Nobody reads anymore in America. Reading has become the least effective delivery system for narrative. That's sad because prose is the means by which you can deliver very complicated, nuanced explanations of problems and possible solutions.
Any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn't sound like some news robot but in fact sounds like a real person having the reactions a real person would.
You can only truly wow a player the first time he sees [a cutscene]. I felt if players saw the cutscenes outside of the game, they would no longer serve as rewards for playing the game, so I've decided against having them.
The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.
While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques.
As an actor I can bring the story, the narrative in each performance. If I can't do that, then… might as well give up as an actor, hadn't I?
I don't really see a huge divide between filmmaking and television. In the end, a lot of people are going to be watching this stuff on their laptops and their iPhones anyway. So, it doesn't really matter where it comes from, as long as the stories get told.
My job is to show and tell. If I get better at showing and telling then presumably I get hired more.
Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.
The whole purpose of screenwriting is to convey everything through action and dialogue and not explanation and exposition. To me, there are movies where voiceover works really well because it does something more than exposition; it actually becomes a tonal element of the movie.
If a film has a social message, it is very important for me to know what the message is and how it's going to be delivered, but it's not something I look for all the time.
