Nothing The Script Quotes & Sayings

I'm an optimist; I always hope that each new script is going to be a great story. — Viggo Mortensen

I don't have any one way to tell a story. I don't have any rule book of how it's supposed to be done. But I've always said that if a story would be more emotionally involving told, beginning, middle, and end, I'll tell it that way. I won't jigsaw it, just to show what a clever boy I am. I don't do anything in my script just to be clever. — Quentin Tarantino

But DNA isn't really like that. It's more like a script. Think of Romeo and Juliet, for example. In 1936 George Cukor directed Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer in a film version. Sixty years later Baz Luhrmann directed Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in another movie version of this play. Both productions used Shakespeare's script, yet the two movies are entirely different. Identical starting points, different outcomes. — Nessa Carey

Well, I think there was a time when I first started that there was such a thing called 'a woman's film' and there were certain scripts that women would make. But I think that's changed a lot now. I think that if a woman director walks into a room with a script, it doesn't really matter what the subject matter is, or the genre is, so long as the financiers feel that the woman has the skills to make the film — Gurinder Chadha

thought about it and concluded that I would go ahead with the venture since Shapoorji was confident about the movie's success. The more I worked on the basic conflict in the script between the brother who has to uphold the law of the country and the brother who flees from the law, which favours the rich and the powerful and unjustly incriminates the poor and the defenceless, the more I felt it was time for me to make a picture that raised some critical issues about the people of rural India who had gained little from the country's independence from foreign rule. The oppressed farmers and tillers — Dilip Kumar

'EastEnders' keeps me so busy - that is where I'm at and I can't see that changing too soon. There's nothing that has quite got the punch of an 'EastEnders' script. — Steve McFadden

If I'm not in love with the script, there's nothing. It doesn't matter what you give me. It has to start with the script. — Doug Liman

In the film work, I love to work mainly from the script and from talking to the directors, so a lot of the music, big portions of the scores that I've made, have been composed before the movies were even shot. — Gustavo Santaolalla

The reason for his seven-year hiatus in direction: My son Aditya made Mohabbatein (2000), which took a lot of time and energy. Then we started looking for a script for me to direct. Nothing seemed to excite us both. There's a complete bankruptcy of screenwriting in our cinema. I wanted a very earthy and Indian subject. I was tired of the promos on television. With semi-clad girls, they all looked the same. Of course Dhoom (2004) has them too. But I'd personally not make a film like that. — Yash Chopra

I'd been forced into a movie, and there was nothing to do but follow the script. — Jonathan Tropper

A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is - a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing. — John Niven

When you're starting out, you know, you have to do something on a very limited budget. You're not going to be able to have great actors, and you're most likely not going to have a great script. — Peter Jackson

Fear of living without a map is the main reason people are so insistent that we tell them what to do. The reasons are pretty obvious: If it's someone else's map, it's not your fault if it doesn't work out. If you've memorized the sales script I gave you and you don't make the sale, who's in trouble now? Not only does the map insulate us from responsibility, but it's also a social talisman. We can tell our friends and family that we've found a good map, a safe map, a map worthy of respect. — Seth Godin

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material. — Francis Ford Coppola

There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word. Chinese script began this transition between 4,500 and 8,000 years ago: signs that began as pictures came to represent meaningful units of sound. Because the basic unit was the word, thousands of distinct symbols were required. This is efficient in one way, inefficient in another. Chinese unifies an array of distinct spoken languages: people who cannot speak to one another can write to one another. It employs at least fifty thousand symbols, about six thousand commonly used and known to most literate Chinese. In swift diagrammatic strokes they encode multidimensional semantic relationships. One device is simple repetition: tree + tree + tree = forest; more abstractly, sun + moon = brightness and east + east = everywhere. The process of compounding creates surprises: grain + knife = profit; hand + eye = look. — James Gleick

The censors were so far gone as to find the following sentence obscene: 'The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing.' What can I say? This obscenity verdict was handed down by a censor in response to my script for my 1944 film about a girls' volunteer corps, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful). I could not fathom what it was he found to be obscene about this sentence. Probably none of you can either. But for the mentally disturbed censor this sentence was unquestionably obscene. He explained that the word 'gate' very vividly suggested to him the vagina! For these people suffering from sexual manias, anything and everything made them feel carnal desire. Because they were obscene themselves, everything seen through their obscene eyes naturally became obscene. Nothing more or less than a case of sexual pathology. — Akira Kurosawa

