Jurgen Prochnow."

"There’s something beautiful about the stop-motion process, being able to touch the puppets. That’s such a personal feeling, even the medium itself, seeing the characters on the set with the lighting and everything. It’s like actually bringing something to life. It’s not the same feeling you get with a computer, where you can do amazing things, but there’s something about moving something and then seeing it come to life that connects you to the beginning of movies. That’s just a feeling; you can’t even really describe it."

"It’s good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way. It’s like weird, twisted poetry, the way kids perceive things. And quite beautiful sometimes. They kind of blow your mind and ground you at the same time"

"In movies you kind of work out your issues, but then you realize, those kind of traumatic issues stay with you forever so somehow they kind of keep reoccurring, no matter how hard I try to get them out of my head they sort of stay there."

"I never really got nightmares from movies. I was much more terrified by my own family and real life, you know?"

"People say, “Monster movies—they’re all fantasy.” Well, fantasy isn’t fantasy—it’s reality if it connects to you. It’s like a dream. You have a nightmare, and it’s got all this crazy imagery, but it’s real. You wake up in a cold sweat, freaking out. That’s completely real. So I always found that those people trying to categorize normal versus abnormal or light versus dark, yada yada, are all missing the point."

"There is a playwright named David Hwang; he's written a play called FOB which is a wonderful play...Chinese are so interested in food, and he saw it and I saw it, and it means that we both are authentic. Just a little detail like that."

"In 1980, Chinese-Americans were certainly considered perpetual foreigners to America, even more so than today. In addition, Asians, in general, were regarded as poor, uneducated, and manual laborers—cooks, waiters, laundrymen—an image which has turned 180 degrees in my lifetime."

"It seems to me that the biggest challenge for Chinese theater is to cultivate an audience, which would make possible long-running shows. A show that only runs for a few months, tops, fails to generate enough revenue to pay back the investment required to create it. A Chinese Broadway or West End may help to build an audience, but more theaters alone probably will not achieve this goal."

"In terms of theater, I think the musical is closer to the heart of American popular culture than at any time since the 1950s. Plays, on the other hand, seem less influential than before—particularly with the rise of quality television—and only enjoy long runs on Broadway when they behave like musicals such as Harry Potter and Warhorse. I believe the digital age, in general, has enhanced the value of all live events, including sporting events, concerts—and theater."

"I was one of the Asian American theatre people who protested the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in the musical MISS SAIGON when it came to Broadway, as an example of “Yellow Face” casting.. The intensity, vehemence, and anger I felt, on both sides of that issue, left me shaken for many years afterwards. So I wrote FACE VALUE, a comedy of mistaken racial identity, to explore the question, “What does it really mean to ‘play’ another race?” As noted above, FACE VALUE became an infamous flop, but the idea of doing a comedy of mistaken racial identity stayed with me for the next fifteen years or so. Eventually, I found another way to realize this notion with YELLOW FACE."

"I have a dog who looks a lot like a pig and I would look at him and think: “You know? I can not eat pig anymore.” And besides, is my dog really all that different from a pig on a factory farm? They both have their own lives and big personalities and most importantly the same capacity to feel pain. Once I made the connection, animal suffering became something I could not ignore. So if you have ever loved a cat or a dog, or even a human, I hope you will extend your compassion to include all animals. I am Mike White and I am a vegan."

"Carter carried himself as though he were meeting up with some dudes for a beer. Despite being the ’90s’ most intense purveyor of paranoia, his entire demeanor in person seemed to say, "What, me worry?" After the applause died down, he initiated a penchant for deflective self-deprecation that would last all night — "I have a lot of family and friends who are probably wondering why you are clapping." … In the end, Carter left the impression that he doesn’t take the fandom and his own place in it especially seriously, but that he does take his role as a popular storyteller with the deepest sense of personal gravity and responsibility. "The X-Files gets raves in part because it addresses so many of the central themes of life in the United States at the turn of the millennium — a wariness about technology, a wondering about the deeper questions of life and a distrust of big government." It is his ability to bring these issues forth in story form that makes Carter want to continue, despite the weirdness, and makes him so valuable to a culture that needs an intelligent mirror of itself."

"The most difficult thing to reconcile is science and religion … And so we created a dilemma for her character that plays right into Mulder’s hands. So that cross she wears, which was there from the pilot episode, is all-important for a character who is torn between her rational character and her spiritual side. That is, I think, a very smart thing to do. The show is basically a religious show. It’s about the search for God. You know, "The truth is out there." That’s what it’s about."

"We've got The X-Files, and I believe what we're looking for is in them. I'm more certain than ever the truth is out there, Scully."

"Agent Mulder believes we are not alone."

"Mulder: Sorry, nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted."

"This kid may be the key not just to all human potential, but to all spiritual unexplained paranormal phenomena. The key to everything in The X-Files."

"I suppose the longer anyone spends on earth, the closer we all get to becoming superfluous characters."

"It's fascinating to watch a show develop from a script to a 22-minute comedy. I try to learn as much, and ask as many questions, as I can without being annoying."

"The cinematographer came up to me and said, 'You have to hit your mark exactly,'"

"Actors didn't use to be celebrities. A hundred years ago, they put the theaters next to the brothels. Actors were poor. Celebrities used to be kings and queens. Then the United States abolished monarchy, and now there's this coming together of show business and celebrity. I don't think it's healthy. I don't want to sound self-important, but all these celebrity shows and magazines—it comes from us, from Hollywood, from our country. We're the ones creating it. And I think it works in close step with a lot of other bad things that are happening in the world. It promotes greed, it promotes being selfish and it promotes this ladder, where you're a better person if you have more money. It's not at all about the work itself. Don't get me wrong. I love movies. But this myth of celebrity has nothing to do with movies."

"Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them. Brick was a good script just to read. It was like, “Oh my God, these words feel so good in my mouth.” A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In Brick, the world is born from the words."

"To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse—we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light. In Mysterious Skin, none of the sex scenes are like that. They all are about the process that this character is going through—and he grows from each of those scenes. You couldn't have told the story any other way. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. I would be embarrassed if I was like, "Shit, everybody wants to look at my ass.""

"Traditionally there's this barrier between the people who make movies and the people who watch them, and I think it sucks. Making Hollywood this castle on a hill and crowning actors the "Stars" might have been exciting and even brought people together last century, but now it's grown kind of disgusting in its excesses and it's no longer bringing people together—it's keeping people apart. It always turns my stomach a little when, because I'm in movies and on TV, people sometimes treat me as if I'm somehow different from, even above, a normal person. But the emails, posts, and comments I've been trading recently with people through those aforementioned sites cause me no nausea; they inspire me. There's no nasty status predicated on "Fame" or "Fortune." There's just that beautiful thing, the point of all art in the first place: a connection between one individual and another."

"Supermarket tabloids and celebrity gossip shows are not just innocently shallow entertainment, but a fundamental part of a much larger movement that involves apathy, greed and hierarchy. Celebrity doesn’t have anything to do with art or craft. It’s about being rich and thinking that you’re better than everybody else."

"My dad never blew anything up, but he probably had friends who did. He and my mom have always preached that the pen is mightier than a Molotov cocktail."

"I didn’t really like doing commercials. You had to behave like you were on angel dust or something."

"There's this barrier that goes up between the people who make the movies and the people who watch the movies. But the point of art is to have a connection between people. I think it's going to become much more of a dialogue, where everybody will watch everybody's stuff, as opposed to how it is now, where the huge corporations produce everything. I'm looking forward to seeing that."

"[hitrecord.org is my] alternative outlet of where I get to be a little less professional and just freak out a little bit."

"The Lookout was by far the hardest thing I've ever done. Partially because both Brick and Mysterious Skin were four to five week shoots, and The Lookout was nine or 10. So there's the marathon aspect, as well as the fact that Chris Pratt is having a harder go of it than either of the other two characters ever did. You know, waking up in the morning is difficult for him. Putting a sentence together is difficult for him. Getting dressed properly, driving a car, all these things. He can do them fine, but it's just much harder than it is for a normal person, so I had to try to make it hard for myself somehow. So it was challenging."

"I think the whole thing's changing a lot. The traditions of Hollywood are grand and great and are going to survive forever, in a way. But they're not going to be the only way for much longer. The technology is such now that you don't have to have millions of dollars to make a movie. You can make one with a computer. Like the Ze Frank show. I don't know if you know who that guy is, but at ZeFrank.com, he makes a couple-minute show every day. What he does is fucking great, and he does it all by himself. I think those lines between "behind the camera" and "in front of the camera," the lines between actor, writer, director, the lines between audience and performer… all those lines are kind of dissolving. And I'm real curious where it's going to lead."

"[It's a] really smart, faithful adaptation of the book. The book is such a tight page-turner… The character I play is an extreme guy… He's a killer. He wants to be Jesse James. He grew up watching cowboy and Indian movies and wants to be that. Then he meets Mickey Rourke's character, who's named The Black Bird and he wants to partner up with him and be a criminal and kill people. He's a psychotic and very bad guy… The thing about him is, he's not the bad killer, the kind of guy that sits and stews and then has these rageful outbursts. He is this extreme extrovert who never shuts up and tells you ridiculously tall tales about himself and mythologizes everything… Hyperactive, hyper, hyper guy wearing cowboy boots."

"I don't blame the people for the fact that so many movies are bad. I think there's a corrupt, perverted, lazy and sloppy attitude that's pervasive in the movie business. The whole entertainment business is kind of crumbling around us."

"The cool thing about my character was that it’s not that digital. I get to put hours of prosthetic makeup on and see a different creature altogether. I’ve seen how he looks and it’s really cool."

"Sundance means a lot to me. This is my third one. People that come here who love movies. Everyone has the attitude that movies aren't just disposable entertainment - they can really mean something. I love that, because that's the way I feel about films."

"I guess I have an eclectic taste [about (500) Days of Summer, G.I. Joe, and Uncertainty all in one year], I don't just like one thing. Contrast is key. What do they say? Variety is the spice of life. My favorite actors are the chameleons, guys like Daniel Day-Lewis, Billy Bob Thornton, Meryl Streep, people who are always different."

"The most valiant thing you can do as an artist is inspire someone else to be creative."

"I just want to say thank you again to all you crazy motherfuckers who came out for hitRECord on Halloween - give me your records! I want to see your videos, I want to see your photos, and even more importantly, I love this stuff, remix it!"

"Wrote an adaptation for the Brothers Grimm's Little Red Riding Hood for 2011-10-31."

"Actually I've thanked you a lot of times so now I'm thanking you again."

"[Looper's] sort of a down-to-earth Blade Runner: it feels real. It's that style of sci-fi that could actually exist in 30 years."