Melissa Rosenberg Quotations

I love Charlie, Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin, and it's the funniest, most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.

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.

In 'Twilight,' you're setting up the world. You're introducing the world, and I was also writing in a vacuum because I didn't know who the actors were going to be. Now you're going to 'New Moon' and 'Eclipse,' and I could write specifically to them in my mind. So it becomes a more comfortable world.

It doesn't matter if you're the smartest person in the room: If you're not someone who people want to be around, you won't get far. Likewise for helping those in line behind you. I take seriously my role as a mentor to young female filmmakers - I make sure my time is tithed.

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.

I think one of the major differences between Wonder Woman and Jessica Jones is that Wonder Woman is iconic and much better known, so you get into a lot of ridiculous expectations, like what's her costume going to look like? Well, nobody knows who Jessica Jones is, except for fangirls and boys.

Everyone is given one gift, a reason for being, and it's our obligation to do something with it.

I am involved with 'Write Girl,' which is such a great organization, because they go into inner city schools and work with underprivileged girls to pair them up with other writers. And it gets them learning to express themselves and become familiar with their own voice. They have a 100% success ratio getting those girls into college.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.'

I got so lucky on my 'Red Widow' cast. It was just the universe looking out for me that I got those actors. It's a big ensemble cast, a very international cast. I don't know how that happened.

I remember when I was a dancer and I had to do this performance and I was really nervous about it, and I happened at that moment to go see 'Flashdance.' I mean, it's silly, but I walked out of that movie going 'what a feeling!' I walked out with confidence.

I think stories do have an ending. I think they need to have an ending eventually because that is a story: a beginning, middle and end. If you draw out the end too long, I think storytelling can get tired.

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.

I'm not saying that 'Twilight' is, you know, some brilliant Oscar-winner, it's not 'Dr. Zhivago.' It's not trying to be. Because it is a female fantasy. I would argue that it's actually a universal fantasy. Which is, the fantasy being to be loved and cherished for exactly who you are.

I love that as a theme for women: Stop standing by! You've got to make stuff happen! You've got to create your own world because if you let other people do it, they're going to just screw you.

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.

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?

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.

I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.

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.

My humor tends to be a little more edgy than is appropriate for 'Twilight,' although I got some in there. That was fun! There's just a tonal difference. For me, storytelling is storytelling. But, I do like writing for grown ups.

I have been working in television for quite a long time. In television, the writer is the constant, and the director is rotated in and out. I am very use to dealing with people's methods. And perspectives.

I have a very strict regimen of showing up at my desk at a certain hour with my cup of green tea. It is very quiet. I don't like having a lot of atmosphere around.

I find Jessica Jones a much more interesting character to write for than Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman is so noble and heroic, and I don't find that as interesting as one who's really damaged and flawed and has post-traumatic stress disorder.

My plan is, I'm in the process of creating a production company called Tall Girls productions. I want to be doing both film and television. I'll never leave television. I just love working in it too much.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bill Condon, I must say, may have been one of the best professional experiences of my life, collaborating with him. He, himself, is an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He is a storyteller first and foremost, so we speak the same language. We approach things always from the story.

Directing doesn't appeal to me. I'm much more in the world of ideas. My husband is a director, and I understand what it takes to direct. It's a skill set where you have to be able to talk to actors and understand them, and I don't. It's a very different way of being in the world, and I much prefer writing and producing.

I stay off the Internet, because I'm very sensitive to commentary. There could be 10 comments of 'Fabulous job!' and one 'She's horrible!' and it completely throws me.

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.

If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them. I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.

Women tend to be categorized as Madonnas or whores.

Showrunning is not a one-man job; it's literally impossible to do for one person. I have learned the hard way now from two seasons, one with Red Widow, and this, I can't control everything. I certainly have tried, but having an incredibly strong team around you, surrounding yourself with incredibly talented people, that is the trick, and I certainly had that for the first season here of Jessica Jones.

Women, in general, are very passionate fans, and that's what you love about them.

I've really been very focused on Jessica Jones. Our series was well on its way to being created by the time we even saw scripts from Daredevil, and Luke Cage didn't even have a showrunner hired then. Jeph Loeb [Marvel TV boss] is the master of the connective tissue, but each series exists in its own world.

Jessica Jones is its own animal, I think each one of these series is its own animal. There is some connective tissue, in terms of referencing the Marvel Universe, but it glances off of the other stories.

When I was developing the [Daredevil] idea, we were really doing something closer to what was in the comic book. By that, I mean in terms of civilians in the street knew that superpowers were an everyday matter of fact. When it finally ended up at Netflix, they really decided to land it in the Marvel Universe that exists in the cinematic universe. That changes the story entirely. It was no longer about the other, which is what that metaphor was. It's really more about the character herself, which I love.

Jessica Jones is the first female superhero Marvel's ever introduced as a lead.

The Daredevil comic book was the first comic book Marvel had ever put out that was an adult R-rated book, so I started with that. When I was creating the series, I just started with that tone, and that edge, and it just kept going.

TV is very much my first love. I love this world. It's where writers have the most creative control, and I just love that.

When you have a show that's called Jessica Jones, if Jessica Jones isn't in a scene the rest of it become almost irrelevant until you earn other character storylines. You've got to flesh out those characters enough that you can travel.

In in some ways Jessica Jones and Supergirl are the opposite of one another, they both happen to have superpowers. But, in terms of the lack of parity, I think it is a good start and this is just the beginning I hope.

I'm a little jaded about change actually happening, I'll admit. The numbers are exactly the same as they were two decades ago, in terms of the number of female leads, or people behind the camera, all of that. I'll certainly do my part, and I feel like Jessica Jones is a great step.

Trish "Patsy" Walker is just one of my favorite characters and she was a big comic character in the '40s.

Because I work in television, I always knew that I loved working with writers. It's very collaborative. You're always in a room full of writers.

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.

I've started a company, called Tall Girl Productions, and we've got our first project that is purely producing, not writing, with a writer named Evan Daugherty. It's for NBC, it's called 'Afterthought,' and it's science fiction-ish. That's fun.

My humor tends to be a little more edgy than is appropriate for Twilight, although I got some in there. That was fun! There's just a tonal difference. For me, storytelling is storytelling. But, I do like writing for grown ups.

Bryce Zabel and I went down the road of revising the Kennedy historical record together on the NBC seriesDark Skies. This time instead of giving new meaning to the established JFK chronology, hes created a brand new one altogether.Surrounded by Enemiesis an exhilarating ride, full of twists and turns that never were, but surely could have been.

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.

That's how I operate best. I just ignore feelings and jump right into the next thing.

The only kind of film I want to write is a story where I can keep on seeing the stories play out. I'm a huge television fan, and I'm a huge continuing storyline fan.

I think going into 'New Moon,' I knew the characters better. I knew the world better and I knew the actors who would be playing these roles. I had a sense of their rhythms and tones. 'Twilight' I was writing in a vacuum. We hadn't cast it yet.

Directing doesn't appeal to me. I'm much more in the world of ideas.

Don't give up. You're going to get kicked in the teeth. A lot. Learn to take a hit, then pick yourself up off the floor. Resilience is the true key to success.

My husband is a director, and I understand what it takes to direct. It's a skill set where you have to be able to talk to actors and understand them, and I don't. It's a very different way of being in the world, and I much prefer writing and producing.