For me, my rule in this industry is I've got to listen to my butterflies. So if I got butterflies, then those are the scripts I go after.
What I hope in my ideal world is that with each project, I'll either get to work with a really great script that would force me to grow, or work with a really great actor who will make me better.
I ain't the first on the list that people are sending scripts to. I'm very lucky. I've managed to put myself in the position with some directors, yes, who will be calling me directly, and we're working on things and talking about things, but that's on a purely creative level. And then you go and have to deal with the financial level.
Some of the material out there - I don't want to say that it's all bad - but there's a lot of bad stuff out there. You just continue reading scripts, and eventually you find something you connect with.
When I'm writing, it's about the page. It's not about the movie. It's not about cinema. It's about the literature of me putting my pen to paper and writing a good page and making it work completely as a document unto itself. That's my first artistic contribution. If I do my job right, by the end of the script, I should be having the thought, 'You know, if I were to just publish this now and not make it. . . I'm done.
It's always so much fun to create backstory. Even if there are more clues in the script, you still always have to invent a lot for yourself. I think that comes naturally.
The way I choose parts is I look at the scripts. . . I choose a part by whether or not it challenges me.
Often in television, you read a script and you're amazed that you get the scene given to you.
Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.
Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander - and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters - but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters' bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts.
If you steal other people's characters, it doesn't work with the context of the scripts and what is written, so I wanted to make her my own. I was petrified, in the beginning, because it's such an iconic character, especially being a young lady myself.
When I started out, nobody gave me scripts, so I had to write.
I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to literature and theory. I wish I could have more of that in life, but I don't because I'm always reading scripts or things to prepare for movies when I'm reading.
As she lifted the glittering strand of diamonds from the box, a small slip of paper fell out. She caught it as it wafted toward the floor. Four words in ancient script, an arrogantly slanted scrawl. Accept these, accept me. Well, she thought, blinking, that was certainly direct and to the point. -Adam's note to Gabrielle
Personally, I read a lot of scripts.
If I don't have a script I adore, I do one I like. If I don't have one I like, I do one that has an actor I like or that presents some technical challenge.
I find it really hard to even read another script while shooting.
Sometimes, something seems dead, and then out of the blue, someone just figures out the way to fix a script and it goes.
The better the script, the less money there is. That's just the economics of the studio system.
A lot of screenwriters have a drawer of unsold scripts that they cut their teeth on. I don't have one. Everything I've written, after my first spec, I wrote on assignment. Everything I've written was work.