I look forward to every script that comes down the pike. — Colin Cunningham

I've told you many times that the first thing I decide is the kind of story I want. ( ... ) This is not the kind of story I want. The story we bought had shine and glow - it was a happy story. This is all full of doubt and hesitation. The hero and heroine stop loving each other over trifles - then they start up again over trifles. After the first sequence you don't care if she never sees him again or he her. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Since I worked with Danny Boyle before on Slumdog Millionaire, we have great success and everything. So, when I first got the script and the screenplay of Simon (Beaufoy) and I was reading it, even before the shoot, some kind of sounds came into my mind and I put some stuff [down] and sent it to Danny when he was cutting the movie. — A.R. Rahman

I'd love to say I made the smart decision of picking projects that became hits, but with 'The Good Wife,' I read the script and something inside me said, 'I love this, I want to do this.' — Archie Panjabi

Too-broad questions, such as, "What's on your mind?" are apt to be answered "nothing" nearly one hundred percent of the time. Be careful of slipping into ""psycho-speak," however. Kids pick up instantly your attempt at being a pseudo-shrink. Most resent it and are apt to tune out anything that sounds like you're reading a script from the latest child-psychology text. — Margaret Kennedy

Sometimes I want to do something that's really funny and other times I read an indie script that is going to be made for nothing but I want to do it because I think that I can connect with something in the story. — Brittany Snow

Why couldn't she have slid it under the door? he wondered. Why couldn't she have folded it? It looked just like any other note she would leave him, like, Could you try to fix the broken knocker? or I'll be back soon, don't worry. It was so strange to him that such a different kind of note - I had to do it for myself - could look exactly the same: trivial, mundane, nothing. He could have hated her for leaving it there in plain sight, and he could have hated her for the plainness of it, a message without adornment, without any small clue to indicate that yes, this is important, yes, this is the most painful note I've ever written, yes, I would sooner die than have to write this again. Where were the dried teardrops? Where was the tremor in the script? — Jonathan Safran Foer

Responsibilities are relative. My responsibility is to a character in a script, to a part I'm playing. — Al Pacino

My dream was to play in good films, no matter in what country. I always waited for a decent script, and nothing has changed. I'm just sure that nothing in life is random, and I believe in the fate which guides you. Probably my starring in 'A Good Day to Die Hard' is good proof of that. — Yuliya Snigir

In an ideal world the script is written lean and tight and therefore there are no scenes left on the cuttring room floor and therefore no extended edition. — Peter Jackson

The only description for Nolan in the script was that he's a very bad dresser. I put on a red windbreaker and every other ugly, ill-fitting thing I could dig out. He was potentially written as a clean-cut nerd, but I wanted a darker spin. — Gabriel Mann

When I was sent the script for 'Homeland,' I didn't think anything of it. Three months later, my manager rang and said: 'They are interested in you.' I read it and I realised, 'Yes, I do want this.' Then I got an email saying I'd got it. — David Harewood

She smiled, nodded, and kept walking. She waved her badge at the proximity sensor, stepped into the revolving door, and entered the cavernous atrium. Right in the center, surrounded by tropical foliage, was a huge bronze globe, the continents sculpted in sharp relief. On the front of the globe, set at a jaunty angle, was the Gifford Industries logo, which couldn't have been more hokey: retro squared-off streamlined script that must have looked futuristic when it was designed in the 1930s. A couple more people waved at her, flashed sympathetic looks, and she ducked into the express elevator to the twenty-fourth floor. She slid her security card into the slot, and the elevator rose. The lights in the executive suite were already on, which surprised her. She was normally the first one in. She passed her prox badge against the sensor until it beeped, then pushed open the glass doors. When she rounded the corner, she saw someone sitting at her desk. Noreen Purvis. 23. — Joseph Finder

I'm an instinctual actor. I don't really talk about it. Usually if I get a script and I'm having trouble with it, I go to sleep and I dream about it because I'm super internal with the way I work. — Megyn Price

There's a film I did called 'Front of the Class', about a teacher who had Tourette's. That was a beautiful blend of drama and comedy. There's some great moments of levity in the script. — James Wolk

