Thursday, Jul. 15

It Takes Years to Write a Great Screenplay

You mean you can’t write it in 31 days with the new super-improved 8-sequence method?

Well, I think the thing that people sometimes find surprising about source material, if you will – whether it’s a comic book adaptation, a remake of another film, whether it’s a sequel, these are all things I’ve done before, or an adaptation of a short story – the interesting thing about an original concept is that, particularly with this sort of ten-year gap, it took me from my initial set of ideas and to finishing the screenplay. By the time you get there, you’ve lived with those ideas for so long it really isn’t very different from working from somebody else’s story, for example. As with Memento, when I adapted my brother’s short story, the same thing happens. You take on the story as your own, and because the screenwriting process is a very long one for me, it takes years really to put a script together. By the time you get there at the end, it starts to feel a little bit irrelevant as to where you started. So, the experience has been quite similar in fact.

Christopher Nolan on writing original material.