79 Film Adaptations Quotes
Following is our list of film adaptations quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about what is film adaptation.
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Famous Film Adaptations Quotes
The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems. — Stan Brakhage
People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind. — Renata Adler
Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage. — Charlie Chaplin
Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills. — David Mamet
After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal. — Harmony Korine
The filmmaker's got to make it his story and the actors have got to make it their story. — Rachel Griffiths
Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood. — Walt Disney
A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay. — Dirk Benedict
A film is a director's vision... there is, however, much input an actor or actress can have. — Natasha Richardson
Although it is a fantasy film, it's as real as it can be. You have to imagine that an audience will buy their ticket to a cinema and get on a first-class flight and journey to Middle Earth. — Orlando Bloom
I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books. — Matthew Vaughn
Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. — Ingmar Bergman
Motion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century - they combine Art and business! — Roger Corman
The big-budget blockbuster is becoming one of the most dependable forms of filmmaking. — Peter Jackson
One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it. — Julie Taymor
Short Film Adaptations Quotes
- Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourself — Michael Haneke
- Special effects movies have taken over the universe. That and scary movies. — Jami Gertz
- Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images. — Steven Bochco
- Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami. — Jean-Luc Godard
- Film lovers are sick people. — Francois Truffaut
- The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout. — Robert Holman
- A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake. — Alfred Hitchcock
- Movies are a big part of our Indian culture. — Mahendra Singh Dhoni
- Movies take years to bring to theater, but hours to watch. Strikingly similar to success. — Isaac Mashman
Film Adaptations Image Quotes
Adaptation Movie Quotes
Almost all the movies I've directed are adaptations. And I think what I found when I went to film school, where they try to push you to find your voice or your thing, is that I got a lot of things out of adaptations. — James Franco
Making a movie is like a chess game. It's about constantly changing patterns, adapting to new things. It's not just black and white, as you know. — Tom Cruise
The movie adaptations of stage musicals that I've seen, without exception, in my opinion don't work. A lot of people would disagree with me. — Stephen Sondheim
The landscape of cinema is not original. Not to say there aren't great movies being made, but it's much easier for studios to make movies that have built-in audiences. So it's all remakes, adaptations, a lot of remakes of adaptations. — Charlie Hunnam
Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil. — Karina Longworth
The fact that I made a special movie with an old-fashioned style - even if it's a mix between with modern and old-fashioned things - must mean I feel both ways about change. In a way I'm resisting, but in a way adapting myself to the times. — Michel Hazanavicius
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration. — Richard Schickel
I'm very opinionated about movie musicals when they're adapted from live shows. You'll sit still for a three-minute song in a theater. But in movies, a glance from someone's eyes will tell you the whole story in a few seconds. — Stephen Sondheim
A movie takes on its own life, and you have to respect that and be open to it. — Todd Solondz
It is impossible to do a movie exactly the way a comic book is written and drawn, just as it's impossible to do a movie exactly like a novel or exactly like anything else. When you go to different forms of media, you have to adapt. — Stan Lee
People Writing About Film Adaptations
More Film Adaptations Quotes
God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character. — Robert McKee
You and I share the same DNA. Is there anything more lonely than that? — Charlie Kaufman
I love the variety of films. In theater, you go into a room and the director runs the room, so you all work to his or her method. On film, if an actor or an actress is in for a day or two, the director has to get out of that actor what they need, so they have to change and adapt to that actor's technique. — Eddie Redmayne
You know, you can try and plan [filming] as much as you want, but you get there on game day and you get thrown a curve ball, I guess, hey, the game plan goes out the window. You've got to adapt. — Michael B. Jordan
Director Gary Ross has created an adaptation that is faithful in both narrative and theme, but he's also brought a rich and powerful vision of Panem, its brutality and excesses, to the film as well. His world building's fantastic, whether it be the Seam or the Capitol. — Suzanne Collins
Adaptation is a profound process. Means you figure out how to thrive in the world. — John Laroche
I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation. — Satyajit Ray
I'm going to do an adaptation of the Italian film, Bread and Tulips. I really like that film. — Norman Jewison
If I want to keep making films for a few more years, I probably should be willing to adapt. I've sort of evolved into the filmmaker that I am because of natural selection anyway. — Guy Maddin
Whatever the genre of film you're doing and whatever the source material is, you have to adapt to the different genre, but it's the same work, as an actor. You're just trying to ground it in reality and find your truth in it. — Ben Schnetzer
I'm always open. I try not to have a closed mind. In fact the only reason why I'm able to continue to make films since 1986 is I have been adaptable. If I weren't flexible I sure wouldn't be making films this many years as I've been doing it. I've been making a film a year almost since 1986 and that's hard. That ain't easy. — Spike Lee
It was 1978 when Superman came out, and I kept thinking, Why don't they do something about it? They've done all these crappy attempts at comic book film adaptations. What can we do different? Why don't we just re-release this thing? — Richard Donner
There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. — Charlie Kaufman
Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: ‘the book is so much better than the film. — Paulo Coelho
The Forbidden Room and Seances are related. Both of them are made up of lost film matter adapted through the medium of me and Evan, but the way they present themselves is totally different. One of them is this big Russian nesting doll of movie narratives and the other is much shorter experience on the internet. — Guy Maddin
When I was younger and in primary school, I'd do maybe a film a year, and I had to adapt to being away from everyone for a couple of months. — Saoirse Ronan