Talk - half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman - like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again. — Anais Nin

The stage of Creation is a Timeless Marche. The three measures of Nothing, Possibility, and Chaos will eternally ensure that the script continues on. — Lionel Suggs

I've seen a lot of friends who have a lot of great projects, whether it's a script or a play or whatever, and it is a great project and they have great people involved, and they can't make it. — Philip Seymour Hoffman

Once again, I had the sensation that everyone else was working off a fully rehearsed script, and I was being asked to improvise. "I just meant - nothing," I said, hoping for a clue on what my line was supposed to be. — Jeff Lindsay

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet. — Joe Eszterhas

I love to play with language; make it do tricks, turn a word inside out to see if it's got a hidden meaning tucked away somewhere, or perhaps find that it's capable of an extra entendre or two ... Plotting is nothing I did, or do, naturally. It is the hardest part of the writing process. No matter how many times you plot a script successfully, the next one, representing new and uncharted territory, convinces you that you really don't know how to do it at all. — Larry Gelbart

There is always something funny going on between scenes with Adam Sandler. He's always cracking jokes and yelling at people for no reason. It's pretty funny. He'll joke around during scenes, too. When he guest-starred on 'Jessie,' there was nothing in the script that he said first take. — Cameron Boyce

Guy between boyfriends #6 and #7
Paul Diaz, Twenty-Something
He was in her watercolor class, so cute and the sweet kind of shy. They obviously clicked, the attraction thrilling between them, inspiring her to relish the infatuation freshman-style and write his name in her notebook in curvy, flowery script. She gave him openings but guessed he was too timid to ask her out. The day after finals, she ran into him at the deli on campus and thought she had nothing to lose.
"My work is having this fancy dinner party next weekend, the food's supposed to be great. Would you like to go with me?"
"Oh, uh, maybe, I'll have to check," he said. Then, "What was your name again?"
There's always something to lose. — Shannon Hale

I love my situation as a spectator. The actors are only a little bit ahead of the audience. The audience discovers the episode when it's screened, but we actors only discover the episode when we get the script, two weeks ahead of shooting. Until then, we know nothing of the evolution of our characters. — Richard Sammel

I remember I was unsure about doing 'Shameless.' I'd never acted in anything so commercial. I read the script in the garden with my mum, Mary. She said it's filthy dirty, but she said these people have love and sex and nothing else. That made me take the role. — Anne-Marie Duff

She caught him in his schoolboy mode, polite and dutiful, mailing letters to his grandparents and step-siblings, notes full of nothing written in perfect script. Yet he feels like she caught him so unaware and alone that she saw the other side, the wolf crawling through wreckage, through broken walls, cracked Venetian mirrors, dust, blood, a turned-over rocking horse - the child who doesn't know it's own name. — Jardine Libaire

Aside from a couple of signature flourishes, there's nothing to mark Paycheck as the product of acclaimed action director John Woo. In fact, there's little about this movie that makes it worth anyone's time and money. With a script that waffles between being hilariously absurd and insultingly stupid, and action scenes that won't cause anyone's pulse to skip a beat, Paycheck is less appealing than a lump of coal in a Christmas stocking. — James Berardinelli

It's an odd fact of life that you don't really remember the good times all that well. I have only mental snapshots of birthday parties, skiing, beach holidays, my wedding. The bad times too are just impressions. I can see myself standing at the end of some bed while someone I love is dying, or on the way home from a girlfriend's after I've been dumped, but again, they're just pictures. For full Technicolor, script plus subtitles plus commemorative programme in the memory, though, nothing beats embarrassment. You tend to remember the lines pretty well once you've woken screaming them at midnight a few times. — Mark Barrowcliffe

Eventually, the state's funding covered only the stages leading to presenting a film project to potential funding bodies. It was enough to produce a script, indicate casting and put together a budget to present it all, but nothing beyond that. — Andrzej Wajda

I mean when I was working shall we say with Disney, you know they sent me the script for the film Hercules and I had to imagine what all the characters looked like. And to develop those characters, so nothing exists visually when I get the script. — Gerald Scarfe

A writer is a performer as well. A writer isn't the literary department. That gets tried on but nothing's a script unless a good writer goes away and does his thing alone. — William Monahan

