Sometimes making a story is as easy as putting two characters in a room and seeing what happens. So, imagine a great white shark and a giant squid in the same bathroom.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.
To this day, I have people I might meet who will make assumptions about my life based on fictional elements of 'The Squid And The Whale.' But I think that's par for the course if you make something that feels kind of real.
A story is built on characters and reasons.
But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors.
You set up a story and it turns inside out and that is, for me, the most exciting sort of story to write. The viewer thinks it's going to be about something and it does the opposite.
I've always been interested in this idea of looking at these monster stories and trying to really understand the mechanics underneath. That's very much true of this movie I made, 'All Good Things,' as well as 'Catfish,' which I produced.
Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail.
Although my stories are all very different on the surface, I like to write stories about characters struggling with big problems. I'm always reminded, no matter how different from me one of my characters is from me on the surface, how we're all pretty much the same underneath.
It's harder to write a story with just two people in a room than with 50 characters.
In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.