But the longer I'm in the business, you see a lot of times these screenplays have been rewritten 5 times and you're not really offending an author.
You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.
I think it's a bad habit for an actor to change scripts because that's not your job. You're not a writer, necessarily - although there are some actors that are good at it.
So much of what you see now in Hollywood is written and directed by committee, and you can see it.
Capra always wanted a screenwriter with him, even on the soundstage. The writer had to be there at his side.
I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.
When you see two writers named on a movie, one of them did some drafts and got the boot.
I've had various experiences where I've been called by Hollywood studios to look at a script or comment on various scientific ideas that they're trying to inject into a story.
You can't fix a bad script after you start shooting. The problems on the page only get bigger as they move to the big screen.
When I was in New York, a lot of my friends were studying filmmaking and would bring their scripts to me, as I was a good script doctor. I would read their scripts and make corrections to them for $20 per script and was fascinated by films.
When I finally finished writing 'Sisters,' I started getting hired for lots of rewrites.
I did three or four weeks of work on 'Godzilla;' it wasn't a page-one rewrite or anything like that. The term is 'script doctoring,' is what I did on it.
In TV, I did scripts that were not well-written, and I learned how to make bad material okay. That's a hard thing to do; you can learn bad habits, but you can also learn to find something in anything.
The Indian film industry does not believe in investing financial resources in scripts.