On Disney, we stick to the script. But you go to the 'Grown Ups set' and it's completely different. Same thing with Tyler Perry - it's nothing but ad-libbing. — China Anne McClain

I don't intentionally try to find the scripts with unattractive characters, but I think that if a character is described in a script as heart-stoppingly beautiful, and there's nothing else said about her, it just doesn't hold a lot of interest for me. — Amy Adams

You can't ever let yourself be thrown by a camera. That's never good for an actor. When you're reading the script, you want to work with someone you trust so there's nothing to worry about. — Jennifer Lawrence

Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic - a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a long long time ago. But as I've lived my life and loved and lost friends and family, and seen dreams smashed and resurrected, and marveled at the pettiness, drear ambition and ignorance of the herd of which I am a part, I can no longer say that a poem or a story or a script comes from nothing. If it's any good, if it has any power, any potent emotional body, then it's something that a writer has paid for, not only in time, but in all the anxiety that accompanies living and those small fret-filled acts of becoming present that make it possible for us to see beyond our little patch of immediacy. It's not just a reaching out, but a reaching in, into the depths of our being from whence we've sprung. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

Memorizing a playbook is like memorizing a script. When they change the script at the last minute it's like changing a play in a game. — Michael Strahan

'7th Heaven' was a big ensemble cast, so everyone would get a turn. Basically, I'd get a script that focused on my character and think, 'Oh, I'm working every day this week.' The mindset was I've got more to do, so I had to focus. — Tyler Hoechlin

I'd love to work on a script in collaboration. — Matthew McGrory

Well, obviously I was excited by the idea that Woody Allen was going to direct it. But at the same time, the script itself and the character was really interesting. — Radha Mitchell

Generally, Hollywood makes the same stories over and over. I've never wanted to do the same thing twice. If a script doesn't surprise me in some way, I simply can't commit to the project. — Sherilyn Fenn

The customer service agents who accepted the defaults of Internet Explorer and Safari approached their job the same way. They stayed on script in sales calls and followed standard operating procedures for handling customer complaints. They saw their job descriptions as fixed, so when they were unhappy with their work, they started missing days, and eventually just quit. The employees who took the initiative to change their browsers to Firefox or Chrome approached their jobs differently. They looked for novel ways of selling to customers and addressing their concerns. When — Adam M. Grant

We started getting the script to different people and we were in the business of trying to fund it so we could get it off and running, and all the characters and sets designed and everything. — Don Bluth

But the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. — Erwin Schrodinger

Often when you get a really good script, and you receive the new pages, you see that the entire thing has been dumbed down. Films in the '30s and '40s, that were huge blockbusters, were very sophisticated in their language, and the ideas they brought. There were no questions about whether the audience would get it or not. — Connie Nielsen

Producers on Broadway approached us with an original script after relaunching ourselves as 'A Great Big World,' and wanted us to write the music. They asked us to make the music we would sing if we could, and so we can go a little crazier. We refer to it as 'our music on steroids.' — Ian Axel

I don't know how I absorb things, but I do. I just absorb them. I don't over read the script, and I don't really ever spend much time learning it. — John Noble

A movie's very different from the book, and it's different from the script, and it's usually one person's vision. — Casey Affleck

I structure the scripts and work on them on films and work on scenes with writers and but I haven't written a script myself, I really respect what they do and I'm fortunate I get to work with people that I really enjoy working with and we all kind of spitball and work together on these things, but I haven't written a script yet. — Tom Cruise

When I got the script for Memento, I read it and I got killed off on page one and I fired my agent. — Joe Pantoliano

Suffering is inevitable. It is part of the human condition. It is written in the human script. — Johnny Rich

I have a shoebox: for ideas, fragments, snatches of conversation I hear. I scrawl it down, throw the scraps in the box. Every time I start a new script I start picking through the pieces. Suddenly you get five pieces together and think: this is almost the first Act of a movie, if I flesh it out a bit. — Shane Black

If I could, I would take you with me," he said, his voice barely more than a whisper.
She tried to pull away from him. "You would not. You would grow tired of me in a few weeks."
He shook his head, pulling her tight against him. "No ... I could never grow tired of you."
"How can you be so sure?" she asked.
He brushed tendrils of hair from her face. "I have craved to know you for years ... even just to hear you speak my name ... a single touch of your hand on mine ... "
He kissed her softly, his lips tasting hers. "I want you to be mine ... I want you always."
- 'unknown script' 2012 — Faye Hall

