To frame an issue is to reduce it to a story for which there is only one possible outcome
Sometimes I regret that the wonderful children's stories that have been made into movies were - people no longer read 'The Wizard of Oz'; they think they know the story. They don't know anything about all the bits and pieces they had to leave out.
I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.
But the biggest challenge overall was narrowing down the complex narrative elements into a clean and straightforward story while maintaining a sense of the cultural context that makes the film special.
Films have become shorter in length, jumpier in style, and simpler in story so that they can be more easily transferred to once under-exploited international markets.
In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.
When I write Superboy and other DC characters, it's about boiling them down to core concepts.
Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line.
'Richard III' is a really difficult play to film - it's involved, often obscure. I felt it absolutely necessary to do more simplification than I've ever done before.
So it was doing all this research or going to the archives or doing all these interviews or traveling, and then trying as much as I can to delete all of that research in a later draft so that all the reader cares about is the characters.
When you adapt a book, you really have to cut it to the essence.
Having the Stitch character, the villain that becomes a hero, coming from outer space, it took a very difficult and complex story and put it into a simpler, kinder time.
I've been wanting for some time to find a way of stylizing cinema and trying to get closer to the emotional story I was telling and get rid of all the bumph that goes with it and allow the audience a more participatory experience. It was an attempt to do all of those things and to express the idea that all these people were just performing roles in their lives.
You know, when people talk about filmmaking and the techniques of filmmaking, we use them all the time in network television news in order to make our stories simpler, tighter and more understandable to the general public.
