The writer must be a participant in the scene... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The writer creates the role on the page and then the actor takes it and makes it their own.
When a director is also a writer, everyone on the production looks to him, knowing he gave birth to the idea. There's a different level of viability.
My theory is that everything an actor does, from the way he looks at his watch to the way he moves across the stage, is in the service of advancing a story, and in that sense, it's all writing. In that sense we, while acting, write.
With a novel, you're the director and the screenwriter and everything else, except that you have to write it knowing it will all be performed inside the head of the reader. So it's a difficult and lonely task.
In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.
Writers - all writers, even screenwriters - like to make their mark. I don't think many screenwriters can write. They pass as writers.
The filmmaking process is a team effort. A screenwriter cannot possibly do exactly what he wants as if he was writing a novel.
Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
An actor's job is about putting across the author's intention; I don't think of myself on the same level as a creator.
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.