One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.
I think my love is storytelling. No matter what it is, it's storytelling. And so whatever the medium is, what's right for the story, I enjoy doing it.
Maybe they'll start making serialized movies. I watched the first couple seasons of '24' and it's really fun. I bought the DVD and watched it over a month or so and it's great. It's like reading a novel. It has a lot of possibilities that are more difficult to accomplish with a film.
Every camera shoots horizontal, right? So we're all super used to framing things with lots of horizontal room. We've seen this new wave of Snapchat stories and Instagram stories where people are actually framing for and recording in vertical. Whether it's better or not is debatable.
I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books.
Some of the most important stories don't lend themselves to television treatment.
Remember: TV is a format, film is a format, and books are a format.
The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away. The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others. The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.) Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
A movie is a movie and a book is a book, and they have different rules.
I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.
I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.
I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.
We're in the age of the series, trilogy, boxed sets.
It's not an accident that, while bookstores are all in a tizzy, one of the more lively and alive sections is the so-called "graphic novel" section, because those are harder to replace.
After making a movie, maybe you weren't able to shoot many of your ideas, because a movie is only 1 1/2 or two hours long, but TV gives you space to film a lot of things.
I have an affection for tangible objects, like books and pages, but people sure do seem to love their Kindles! We're definitely in the middle of a revolution that will determine how people find, read, and experience stories.
There's a different experience when you're reading a book rather than when you're seeing something on screen. When you're seeing a movie or TV show, it's a three-dimensional experience you're in the middle of, but when you're reading something, you're suppling the reality with your imagination.
I'll tell you what I miss most. What I would love to do, more than anything, is just anthologies. With an anthology you can tell any story and be in every division of television. We don't have any anthologies anymore, do we?
In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
I certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.
There are so many ways to tell a story. With multiplatform books, we are reimagining what literacy can be.
The one problem with the Internet for journalists who like doing long form is that any story that's going to involve 16 screens on the web page... that's asking a lot of people.
The chance to tell personal, language-specific, culturally specific stories is really flourishing on TV and I think it's just the nature of movies and international demands that you need to get a much bigger audience. TV is more like independent film was. The forms of adult drama and certain kinds of sophisticated comedy, there's no room for them in the tentpole movie universe.
A book is maybe about 350 pages, and the prose allows for readers to get a glimpse into the internal lives of the characters. A screenplay is 120 pages, and it's all dialogue and action. The pacing of films is different, the structure is often different, and the internal lives of the characters must come across through the acting. Movies are just a different experience than reading - so it just depends on what an individual prefers.
I want to figure out what comes after cinema as the gold standard for storytelling.
