A Quote by Craig Mazin
There's a certain exhaustion that sets in when screenwriters are approaching sequels, and they start to lean on crutches - those same old wacky characters!
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"Do not lean on your own understanding." That means don't bring in the crutches and lean on them, those crutches that you have designed and made to handle such situations. Stay away from them. Don't lean on them; lean on God.
A lot of screenwriters write certain characters, certain parts, with actors in mind. I don't really tend to do that. I describe them as specifically as I can, but I don't really picture anyone in particular.
My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really handicapped, I wouldn’t advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That’s all that I can say. ‘If I fall....’ - that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to fall.
Let guilty men remember, their black deeds
Do lean on crutches made of slender reeds.
One of the things I did during my 17 years as a psychiatric social worker was go around and find people with mental crutches, and every time I found one, I kicked those goddamn crutches until they flew. You know what happened? Every single one of those people has been able to walk without the crutches better, in fact. Were they giving up anything intrinsically valuable? Just their irrational reliance upon superstitions and supernatural nonsense. Perhaps this sort of claptrap was good for the Stone Age, when people actually believed that if they prayed for rain they would get it.
I think at some level, it's just alchemy that we, as writers, can't explain when we write the characters. I don't set out to create the characters - they're not, to me, collections of quirks that I can put together. I discover the characters, instead. I usually go through a standard set of interview questions with the character in the beginning and ask the vital stuff: What's important to you? What do you love? Hate? Fear? .. and then I know where to start. But the characters just grow on their own, at a certain point. And start surprising me.
I have to stay interested. I can't do the same thing over and over again, which is why I don't do - I've made sequels, but it's the movies that are not sequels that I enjoy the most.
In a play, a few actors perform a few characters, and they need to perform those characters with a certain level of believability so that audiences can actually understand and see them as those characters.
One of the things when you write, well the way I write, is that you are writing your scenario and there are different roads that become available that the characters could go down. Screenwriters will have a habit of putting road blocks up against some of those roads because basically they can't afford to have their characters go down there because they think they are writing a movie or trying to sell a script or something like that. I have never put that kind of imposition on my characters. Wherever they go I follow.
Publishers are very risk-averse, so they lean towards licenses and sequels. But the fact is that even those are not guaranteed hits. So, if 'playing it safe' does not guarantee hits, they might as well leave it up to the really creative, risk-taking people, because they couldn't do any worse.
You know for years before the notion of sequels, actors were the franchise. John Wayne would rarely do sequels, but he kind of played the same guy with a different name in every movie. I have no problem with using actors as franchises. And that's what is fun to do.
My effort is to slip into any role that is offered to me. The minute you go into those costumes, those grand sets, and start prepping up for the role, you become the part or at least start feeling the part.
As a rule, people are afraid of truth. Each truth we discover in nature or social life, destroys the crutches on which we need to lean.
Every filmmaker has his own vision, and when they write a film or characters, they see certain people in those characters.
A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.
The approaching exhaustion of domestic reserves of petroleum and the rapid depletion of world reserves will have a profound effect on Americans in the cities and on the farms.
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