Melissa Rosenberg Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

Everyone is given one gift, a reason for being, and it's our obligation to do something with it. Obviously, it's a challenge - but if you're not taking the bull by the horns, I have no patience for you. You're just taking up space.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.'

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Women tend to be categorized as Madonnas or whores.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 [TV Series "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.