Everything is in a script for a reason, and only by being part of a writing team (or writing it yourself), do you really understand the intention of every beat. — Peter Jackson

Your mind just goes to the craziest idea to lure people into the theater, and then you write your script around those elements. — Robert Rodriguez

Haska - a dim legendary figure of a generation ago, who went back up the mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house, and planted apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable, the location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in angora goats to browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death. So I, too, scratch the land with my brief endeavour and flash my name across a page of legal script ere I pass and the page grows musty. — Jack London

Working with Danny Thomas was truly an adventure every week. Danny didn't always say the words as they appeared in the script. I learned more by osmosis than by sitting down together. He was a force to be reckoned with: an explorer of television. — Angela Cartwright

Radical Edwards's profile? He's a seven-foot tall ex-basketball pro hindu guru drag-queen alien.
-Jet Black, from the Cowboy Bebop anime script — Keiko Nobumoto

Finally, Colin Farrell showed up on my doorstep, only he wasn't Colin Farrell - he was just this Irish kid who had read the script and wanted to do it. — Robert Towne

When I take on a role, all I tend to do is get to know the script and ask millions of questions, and keep fine tuning what I think the character is trying to say. — Sophie Okonedo

No one is really a method actor, everyone has their way of going about it, preparing for it, but method is preparation, it's what you do to prepare. So my method is to read the script. Some actors' method is to read the script a hundred times and in the doing of it, to immerse themselves in as much of the reality as possible. Me, I believe strictly in acting. If I am out of breath, I'm out of breath. I ain't running nowhere. — Morgan Freeman

A director should cast a person who fits into their script. — Christina Ricci

When I get a script, it's the only time that I get to be an audience member with the first-time experience of that movie. That's the first and only time. — Dennis Quaid

Once you've written a good script, it will get made or not get made, according to variables you cannot control, like stars getting interested, and the superstitions in Hollywood rising or falling around what is over and done with versus what's in. — Jon Spaihts

I'll only work on TV shows that have a 'Sookie' on them! Those are the only shows that will cast me. And I've never even met a Sookie in my life. Sookie on 'Gilmore Girls' was played by Melissa McCarthy. And Sookie, played by Anna Paquin, is number one on the call sheet on 'True Blood.' Somebody should write another script with a Sookie in it. — Todd Lowe

You can have a great character in a really bad script, and the film will never be seen. It's just too much work to commit to a film and not have it released. — Devin Ratray

I feel very blessed in my career to have been able to bounce back and forth between different things, television and film, comedies and some dramas, but I am, um, as long as the script inspires me and there good people, that's it. I'm in. — Geoff Stults

My criteria for doing theater has always been slightly different than my criteria with movies, in that there are a lot of reasons to do films, having to do with location, money, and first and foremost having to do with script and role and director. — Stephen Lang

My experience is that's rare - that you have a script that is ... what they call 'film-ready.' — Laura Linney

Silence is banished from our screens; it has no place in communication. Media images (and media texts resemble media images in every way) never fall silent: images and messages must follow one upon the other without interruption. But silence is exactly that - a blip in the circuitry, that minor catastrophe, that slip which, on television for instance, becomes
highly meaningful - a break laden now with anxiety, now with jubilation, which confirms the fact that all this communication is basically nothing but a rigid script, an uninterrupted fiction designed to free us not only from the void of the television screen but equally from the void of our own mental screen, whose images we wait on with the same fascination. — Jean Baudrillard

There was a piece of paper crumpled in the tight fist of the man. Porter opened the
fingers carefully and extracted the paper. On it, in a shaky script, were the words: Tell
them I killed the kid. — Sarah Margolis Pearce

The most frustrating thing is picking up a script and loving the roles in it except the female ones ... It's really annoying and something I've striven to change in the industry. — Margot Robbie

I had a hard time on TV, the last time on television, so I wasn't sure that I wanted to do that again. But, I really am a big fan of Jenji and I knew this is her next thing, so I read it. And once I read the script, I was really, really impressed that there was a woman who was the centerpiece of her own story, and that she was in the center of her own narrative. — Taylor Schilling