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To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'
John Sayles
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John Sayles
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 28
Actor
Film Director
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Schenectady
New York
John Thomas Sayles
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More quotes by John Sayles
But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras we didn't have to pay them.
John Sayles
There were not fifteen people in the story department and twenty-five producers and stuff. And Roger had produced 1,000 movies and directed a couple of hundred, and their comments were always very, very specific.
John Sayles
Not that I've always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don't come out-but I've gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.
John Sayles
I don't have a social agenda. I just don't choose to ignore what's in front of me.
John Sayles
As a screenwriter I'm often writing in genres where there have been thousands of movies whereas when I direct movies they tend to be in between genres. They tend to have a little bit of a genre to them, but they're really about the people, and they're people we haven't met before.
John Sayles
I probably wouldn't have done as many as I did in one year, which I did when I was trying to raise money.
John Sayles
America is a very divided country now. Not only are there red states and blue states, there are now red facts and blue facts. The right-wing believe in creationism. The left in evolution.
John Sayles
I'm never at a loss for new projects.
John Sayles
Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn't going to give you any more money.
John Sayles
I don't write [screenplay character] biographies beforehand. I usually go in knowing some sequences: this is where I want to start, this is where I want to end.
John Sayles
The less money and time you have, the more you haveto plan ahead and be careful about your coverage. It's like a gas:it expands or contracts depending on the size of the container.
John Sayles
There are very few distributors left to do off-Hollywood movies, and those distributors generally have got thousands of movies to choose from. So you're pretty lucky if you get one to even take your movie and it's pretty rare that they pay anything upfront.
John Sayles
I never actually do rehearsals. That's one of the reasons that I write those bios and if I can meet with the actors I'll meet them or talk to them on the phone. What I want is for them to come on set knowing their lines and knowing who the character is.
John Sayles
For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much I only change it on average about two lines per movie.
John Sayles
I figured, 'When is that ever going to happen again?'. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made I set out with a budget first. I said, 'What can I do well for $40,000?'.
John Sayles
In a movie you have all these logistical problems all these practical problems. But you're also going to have people come who can do things that you can't do, and you get to direct their talents.
John Sayles
The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you're playing a character who changes within the movie, you've got to do that, but you've got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that's really, really tough.
John Sayles
I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.
John Sayles
I made it about a three-day weekend so people wouldn't have to change their clothes a lot. We didn't have an art department we didn't have a make-up department.
John Sayles
I've always got five or six things that would either make a good feature or TV show. And you just never know. You go and you pitch and it may be exactly what they're looking for, or they may stop you after two sentences and say, Oh, we've already done something just like that.
John Sayles
