Way back before the 'Alex Barnaby' series was first published, we were talking with Dark Horse then about making it into a graphic novel of some sort. We just couldn't get it together at the time; we had too many projects going on. We weren't sure how we wanted to bring it forward.
You feel quite strangely secure [doing any kind of series]. It's the opposite of how you're supposed to feel doing a movie.
I'm disappointed in television. I'm disappointed first of all in the audience that will not let stories be told in longer form.
I hadn't thought specifically about doing graphic novels until a couple of my friends got contracts for them. Then I started picturing how various of my stories or poems would work in an illustrated format and thinking how cool that would be.
The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.
The difference between movies and TV is that in TV you have to have a trauma every week, but that event may not be the biggest event in the characters' lives.
The idea was always going to be that each year is a stand-alone story, which did make it easier on some level. It also requires the network to have the creative imagination to say, 'This is also 'Fargo,'' you know what I mean?
When you do 22 episodes of a network show, it's incredibly useful to have a format that gives you a jumping-off point for a story.
I've always been drawn more to film. But 'Bloodline,' to me, feels like a 13-hour piece of cinema. And the great thing about Netflix is you get to be almost like an editor. You choose how much of the narrative you want to watch at a time, which makes you complicit in the story.
TV is obviously so different from film: because it's a never-ending process, it keeps going; you keep receiving new pages.
The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.
I think I'm kind of attracted to the material more than the medium. I'm not opposed to doing a television show, though. I actually think there are a couple of good ones. And there is some terrible theater. Film is a very different kind of acting.
One of the things that takes a bit of getting used to on an American series is having a different director, and often writer, every week.
I think my dream would be to move into film, purely because there's a definite beginning, middle and end to a project. I struggle a bit with such a big series that's going all the time.
There's something inherently more appealing about the idea that you could reveal and tell stories about characters over the course of a TV season - 13 or 26 episodes, whatever it might be - than in the course of one two-hour movie. You can do so many more novelistic kinds of things on a TV show - with time, with gradual development of relationships, and so on - than you could possibly do in a movie. And that is very appealing.
I believe monthly comics and the extended miniseries are the true hallmarks of comic art and storytelling.
I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.
Web is going to become very big... The format is different in terms of its storytelling pattern and its duration. Web audience enjoys watching stuff on the go, they prefer to watch it alone. It is isolated viewing while cinema is collective viewing.
A picture story just doesn't run like a film. It doesn't have 24 frames per second. It doesn't deal with this illusion of movement.
The difference between film and TV, for me, is just that huge thing of knowing that there's a script that is not going to change and you can go really deep into that. With TV, you're just constantly on a high-wire, making sure you don't fall.
I think that the best television now is giving you a three-act experience.
Crime is one of the leads of the show. If there's ever anything that deals with a character's personal life, you don't have to worry about it getting too crazy. People don't have to worry about character arcs. Each episode is a self-contained unit.
I think that that is a wonderful format - you know, having individual stories over a period of weeks that are thematically connected in terms of genre - there's not enough of that out there.
Readers and viewers will differ about what's totally standalone, what's totally serially dependent, and what's merely enriched by reading/viewing in a particular order.
I think when you're writing prose there's a lot of attendant description and that's were I used to really go bananas. With a screenplay that all gets filled in by the director, so it just sort of pulls you back by virtue of the form. You also have to use more economy as a screenwriter and so it's kind of limiting in a good way.
