Words matter. These are the best John Fusco Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We searched around the globe and looked at well over a hundred ‘Marco Polos,’ came down to the wire, and went back and looked at our Italy tapes, and we realized that we had overlooked someone. That was Lorenzo Richelmy.
It always circled back around to Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. That always fascinated me because so few people make the connection between the two.
In many ways, it’s easier to write a book. You have more latitude with structure, and you have the freedom to luxuriate within the internal lives and musings of your characters. But where a screenplay does not always demand great prose, a novel lives or dies by it.
The journey of Marco Polo is the hero’s journey, one that all cultures across the globe can relate to.
We drove for 10 hours on rocky trails out into the central part of Mongolia in a Russian utility vehicle with no shock absorbers. Then we arrived at a remote area where we stayed in a yurt and waited to meet a horse wrangler who was scheduled to bring our rides.
Being a student of Wuxia literature, I was aware ‘Crouching Tiger’ was book four in the ‘Crane Iron Pentalogy.’
I have seen too many screenwriters of promise become formula addicts and slaves to stop watch structure. Spend that time watching movies, reading screenplays, reading plays, and most importantly – write from your gut.
Being on the ground in Mongolia and traveling with the horse culture and sleeping in yurts, I was able to pick up a lot of detail. But I brought in advisors to work with our horse master to make sure the fighting strategies both on the Chinese and Mongolian sides were very accurate.
He was an Italian kid traveling in China, and I’m of Italian decent with a fascination for China. So, I always felt this connection to him and lived vicariously through the travels of Marco Polo.
My son, Gio, wanted to do a horseback trip in Mongolia, but he didn’t want to do an Abercrombie & Fitch-type tour, where they show you around while you sleep in B&Bs.
I was interviewing an elder, Chief Fool’s Crow, who was the ceremonial chief. He was 103 years old. I was getting his information on the history of Lakota horses. He told me the story of Hidalgo and Frank Hopkins.
I wrote ‘Young Guns’ on spec because I really believed that the young age of these guys historically, the whole legend of Billy dying at 21, would attract a young staple of stars, and that would be the game-changer.
With the Mongolian horse warfare, I did a lot of research into the Mongol art of war.
I feel that Marco Polo has really been misrepresented – has never really gotten his due.
Marco Polo has been kind of buried under this cloud of rather banal historical dust, when the true story is so much more exciting.
I got the feeling: It’s time to do a Marco Polo story. I felt like everything was lining up right because long-form television series were becoming to me like the new great American novel.
When I was growing up I spent a lot of time reading about ancient China and was really fascinated.
Twelve years ago, when I was on the Pine Ridge Reservation for ‘Thunderheart,’ I was dong research into Native American horses that had come into extinction. I was tracing certain Lakota bloodlines, and it became an obsession.
As a writer of both novels and screenplays, I can say that screenwriting is a vastly rewarding creative life – if you fight hard enough to do it on your own terms. Whether I write books or not, my screenwriting life has been creatively rewarding and remains so.
