There's a strong tendency right now toward formula. Like this is how a screenplay is written: By page 30 this has to happen, your Act Two goes to page 90...That's just horse shit. I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

For example, Scorsese talks not about three acts in a script, but rather five sequences. Or you watch Fellini films -- you watch "Nights of Cabiria" or "La Dolce Vita" or "8 1/2" -- and you get a sense not of a three act structure, but of episodes with on character going through all these episodes. Then you get to the end of the film and there's a sudden realization or a moment that pulls a loose string suddenly taut through the whole movie you've been watching up until that point.

(We need) different mental models of what a film can be, and if you pay too much attention to these books, by Sid Fields and Robert McKee and I don't know who else, they're only presenting one cultural paradigm, and that's really, really dangerous to the act of creation and to our cinema, which needs new ideas and new blood now more than ever. Hollywood films have become a cesspool of formula and it's up to us to try to change it. - Alexander Payne (in an interview as posted at alexanderpayne.net)


And thus, I'm not doing my McKee reading for Wednesday's class. Because Alexander Payne said I shouldn't.


Oh, how I love him. Now, I'm being a bad kid and watching Citizen Ruth instead of (possibly while) doing my work. Bwahahaha!