From: (Anonymous)	Date: August 13th, 2008 10:31 am (UTC)		(Link)

from RJ interviews:

Do you think a two hour movie could ever do the series justice? Or would it at least have to be a trilogy of some sort?
RobertJordan: I think it would take at least 18 or 20 hours of movie to do any one of the books. Which means, I suppose, that none of them will ever be done as movies.


Would you like to see the Wheel of Time made into a movie - or movies? If so, who would you like to see play Rand?
I would very much like to see the Wheel of Time made into a miniseries for television, perhaps by someone like HBO. They do very good work, and there would be no commercial interruptions. I don't think I would let one of the books be made into a movie. Such a movie would have to be at least five or six hours long, perhaps longer, just for one book, to maintain the coherence of the story, and movies of that sort aren't being made by anyone I know of. As to who should play Rand, I really don't know. How many good, young actors are there who happen to be six feet five inches tall?


...A japanese company contacted me about doing an animated movie. I told them no, because they wanted to do a movie based on two or three books, and I said 'no, I won't do that.'

Then he talked about NBC acquiring an option about doing a miniseries based on the first book and options to buy options on the other books, and that there was quite some progress made by the people involved and then "those people promptly left NBC" and NBC has let the option lapse...
quote:

It's a chancy thing. I would not support anyone doing a feature film of, say, The Eye of the World. I do not think it could be compressed into three hours. Certainly not into two. That would make it incomprehensible. But... [end of this side of the tape]
... the screenwriter makes further changes, because, although it's a collaborative effort, if the director says I don't like this, do it some other way, do it this way, and the screenwriter does that. And if the screenwriter doesn't do that, they'll get another screenwriter. And then the actor says 'I don't believe this character would say this.' And the actress says I don't want to do that, see, I want to do it this way, so they change the dialogue, and they change the scene. And the director, again, comes up and says 'I think it should be done in this fashion' and he shapes it.
And what goes up on the screen bears, you hope, some resemblance to what was on the page.



Q: Which actors and actresses would you cast if a movie were made, and you had that power?
quote:

That power is never given to a writer of a book, believe me. I know that there are websites, more than one, that have sections or they have posts that this actor or that actress for this role or that role. I don't htink I've ever really thought about it. To me a movie is something that would be nice if it happened. A miniseries....
...
...if Thom should be Sean Connery or Patrick Stewart. I'm sorry, I simply have never thought about that.


Perhaps New Spring could be done in a three hour feature length movie.