I try and direct environmentally, so that people don’t feel like everything is going to depend on what happens when someone says, ‘action,’ so that they can literally be swimming in the warm water, and at some point the race begins, and at some point the race ends, but it is about being free to swim.
Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.
Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened – but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies.
I don’t think people are ever going to a place where they’re like, ‘I’m over stories about character and love.’
I mean, Internet radio, which is basically a guy with his iTunes putting it over the computer, is the only way you’re going to get true eclectic music programmed.
It’s more like can I build a group of characters and can I tell some universal truths that feel real and aren’t formulaic in the spirit of filmmakers gone by who’ve told American stories that were personal and universal as well.
‘Elizabethtown’ was a movie made for all the right reasons, and people who connect with the movie really connect to it. It’s not the biggest group of people ever, but I still really believe in ‘Elizabethtown.’ It wasn’t, like, a savage blow.
I always loved movies, but I never thought I would presume to be a screenwriter and definitely not a director.
In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody’s got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about.
And I liked that whole idea that energy comes from not disseminating your ideas and talking about them.