You have an hour and a half or two hours - maybe two and a half hours - in a movie, and it has to be a self-contained three-act structure. It's like a rock and roll song. Certain things have to happen for it to be a toe-tapper and get people excited, leaving the theater.
In a science fiction movie, the first act is a little longer than it is in most movies because there is so much world building to do.
What you don't want is for violence and gore to become more important than character and structure. A lot of slasher movies from the eighties were only focused on violence and gore, which robs the human beings in the story of any empathetic reaction from the audience, and instead makes them cheer for the gore.
Also, if you watch the film once, there are lots of things that you won't get because there are punch lines in the first act, the setup to which isn't until the second act.
TV is like a school. It is easy to shoot for a film. In movies, you have a definite start and end. You know your character is there for a particular period.
A fragmented film such as 'Babel' gives the impression of 'edginess' but, in its form, tells us nothing we didn't already know.
When I storyboard, they're just fragments of thoughts. I write in three acts like a movie, so I have my plot points up on the preliminary storyboard.
What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over.
Films must all have the same structure. All of this to guarantee box office bonanza, which of course it never does, but that's another discussion entirely.
I go to movies expecting to have a whole experience. If I want a movie that doesn't end, I'll go to a French movie. That's a betrayal of trust to me. A movie has to be complete within itself; it can't just build off the first one or play variations.
Certainly, 3rd acts of any movie are hard. It's always hard to have something that will give you the promises from the beginning of the movie. That's true for all movies.
The downside of doing a multi-protagonist movie is that you don't get to service each character as you would if they were the central protagonist of the movie.
In a great horror movie, you've gotta have some character development and you've gotta set some of your people up and you've gotta have a little back story going. You've gotta take that time for exposition.
But at a certain point you've gotta be ruthless with the movie because you can have these great scenes, but they aren't specifically building the story that needs to be built at that moment.
The interesting thing about movies, it's not always - y'know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.
I think everyone loves 'The Departed.' That was a movie that had a lot of problems structurally. And we had to battle with it. Fight. Experiment. Try different things. And I think finally we hit it.
Audiences have grown to equate being startled with being scared, and will complain that a movie 'isn't scary enough' if it doesn't have enough jump scares... so that means that a lot of studios will insist on shoving jump scares into a movie, regardless of character or story structure, thinking it 'makes it scarier.'
You can't, no matter what anyone says, build a movie around someone.
Usually, you just have a hero and a villain - in any movie, not just a superhero movie.
I love the finality of film. When you make a movie, you know the beginning, middle, and end.
The first time you watch a movie that you like, all of the magic works on you. It's an experience of having a world unfold in front of you. But if you watch it again, you start to see where the seams are.
For me, certain shots or scenes are keys in the movie.
Suffice to say that the theme (the WHAT of the movie) is going to determine the style (the HOW of the movie).
For shows that are hyper-serialized, it just seems to make more sense to follow a feature film model than follow a television model, which was set up more for a procedural type of show.
What made 'Ice Age' work is that it had its shiny candy coatings, but inside was a soft, creamy center.
