'Glass Sword' has several set piece scenes that I plotted out or visualized before I wrote them, but I always knew they were coming. They anchor bits of the story.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
So on my screenplay, on the left-hand side of the page, I will put all the ideas that refer to the scene next to it so I have some sort of pictorial reference.
I've done movies with a sword before. But I haven't really been given the full responsibility of something like a Ridley Scott film.
I don't get over the wonder of it, and 'The Last Samurai' was an extreme example of that. Every day when I went to the set, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time.
I've been obsessed with this kind of visual storytelling for quite a while, and I try to create material that allows me to explore it.
I jump around in the plotting stage, where I basically just make a bulleted list of every damn thing that happens in the entire book.
Having spent a lot of time on sets, I was really interested in the overall storytelling aspect of shows and projects.
There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but that's much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.
Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.
Any film I've made, I've only really begun to understand in the cutting room. That's when the story shows itself to you, like a wreck coming out of the sea.