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

I didn't stutter when I was reading lines in a script. When I got away from myself, I didn't have that problem. — Peggy Lipton

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

All of a sudden, those few pages of script that he had shown me with the weird images I could visualize all of that in my brain, and I knew that there was this mad little genius at work here and I really wanted to do the film. — Jack Nance

Together with script writers Syd green and Dick Hills, we worked on the comedy ideas for this series. — Eric Morecambe

I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff. — Laura Wade

It's important to read as much as you can because you never know when you will find the best script that you want to do next. I'm always quite picky in what I read and what I go for. — Douglas Booth

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

I have done many films across the globe and would love to be a part of Bollywood, but the script must have a strong character for me. — Michelle Yeoh

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

Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant creatures filled with a profound disgust with themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain which is probably their only pleasure. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

The script and the performances and the style all clicked. — Edgar Wright

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

I'd love to work in the States; I'd love to work anywhere where you get a good script and a good part to play. But I do love British film as well. — Laura Carmichael

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

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

When you're an actor, you're very much exposed, but in a strange way you're totally protected behind a character, behind a script, behind a director. — Mathieu Demy

Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of artistic expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb. — Patrick Kavanagh

I've always been better at informing the audience through images than through words, but I took on a script that was so dialogue-intensive, that the words had to do all the informing. — Jonathan Glazer

I heard about the project over a year before we began. My American agent said, 'Oh, you might want to read 'In Cold Blood' because they're talking about you for Capote, but the script's with Johnny Depp and Sean Penn at the moment.' So, these things take their time to dribble down the food chain. — Toby Jones

I really choose by what I like, i thought 'Alexander' was a super smart script. Just [costar] Steve [Carell] alone would have been enough. Gosh, I love working with that guy. He's just the best. — Jennifer Garner

Well, PT Anderson sent me a script of Boogie Nights which I let lay around my house for about three months, then one day I'm cleaning my office and decided that I'd better read this before the guy calls me back. I never put it down, bro. — Luis Guzman

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there. — Graham Greene

Well, first of all, you read the script a million times. Because what the script gives you are given circumstances. Given circumstances are all the facts of your character. — Viola Davis

Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script. — Scott M. Gimple

I did some writing for that movie. The remake of Planet of the Apes. I didn't write the script. But I wrote some lines that they ended up ... not using ... I wrote one line. I thought it would've been perfect. I don't know if anyone saw the movie. It's the scene where the ape general comes in. And they're trying to decide if they should attack right there, or wait until a little later. And I wrote: "Man these bananas are good!" But they didn't use it. I did all of that research. — Brian Regan

We start 'The Butler' in June and that's incredibly exciting for me because I get to work with the amazing Forest Whitaker again. It's a phenomenal script and a great, great role - I play his son. Oprah Winfrey is his wife and my mother. My character is a radical civil rights activist. — David Oyelowo

When you are working on a script, the story itself is not difficult. You say this would happen and then this, resulting perhaps in this. And the dialogue you make as true as you can. — Louis Malle

Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word. — Stella Adler

'Killing Pablo' to me - as much as I love 'The Grey's script - 'Killing Pablo' to me is the best thing I've ever written. — Joe Carnahan

Every once and a while somebody writes a script, but even regardless of what age you are, most of the actors would all agree that it's all based upon material and the material has got to spark with you. It may be great material but you think it's great material for somebody else. Or it's great material and I'm perfect for it. So, you just have to make that judgment and if you feel in the mood to do it. — Clint Eastwood

I hate when I get a script and I can't see who the people are. — Anne Fletcher

If I do do a sequel, I'm going to have to know for sure that the script is better than the original. So I'm going to be very careful about that because I'm not eager to repeat myself. — Nicolas Cage

You can't do things for money. You just can't act them. There's gotta be something about the script that you really want to do. I wouldn't do a job if I didn't think I could do the best work I possibly could. — Tom Wilkinson

A film is different than a script. The text of the script is what it is. — John Curran

It was Ernie Haller, who had photographed Bette Davis in Jezebel and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, who was solely responsible for the visuals in Mildred Pierce, said Crawford. "Ernie was at the rehearsals. And so was Mr. [Anton] de Grot, who did the sets. I recall seeing Ernie's copy of the script and it was filled with notations and diagrams. I asked him if these were for special lights and he said, 'No, they're for special shadows.' Now, that threw me. I was a little apprehensive. I was used to the look of Metro, where everything, including the war pictures, was filmed in blazing white lights. Even if a person was dying there was no darkness. But when I saw the rushes of Mildred Pierce I realized what Ernie was doing. The shadows and half-lights, the way the sets were lit, together with the unusual angles of the camera, added considerably to the psychology of my character and to the mood and psychology of the film. And that, my dear, is film noir." "Mildred — Shaun Considine

The thing is when you play a character it's the persona you bring across from a book to film, or book to script to film. If I play Frank Sinatra, there's gonna be things I do in a movie that Frank might not have done, but it's the personality that comes across. — Alex Pettyfer

As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script. I'm not the world's best writer or the world's best actor, but I can do that thing where I can fix - or ruin - fix-slash-ruin, add quirk, add value. — Sally Phillips

I'm a chanteuse and a diva, and I'm an actress who likes a script. — Jane Badler

I feel nervous when the script is set in stone, and I feel nervous when I feel the script is written for mass consumption because I don't see myself that way. — Jenny Slate

All movies are alchemy and time is one of the ingredients that goes into the alchemy. You want the time to be right; you don't want to rush it. You need the right script, the right cast and the right feeling in the culture. — Drew Goddard

I never put down a bad script and I never walk out of a bad movie because I'm always hopeful things will change. — Peter Segal

The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing. — Akira Kurosawa

I dropped the script in the fireplace, called my agent and said, they can jail me, sue me, but I'm never acting again, unless I can do something worthwhile. — Piper Laurie

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

I have been an Avengers fan since the middle 1960s. I grew up with them, and I've imagined a hundred different versions of an Avengers movie. I think I even have a script I wrote back in eighth grade, 'Avengers vs. the Mole Man.' Truly dreadful, but a work of love. — Jonathan Maberry

You can't fix a bad script after you start shooting. The problems on the page only get bigger as they move to the big screen. — Howard Hawks

My Brilliant Career was beautifully directed, but I had a bit of trouble with myself in it. It was a silly script, based on a book this 16-year-old girl wrote. — Judy Davis

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

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

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

'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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do remember reading the script of 'The Nightmare Fair' and looking forward to doing it. — Colin Baker