You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.
I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he'd never seen 'The Big Lebowski.' Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.
No director wants to be directed, but no good director... would shy away from the good ideas of others.
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
If a director is really a director, I think he's interested in more than one thing.
There are two men in Tolstoy. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion.
I am definitely writing letters to lots of directors in my mind when I'm making a film. I'm chasing Woody Allen and Godard and Milos Forman and all these people.
I'm never going to be Tolstoy.
I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.