Dude! Did you read this entire interview?!

I started on it and indeed, it's got some bite but once I started to feel its length, I did a print preview and found the whole thing's 74 pages. Given that it's not Courier and generally lacking in white space, I'd say this is significantly longer than most scripts.

So again... did you really read the whole thing?!

DS:  Before we get to the biographical stuff, let’s get basic. How do you define your job, as a screenwriter? Do you see your words as immanently more malleable than a poet’s or novelist’s, since film is a group artistic effort, and last minute edits will inevitably affect your words?

LD:  I’ve always thought of it as describing a movie on paper, that’s all.  There are scripts I’ve read, or once did, by favorite writers, that have never been made into movies, but I feel like I’ve seen them.  You should be able to “seeâ€� the movie when you read a script, even though there aren’t actors, there’s no music … but somehow it’s washed over you as if there were.  But this also presupposes the right sort of  reader, a dying breed, someone who might actually know what a movie is and be able to visualize it.  The lack of knowledge and experience -- of taste -- of people in the film business has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The generally accepted page count has decreased significantly from what it used to be.  As costs have increased.  So scripts judged “a fast readâ€� now -- a man, his wife, his vampire mistress -- on a plane -- are often mistaken for good.  NORTH BY NORTHWEST or 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY require a little more cognitive effort, from everybody.

Edits, last minute or otherwise, presumably affect the work of “realâ€� writers, as well -- Raymond Carver, to name but one famous example -- but in other disciplines, at least, their words are supposed to be the final product.  Because of the collective nature of filmmaking, a screenplay is naturally more malleable in one way or another -- and often should be, but needn’t always be.  Fealty to a good script doesn’t necessarily mean limiting a director’s or an actor’s expressiveness.  You can have a “literaryâ€� movie, heavy with voiceover narration, where you feel the actors have been instructed to speak rich and allusive dialogue precisely as written.  But we’re also thrilled by great films made in a seemingly more casual or improvisatory manner.  The trouble from the screenwriter’s perspective is that a film can be sometimes faithful to the script as far as what’s written, but tonally all wrong, hopelessly miscast, with inappropriate music, clueless production design, crippled and compromised in countless ways large and small.  You might go to great lengths, for instance, to evoke the light and landscape of the Hudson Valley -- only to see them film it on the cheap in Romania with eastern-European extras as Native Americans.  Which was par for the course in the former German Democratic Republic, but by no means the only place walls are forever being put up in the world of moviemaking.

DS:  Despite the group nature of film work, are there times when you have put your foot down and insisted your words be performed as written? And, even if spoken verbatim, a good (or bad) actor can twist a word’s meaning to mean almost the exact opposite, no?

LD:  Screenwriters can’t insist on lunch, let alone adherence to their precious script, and if they put their foot down will be sent to their room pretty swiftly.  Speeches imagined in the writer’s head as being delivered breathlessly at breakneck speed (and, God forbid, even so indicated) might be slurred by an actor at a snail’s pace, and pregnant pauses where none were intended can render a scene lifeless.

  (I may have dreamt it, but I’m pretty sure Michelle Pfeiffer once said “intellectu Al” in a movie -- and her co-star wasn’t Pacino.)

  In KAFKA, the marvelous actor Ian Holm -- if he’s to blame -- changed one word which, in a climactic summing-up speech, changed the meaning of the entire movie, if you ask me.  His character declares himself in favor of a mob because a mob is easy to control.  It’s the purpose of the individual he finds, as written, “questionable.”  But in the film what he says is that the purpose of the individual is always -- pregnant pause -- “in question.”

  Since he’s playing a mad scientist, the original phrasing is more in keeping with his project -- the revelation of the film’s mystery, such as it is -- which is to lobotomize individualism.  He’s saying, in effect, I know perfectly well what the individual human mind is all about, and I don’t like it, I find it suspicious, so I’m working to change the equation.  But by saying “in question” instead, he neutralizes his own argument and legitimizes his quest for knowledge.  He becomes an ordinary, inquisitive man of science trying to find out what makes the human brain tick.  What’s lost is, of all things, the Kafkaesque (“questionable” also carrying a hint of the interrogation room).

  Now, this may very well be nitpicking -- the director certainly thinks so -- it may even be a better choice for the character, if you want to look at it that way.  But it wasn’t my choice and here’s the thing -- I bet you it was no one’s choice.  It was probably just the way Ian Holm happened to say it while the camera was rolling on that day in that take at that moment -- and no one cared or even noticed.  I could be wrong.  I wasn’t there.  It certainly wasn’t malicious; no one says, Let’s fuck up the script.  Maybe there was discussion or debate about it, maybe Ian Holm said, “Would you mind if I said it this way, it feels more comfortable to me” … But I’d be surprised.  The point is, it doesn’t cross anybody’s individual mind for a second that the writer might actually have selected the words he put down on paper with any thought or deliberation whatever -- with the luxury of time and contemplation to do so -- rather than in the midst of film set pressure and chaos.  It goes to show you, it’s not only the massive or truly destructive changes routinely wrought on scripts.  These relatively tiny details can drive you -- well, me -- crazy.  Let go.

  In Steven (Soderbergh)’s interview book with Richard Lester, there’s a story about working on a script with Pinter and how desperately at the last minute he needed to add a comma.

If I’m bothered by miniscule word changes by actors, think of the alternative.  Let’s say you’re talented or lucky enough to come up with dialogue so memorable that it enters the lexicon.  For the rest of recorded time it will be misquoted!  Like “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” (which is not what Peter Finch says in NETWORK).  (Another irony of the screenwriting life:  so many famous lines are supposedly discovered “in the moment” -- by actors! -- and are not necessarily in the script at all.  “I’m walkin’ here!”  “You talkin’ to me?”  “I’ll have what she’s having.”
  
One of the most famous and controversial lines of all, still passionately argued about by cinephiles, is Gene Hackman’s line in NIGHT MOVES about Eric Rohmer movies being “like watching paint dry.”  Well, in the script by Alan Sharp it was Claude Chabrol movies, which makes perfect sense to me, if not to Arthur Penn!)

To call it informative seems an insult.

Thanks for posting. You could write a thesis on each paragraph.

What an amazing amount of knowledge he has about film past and present....inspiring.