Making a film is hard because you're not dealing with the intangible. When you're writing, it's perfect because it's only in your head and then you have to take it into the physical world and that's where things drop off and things fall apart and you have to fix them.
Interpretation
Creating a film is challenging because it transforms an idealized vision into a tangible reality, often leading to complications.
Steven Knight’s quote highlights the inherent difficulty in filmmaking, which contrasts the pure creative process of writing. While a script exists flawlessly in the writer's imagination, the transition to physical production exposes the project to practical challenges and imperfections, necessitating problem-solving and adaptation.
In practice
This quote could be used at a film school seminar to emphasize the complexities of bringing a screenplay to life.
I often find in the film world, that it's very self-referring. If you talk to someone about films, they talk about them in terms of other films - rather than as something that happened to them in their life. And I'm really keen to get back to film as a reference to real things, not necessarily to other films.
The whole process of filmmaking can be chaotic, but if you can have an enthusiastic cast, you're pretty much there.
I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.
I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.
Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run. I like to make people stop and say, 'I've never seen anyone run like that before.' It's more than just a race, it's a style. It's doing something better than anyone else. It's being creative.
For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling.
Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
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