I studied acting at Boston University. I was in the theater department there. Somewhere in there I decided that wasn’t what I was going to do and I went to the B.F.A. film program at N.Y.U.
I’m trying to tell a story and do it truthfully.
I tend to not only read reviews, but also every little stupid thing online. It’s a very bad idea, and there’s a lot of angry people in the world. And it’s weird to absorb all that weirdness.
I don’t think screenwriting is therapeutic. It’s actually really, really hard for me. It’s not an enjoyable process.
I want to try it to see what it’s like and see what my stuff looks like when I take it from inception to completion.
I don’t think screenwriting is therapeutic. It’s actually really, really hard for me. It’s not an enjoyable process.
I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it’s nothing like that at all. It’s a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you’re filling in spaces.
I do like escapism. I like going to the movies on a Friday night and seeing something fun.
I can talk endlessly about characters, or why someone did this or that, and what that dynamic and interaction is. I really love it, and I think that actors really respond positively to the fact that I like to talk about that stuff, because I’m not sure that all directors do.
You are what you love. Not what loves you.
I think generally I’m kind of interested in subjective experience, what goes on inside someone’s head, that being all they really know of the world.
I’m old enough, by a long shot, to remember going to the library and spending days researching. If I was looking for a line from a poem or something else I needed, that would be the trip I would have to take.
I like actors – I used to be one.
We try to organize the world, which isn’t organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don’t think we can avoid doing that.
Before you start production, you have characters you have created without actors in mind, then all of a sudden you’ve got actors. They bring an enormous amount in creating these characters, and creating the dynamics between the characters that you’ve written.
As a kid, I had a background in theater.
Sometimes I don’t like the books that I’m reading.
You are what you love. Not what loves you.
I feel like I want to keep moving toward idiosyncracy. Personal, personal, personal.
There’s theater in life, obviously, and there’s life in theater.
If you create something that is asking for people to respond as they’re going to respond, you have to allow them to respond as they’re going to respond. Some of the people are going to be uninterested and some people are going to be mad for some reason, which is their business. That’s just the way the world is.
It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there’s no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something. I can’t think of an exception to that.
When I’m writing, I’m trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that’s how life is lived, you know?
Directing is a more pragmatic experience, where you have to deal with the restrictions of time and money that force you to make certain decisions you don’t have to make when you’re writing.
The way I write is very much without kind of a goal. I have something I’m interested in and then I decide I’m going to explore it. I don’t know where the characters are going to go, I don’t know what the movie is going to do or what the screenplay is going to do. For me, that’s the way to keep it alive.
I think generally I’m kind of interested in subjective experience, what goes on inside someone’s head, that being all they really know of the world.
I wanted to deal with someone’s idea of their relationship.
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