With 'True Grit,' the language was very specific, as is Shakespeare. You couldn't really improvise, nor would you really ever have to. I never felt the need to. It was all so beautifully written, and it was all right there.
When you're doing a concept album, it's easy. It's like a movie: you already know what you're dealing with.
The wonderful thing about film is that you have something that has a beginning, middle, and end, and you have a concrete amount of time to shoot it.
Films that rely on their cast to be funny are often episodic and feel like a series of loosely connected sketches rather than a satisfyingly structured script.
Linear narrative is an artfully-directed telling of a story, where the lighting and the sound is all for a very clear purpose. You're not just wandering around in the world.
You don't improvise with a Cameron Crowe script.
Scripts can be slick and structured, but do they always contain the truth?
I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure - the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play - and inelegant emotion.
In 'Silence,' there was no improvisation at all; really, you're dealing with a script and a 17th century way of speaking.
I like the boundaries, the kinds of conventions of a documentary and having to work within that.
