A Quote by Irvine Welsh
Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it's 4 A.M.
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What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over.
I don't like to reminisce much, and my walls don't have photographs of me and the actors I was with, or any of that stuff... I try and keep that disciplined, and just work. There are so many traps you can get into, and looking back on your own work is certainly one of them.
All my cuts are always about three hours, at the start, mainly because any scene in the movie that's 90 seconds, I probably shot a five-minute version of. If you just extrapolate that through the whole movie, I have a very long version of every scene, usually because, if there's one funny joke, I'll shoot five because I don't know if the one I like is going to work. I'll get back-ups because my biggest fear is to be in previews, testing the movie, and a joke doesn't work, but I have no way to fix it because I have no other line.
I'm a playwright by trade, and in theater, writers have complete control over everything. Nobody can change a word without your permission. I've had a couple screenwriting experiences that weren't terrible, but they were typical, where executives came in and gave you sometimes good notes and sometimes horrible notes - but they wanted to change the movie that everybody had agreed to make. After a couple of times, it's like, "Why are we doing this?" The story is not going to turn out very good when 13 people are writing it together.
I have this nook at Milk Bar that's my office, and my desk was just full of every box of Kellogg's cereal, and at different times during the day, I would open up a box, eat a bowl of cereal, and I live in a world of Post-it notes, so I would leave tasting notes on all the cereal.
The church in the book (and movie) plays a pivotal scene. We looked everywhere .. I mean everywhere! We had to have enough of a front yard area to house a Nativity scenes. And we finally found it .. two miles from our office. And we had been all over Tulsa looking. We were looking in places in Texas, everywhere! And I was in the car with the director and we drove by the church.
It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.
When I worked in theater, I was always writing things on Post-it Notes and sticking them on screens or desks. Twitter has given me a way of continuing to post those notes, only a lot of other people see them, too.
But for me, you also have to be conscious of what is going to play. And that includes playing with. Sometimes it's just a vibe. It's what's going to make this scene work. And sometimes there may be something that restricts you that has to do with something that maybe is historically accurate. And then you have to weigh that decision and give up something for a scene to work.
I have a little office in my house and it is an absolute pigsty but I know exactly where everything is and there are little things stuck all over the walls, and papers in in-trays and files I have saved on my computer and playlists I have made on my iTunes - things that take me to a place that I think is appropriate.
I'm doing the same thing and it's a hundred times bigger and a hundred times better. So if your going to make a computer game off a movie, is it going to be like "Avatar" where it's going to be a prequel before Jake even got to the planet. You've got to be smart because audiences demand that.
I've always been one to arrive early for work; preparation is a big part of how I work, and I like to be in my office going through plans for the upcoming training sessions or meetings I have.
When you're watching a show like this or watching a movie, sometimes when you have big music in a scene, it tends to push the viewer out of the scene and makes someone feel like an audience member rather than like they're in the scene.
If the film isn't suspenseful, i.e. the pressure cooker situation of what's going on in the movie, if that's not part of it, if the threat of violence and the temperature isn't always going up a notch every scene or so, then the movie is going to be boring. It's not going to work.
I like to imagine that all the choices you make during the day that you're doing a particular scene are going to feed into the creation of that scene. It's not a movie-by-movie or a part-by-part basis. It's a day-by-day thing, and sometimes an hour-by-hour thing.
Age is a very psychological thing; I do not know how old I am if you ask my age. Age is calculated by when you get born, but I do not agree with that parameter. I sometimes feel like 25, sometimes 12 and at times 40, and I love that about myself as an artist. I am not stuck to a particular age.
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