I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I view filmmaking as a director's medium.
Writing fiction is the 'job' I try to keep at the center of things. The movie stuff has been a wonderful accident, though not entirely bizarre, either, as I have done some work in film before, and even directed a ridiculous, cable-access feature back in my 20s.
I don't necessarily see myself as an experienced filmmaker just because I've been in a few movies.
I first came to cinema as a passionate filmgoer, when I was a child. Then, when I was a very young man, I became a film critic precisely because of my knowledge of cinema. I did better than others because of this. Then I moved on to screenwriting. I wrote a film with Sergio Leone, 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' And then I moved to directing.
I certainly was an actor and then I drifted more towards writing and directing.
Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, film has been a shadow thrown over the minds of all novelists. Ever since, novelists have strained to make themselves more relevant and, whether consciously or not, novel-writing has been influenced by cinematic doctrines - by turns, embracing and defying it.
I always loved movies, but I never thought I would presume to be a screenwriter and definitely not a director.
I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.
I've always been a fiction filmmaker and I've been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.
I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.