For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.
I tend to edit some as I go - partly because one of the reasons I don't outline much is that I don't know what the next scene will be until I've actually written the previous scene.
When I'm writing a movie, it's usually pretty close to what the movie is going to be, which is just a luxury of being a writer-director.
In my first film, we always tried to have a script and work in a normal way, but I was constantly changing things during shooting. Because I worked as a scriptwriter for 10 years, I understood that directors always wanted to change what was originally written, to improve on it.
I'd be lying if I said that any part of writing is easy for me, but I have always found that setting comes more naturally to me than, say, writing action scenes.
When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.
It's funny: as a director, there are movies you make because you're passionate about getting your vision across, and you know that you're vision is different than anybody else. In those cases, you take the plunge, and it works, or it doesn't. You make the stylistic choices based on how you feel about the material.
When you direct a movie, you're basically looking at a story, the way you want to look at it. You bring that director's vision, and I'm totally open for that.
Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.
Almost every scene, I re-think as I'm about to start drawing it, and at least half of the time I'm changing dialogue or whatever, or adding scenes or different things.