You have to accept that the moment you hand a script to a director, even if you've written it as an original script, it becomes his or her movie. That's the way it has to be because the pressures on a director are so staggering and overwhelming that if he or she doesn't have that sort of level of decision making ability, that sort of free reign, the movie simply won't get done. It won't have a vision behind it. It may not be your vision as a screenwriter, but at least it will have a vision.
It's funny when you put music up against picture, and all your preconceptions go away, and you start over. You just realize that that doesn't work at all.
I think everybody has a little rule follower and a little rule breaker in them.
The good thing about being in advertising was a lot of the skills cross over: you have to be accountable for your jokes; you have to tell a story quickly. It's the most expensive filmmaking foot-for-foot in the world, so it does teach you how to use all of the machines and how to think of things in terms of the physical process of capturing the images. And you have to sell your work. You have to walk into whatever it is and stand up in the middle of a conference room with a storyboard in your hand and make people laugh.
Your favorite story, whatever it might be, was written for one reader
You're not always right. You're often wrong. But at least you're looking at it as objectively as you can with as much experience as you can in the moment and saying, "Yeah, I think it's funny" or "No, I don't think it's funny yet. "
It's always hard, but it's always fun to attack a premise that you think is interesting. It does take a few drafts for sure.
My job, as I see it, is to give you a window into another world and another story, and then to be as graceful as I can so that you don't feel my work or the editor's work or the lens or the light or anything.
When your characters are not white hats or black hats but something in between, you do have to be very careful about your details. So, that takes a while. I'm not interested in white hats and black hats. I don't think that's how people are in real life.
I knew I wanted to work in Cinemascope because I find it much more beautiful just in terms of the shape of the screen, the wider image, and it's also less like television, which is important.
There are people who are put on this earth to do everything.
Most of the jokes that I wrote were funny and there always seems to be an aspect of comedy in my long-form work. I think that's how life is. I think even the more dramatic moments of one's life are often punctuated by very funny comments or situations. I like to say, "Keep your comedy serious and your drama funny, and you'll be pretty true to life. "
The stand-up really helped because you know the feeling when something feels true, and you know the feeling when it feels false. You don't ever want to give an actor the feeling of it being false, because you know how unfair that is.
You want to surround yourself with people who are as dedicated to their discipline as you are to yours and let them do what they do.
Sometimes you go against what they say because you believe in it anyway.
Believe me, you can be in the middle of a beautiful take and the next thing you know you're awash in people crossing the street. You can't even find your actors.
It's hard to hand a script to a director, there's no question about it. You've lived with these characters, you've started with a blank page, especially when it's an original work and something not based on a preexisting piece of material. But if you don't like it, write a novel.
I like to write about love plus an obstacle. Not a really big obstacle; not too serious and not too funny. Just somewhere nicely in between - a combination of the two.
You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.