A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built. Nicholas Meyer More Quotes by Nicholas Meyer More Quotes From Nicholas Meyer Sure you can; the only question is whether you do it well. Nicholas Meyer wells I think that the reason that people are so up in arms about movies that have historical inaccuracies is because now that we've trashed our education institutions beyond repair, people fear that the only people are getting their histories is through the movies, so the elephant in the room is that no one wants to talk about why we're so passionately obsessed with accuracy. Nicholas Meyer elephants people thinking With a historical novel you know that liberties are being taken. Since Walter Scott, we know that poetic license, dramatic license, that events been conflated and that liberties have been taken, characters ditto, dates rearranged. But people don't seem to understand that movies are fictions, they are dramatizations, at least historical movies, and we should accord the moviemakers some of the same understanding and latitude. When you go to a movie you know it's a dramatization and not history. Nicholas Meyer poetic-license taken character When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say "This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln" whatever. But you don't make any such supposition when you say "This is a historical novel." Nicholas Meyer historical-novels gone war I wrote an article not so long ago that was published in the Los Angeles Times, and I think I titled it "Movies vs. History." But I think they had another title for it. I got sort of sick and tired of seeing movies that got picked apart by people because they had taken dramatic or poetic license and I said "These people don't understand the distinctions." Nicholas Meyer tired taken thinking I'm not really interested in the exploding car or endless sort of dystopian fantasies and superheroes. None of that... that doesn't interest me very much. Nicholas Meyer superhero fantasy car I'm mainly interested in people trying to figure s#!t out. Nicholas Meyer figures trying people I think all my Star Trek movies are very earthbound. Nicholas Meyer star-trek-movie stars thinking What I want any genre to do, what I want any work of art to do, is to illuminate the human condition. Nicholas Meyer genre want art But you have to understand what that really did is that it opened these DVDs to be sources of oral history instead of puff pieces for the studio, because people involved with them being in fear of being sued by somebody, so it became another form of movie history. I mean I didn't plan it, but I'm proud that it happened. Which is probably why they didn't interview me for this DVD. Nicholas Meyer dvds mean people Movie studios, Hollywood studios, by and large are not making the kind of movies that I go to see. Nicholas Meyer hollywood-studios hollywood kind Having done, you know, science fiction, I didn't want to get trapped in science fiction. So my eclecticism was my only conscious choice. I didn't want to find myself in a niche that I couldn't get out of. Nicholas Meyer choices done fiction I never gave my career much strategic thought. Maybe I should have. Nicholas Meyer careers should should-have We were extremely prescient in that we predicted the Soviet coup before it happened. That was kind of amazing. Nicholas Meyer coups soviet kind In fact, we've entered a world which is arguably much more dangerous than [being] eyeball to eyeball with the USSR. Nicholas Meyer eyeballs facts world The naive thing I suppose is simply that we thought, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, that we had reached the end of history and we were entering a brave new world minus the Soviet Union where everything was going to be peaches and cream. Nicholas Meyer brave-new-world entering unions Leo Tolstoy said the purpose of art is to teach you to love life. And that's what I want. Nicholas Meyer love-life purpose art
