I read a lot of script. In my opinion, most of them aren't good or aren't about people.
I go straight into shooting with a script that's 80 per cent complete and I wait for my characters to grow on me before I finalise the climax.
I always like being a director in terms of giving acting notes and punching up on the fly.
I was editing for Kunal Kapoor when I got my first film 'Jaan Tere Naam' as lead actor.
I have less to do with 'The Simpsons' every season, but I stick my nose in here and there. Basically, it's just trying to keep the characters consistent and making sure the show has a soul.
I don't know if I'm always going to be acting. Maybe when I grow up, I will be a scriptwriter. I already have a few scripts in my head.
'Underworld' was my first filmed book. I think there are about seven of my lines in it.
Sometimes I work in my office, just reading material, meeting writers, working on scripts. Other times, I'm on location. There's a lot of variety.
Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately.
Unfortunately my career began in Hollywood, doing a negative pickup for Universal pictures.
Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved.
I'd love to work on a script in collaboration.
You're torn between wanting to fill in all the spaces and knowing that's really going to screw up the screenplay. And yet, how are you going to communicate it to people who really don't understand the process?
Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.
It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.
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.
What has always been at the heart of film making was the value of a script. It was really the writer who could make or break a film. But as we all know, the writer has always been at the bottom of the creative heap.
A good script is like a work of art in itself. I've read hundreds of scripts, and good ones are very rare. If the writer has something to say, and a voice, and a plot that matches character, and an emotional trajectory that works, then I'd be an idiot to fool around with it. It's just that few scripts ever are like that.
I can't imagine directing from someone else's script.
If my film fails, I never think it was because the script was weak.
Unfortunately scripts don't chase me. I chase them. I struggle, battle, discard, pick it back, struggle further, plead with it, curse it, cajole and try to be clever. But it is invariably the script that rules.
When I write a script, I have all the old versions of the script on my laptop. They're saved as backups in case something goes horribly wrong.
You have to write a lot of scripts to get any scripts that are worth making.
I won't rewrite on set, but I'll just trim the fat.
Normally with film, it's normal for the screenwriter to never be seen again after finishing until the premiere.
