I'm usually trying to react to what the actors are coming up with. And then the environment, and then the story.
My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!
With television, sometimes the writing is continuous and happening at every moment, and you'll get new pages at the last moment. We have to incorporate that into what it is that we're doing.
I plan years in advance, but I like to leave enough space in the narrative scheme to change things, because I always get my best ideas the closer I come to the end of a project, after I've lived with it for a while.
Gareth [Edwards] was very open to just shaping the performances and the scenes to fit what was happening with the actors and the storytelling that was emerging.
Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.
I guess my approach to adapting books is to treat them with a deep respect on one level and at another level part them to one side and go, 'I'm doing something completely different here.'
I love Sherlock Holmes. There's still an awful lot to steal from Conan Doyle. But within a tradition you can work in many different ways.
When you make a documentary, you have to adapt to what reality imposes upon you.
There are times when a film turns out differently from how it was narrated. But I don't look at it as a bad thing.
'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience.
The story is supposed to change; it's supposed to evolve. In making 'Cartel Land,' I ended up with a much, much different story than I started with.
With a movie, the die is cast. It is what it is. With TV, it's a living organism in a way. Fans can have input, with the whole social media thing, and they can track what fans are liking and not liking.
