When I’m working with another writer, I tend to make a lot of effort. When I collaborate with a writer, I’m not interested in credit, but I’m feeding him stuff all the time that I feel is important to shaping the script.
A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she’ll appear in film and it won’t work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don’t know.
Many films are forgotten and deserve to be, but others glom onto the DNA and they keep a share of the collective consciousness. It’s a profound question: What are we here for? What is the purpose, the sum effect of our work?
I’ve met people who will go to a movie that I can’t stand and they say that they saw that movie ten times. There’s something they like and identified in that movie, and I don’t see it.
Fear may very well be a caveman fear of the predator, of the giant lizard chasing them – maybe that’s what Steven Spielberg connects with so well in Lost World.
I would vote for the man who’s lived life, who’s done different occupations, who’s been out in the real world and struggled to make a living, struggled to raise a family, struggled with life as it exists. So I’d vote for experience, honest experience.
