Hmmm....I guess Terrance Mallick's stuff stands out...but not if you look at structure as, on a basic level, "descent, initiation and return." I saw Bad Lieutenant - the Harvey Keitel one - in the theatre when I was a teenager and I haven't seen it again but from what I remember it was decidedly unpredictable, as if the goal wasn't as much telling you a story as it was to put you in the shoes of a life that had lost all structure to drugs. I felt kind of delightfully displaced by The Dark Knight ...when it got to the scene where the Joker [SPOILERS] is in the interrogation room, something started to happen where the movie felt like it was well past what "should have" been a Batman movie but ...[Read more]

I don't have any real alterations I'd make, like "oh, I put the threshold in the wrong place," but I do have a much simpler view of the circular story model, based on years of breaking well over a hundred stories with it...little tricks that make viewing a story even easier and I guess a little less out-and-out hero's journeyish in favor of something more fundamentally geometrical. I'm hoping to share these discoveries in some part of the book I'm writing for Doubleday, in the chapter between the shit from my childhood nobody cares about and the Chevy Chase stuff I forced everyone to care about.

With a screenplay you’re creating a world; consider everything, every character, every room, every juxtaposition, every increment of time as an embodiment of that world. Look at all of this through that filter and make sure it is all consistent. As in a painting, every element is part of one whole composition, just as there is nothing separate in the actual world there should be nothing separate in the world you create.

Well, I know how you DON'T tell a story saying the ending part first, because that's what my mother does all the time, and that's what people sometimes do in the audience, where they'll yell out "DO the joke where the thing at the end happens?!" You know how they always say a story has to have a beginning, middle and an end? Well, I find that if you have a beginning and an end, you don't really need a middle. Why waste time with a middle? Who ever goes "You know what part of the movie I liked? The middle.. That long part between the beginning and the end." That is no one's favorite part. Although I worked on the Middle and it was a fine show. ...And just because the other person is silent...[Read more]