The cool thing about comic books and prose is that if a reader gets confused on page 8, they can backtrack. With films, you sit down in a seat and once the projector starts going you're stuck for the next two hours. There are no do-overs, rewinding or starting again.
While I was writing 'Elizabeth Is Missing' and struggling with the intricacies of the plot, I told myself the next book would be really simple and linear, and I'd have it all worked out before I set down a single word.
You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.
TV is the only thing that's really alive, because it's happening as you go. You don't know the end, so another day brings a new life to it. Unlike a play, unlike a movie, where you know the beginning, middle, and end.
Film and television are so piecemeal. You do one scene, and then you put it to bed, and then you do a scene that comes before. In a play, you have to go from beginning to end every night, and that's harder, but also more fulfilling in a way.
The challenge to me as a director was for the audience to see the film as going on in a straight line, so that they did not sense all of these break-ups. I did not want a film to be a collage of all these images.
You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.
I try to write every day until the book is done, but the exact process depends on the story and its structure. Sometimes, if the story is more linear, I write it from beginning to end.
All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script and it's very linear.
I like to start with the first chapter, end with chapter 40. No flashbacks, nothing fancy, just a direct storytelling.
It is very linear storytelling, and I think that's not so much the fashion. I was watching a new drama the other night which was extremely non-linear, where you flash back and flash forward in ways that certainly keeps you on your toes as the audience. There's not much of that courage with the storytelling in our Maigret film.
I've always been a little more narrative, a little more linear, a little more direct. People instantly want to classify that as something retro. It's just a way of writing songs.