The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold. — Milan Kundera
To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was. — Nicholas Sparks
The films that I've done before were original stories most of the time, I did two adaptations before this, but they were mostly original stories where I had complete freedom to evolve in the direction I wanted. — Walter Salles
I think where the criticism of videogames come from is where videogames are just Xeroxes of films, and when you get a film adaptation of that game, you've just Xeroxed something twice. I think that's where a lot of the criticism comes from - there are ultra-violent games that are already based on a million films. But there's definitely beauty and art and design in games. I don't think anybody could deny that. — Edgar Wright
I don't think that people are necessarily going to films simply because they were adapted from comics, though I could be wrong. Comics aren't really misunderstood either, they've just been mostly silly for the past century, and those genre-centered stories have found their way into the movie theaters over the past couple of decades because a generation who grew up reading them has, well, grown up. — Chris Ware
I think a lot of ["Cosmopolitans"] is marked by [Jerome David] Salinger. Salinger wouldn't allow his works to be adapted for film after his experience with "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut," and I think that's great for us because then we have to do our own Salinger stories. — Whit Stillman
I got Michael Caine's book, Acting In Film, and I read it on the plane, desperately trying to glean information from him about how to adapt my craft, which was actually very helpful. — Eric McCormack
I always thought that the location of this film [Girl In The Train] was on the train and inside her imagination, and her loneliness and her gaze out the window.Although it was set in England, it didn't feel to me like an overly English book. In terms of the use of cultural references, it was not extreme, so it was very simple to go from England to America in the adaptation. — Erin Cressida Wilson
When I read the book [The Adderall Diaries] I loved it, and I maybe had an inkling that there was a lot of good material in there. I didn't quite know at the time how to adapt it into a film, but I hoped I would figure it out one day. — James Franco
I felt I should also contrast Visconti's treatment of the novella - usually damned by Mann fans (who typically respect Britten's more "faithful" adaptation). The Visconti film does many quite wonderful things, although there are good reasons for the condemnation. — Philip Kitcher
So getting that balance between what is honoring scripture and the Word and also acknowledging the fact that by the virtue of putting it on film there's going to be a variation and adaptation, I mean, it's a fine dance and a balance. Our producers and directors have worked so hard to get that right and I'm really proud. I think it's a pretty good job. — Joseph Fiennes
'How do you balance the creative with the biblical?' One could pick up the scripture and read it to oneself and you would be communing directly with that information. As soon as you go into film, as soon as there's a camera, and there's an angle, and there's lighting, and there's editing, you're into the adaptation. — Joseph Fiennes
One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change. — Hirokazu Koreeda
To tell you the truth, I'm not unhappy about it. I'm not even sure that I like the idea of adapting novels into films. It's very difficult to do, and it usually doesn't work. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, one feels disappointed with the result. — Paul Auster
Seances is an internet project where I intended to adapt at least a hundred and maybe three hundred lost films into ten and twenty minute long fragmentary versions. We then uploaded them to an internet archive that fragmented them even more. We treated them like shreds of lost movie spirits and allowed these spirits to interrupt each other in non-consecutive collisions that formed new movies. — Guy Maddin
My film is in French. It's not something folkloric. It's who we are. There's this tension about immigrants coming in. Will they learn French? Will they adapt? In this film, I'm on the reverse side because Monsieur Lazhar comes from a society where French is also the second language. — Philippe Falardeau
It's sort of an organic process when you're adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression. — Jonathan Tropper
I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there's nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: "Let's get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film." — Colin Firth
Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath. — William Boyd
I think it's always a challenge to adapt something from one medium to another - a novel into a film or a play into a movie or whatever. — Julian Fellowes
A lot of films that have been adapted from books stop serving you because they become different. I mean, they are different entities in themselves, but artistically, what you're trying to achieve with a film is so very different to what you're trying to achieve with a book, and the way when you write a script is so very different on paper to how it seems on a screen. — Andrea Riseborough
There are always differences when you adapt a novel to a film. A novel is longer so you're automatically cutting out elements and introspection but this is actually a film that stays very close to the novel. — Nicholas Sparks
Interestingly, I never thought Id do an adaptation. Ive also been quite against them. I think trying to translate one medium to another is wrong. I never really felt that books fitted into film. Generally people are disappointed, arent they? — Andrea Arnold
When you adapt a book to a film, you take all the best parts and put them into an hour and 15 minutes and have to compromise on the characters. — Channing Tatum
Baz [Luhrmann] paid me one of the greatest compliments ever. I don't know him, really, but when I first met him I was congratulating him on ROMEO + JULIET - which I think is a wonderful adaptation - and he said, "Oh, well we couldn't have done it without your RICHARD III, which was an inspiration!" I've never quite checked up on the dates to see whether or if, in fact, we did our film before he did his. — Ian Mckellen
I adore book-to-film adaptations when they're done well, and I'm more lenient than many readers when it comes to what counts as 'done well.' For me, the most important thing is that the film maintains the spirit of the original book. — Maggie Stiefvater
I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action. — Tom Perrotta
No one forces me, or any other writer, to sell a film option on the books. If you don't want to run the risk that the filmmakers may adapt your work in a way you don't like, then you don't sell the option. You know when you sell it that they will have to make some changes, just because film and TV are different media than books. — Jeff Abbott
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