Melissa Rosenberg Quotes

• You don’t know what someone’s going to walk away from a movie with, but you hope it’s something positive, but if nothing, you want them most basically to be entertained and engaged. That’s your job. But you also hope to give them something to chew on or maybe some insight into the human existence, you hope a little bit. Not to sound too lofty.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• With any sci-fi fantasy storytelling, you must have rules be very clear, otherwise you lose people, like ‘OK, they can fly; now they can’t fly.’

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• With ‘Twilight,’ you have these massive tomes that you have to condense. With ‘Penoza,’ we had an eight episode Dutch series that, just for the pilot alone, I condensed three episodes. So, there’s a lot of filling in and a ton of invention that has to happen to fill out eight episodes.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• With ‘Darkly Dreaming Dexter,’ we as a group of writers had to take a rather thin novel and spread it out over the course of 12 episodes, and not only 12 episodes, but lay in story for everyone that’s going to take you through five years.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• When you’re writing you’re constantly fighting demons to sit down and do what you do. If you listen to the voices outside your head, in addition to the ones inside your head, you’ll never get anything done. There’s enough inner strife.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• When I’m stuck in my writing, the world is amiss. If I’m eating a sandwich, it’s an unsettled sandwich. If I’m in the shower, it’s an incorrect shower. It’s profoundly uncomfortable. But it’s what keeps me pushing.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• What I want is to be the highest grossing screenwriter, or to have some other woman be the highest grossing screenwriter, instead of being number nine on the list. That’s my goal.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• What I really want to do is create great roles for women. And I’m not talking Nicholas Sparks romance. I think women’s roles have gotten ghettoized in these sort of places… I’m thinking women in action, comic books, or like the Tony Soprano of women. We need some complex roles.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can’t do that.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• Well, I think one of the problems with ‘Birds of Prey’ was there were too many cooks in that kitchen. The studio, the producers, the network, all had very different visions of what that should be. They should have just let Laeta Kalogridis control that. Instead they decided to try to get their hands in the mix.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• Well, I never got into the young adult headspace. With ‘Twilight,’ they are pretty adult themes, aside from maybe the first one, but even that. They’re very adult themes, actually, particularly as the characters age. I never wrote for young adults. I wrote for myself, as an audience.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• TV is the place for writers to live. This is where you have creative control and you’re constantly writing. ‘Twilight’ had almost a TV schedule to it. I was constantly working on these projects. There was not a whole lot of lull but I’ve gone onto other feature projects that’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll get back to you on notes.’

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• To me, to spend all the time and energy and face all those creative challenges that you would spend for a two hour movie, you’re inventing a world, you’re inventing characters. If they’re interesting enough, they should be compelling enough to go for five more episodes. How incredibly frustrating would it be to just do one movie?

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• The number of vacations me and my husband have canceled… if you really want a job, book a non-refundable vacation. But obviously we’re blessed too.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• The film industry sees the writer as fungible: The thinking goes, As long as we have Brad Pitt and all this money, we have a great film! No, you need a writer with voice and an engaging story, or what you have is a bomb.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• That was, in writing the ‘Twilight’ script I had about five weeks to write that. I’d taken about a month to write the outline and then it was slam into a script and write it down fast because the writer’s strike was looming.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• Studios, because they are investing a great deal of money in movies, they want a guarantee that when they hire somebody that person can deliver for them. Everything is fear based, so they pigeonhole people. But I’ve written everything, from Westerns to sci-fi to dramedy, I’ve done it all.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• So what ‘Twilight’ does is show how women/girls can drive box office and they can support a tent pole movie. They’re an extremely passionate fan base. This coincided with the 13 year old boys starting to stay home and play video games and work on their home media stuff. They’re no longer going to theaters in droves.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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• One must never assume that a character is sympathetic because of either the actor playing them or the fact that they’re a lead. I think that’s a recipe for failure, actually, because if they become unsympathetic, you lose your audience.

  Melissa Rosenberg

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Melissa Rosenberg (44)

Birth:	28th August, 1962
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Screenwriter, Television Producer

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Today's Anniversary - 21st November

Births

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• 1926 - Joseph McKenna
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• 1999 - Quentin Crisp
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