In the case of 'Ice,' in the beginning when I got the script, felt like a show that was searching for what it is, and what they knew or what felt palpable to me was that this character, Freddy Green, was going to have the biggest journey.
With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.
When it is going well, it is the best job [writing] in the world. For those few hours, you are god, in control of everything. However, for me, the great joy of writing is that it has allowed me to travel the world in search of stories.
I'm looking for human stories to do.
The soles of the best writers, a professor once told me, are worn down to holes. This is an incomplete measure, but the image of a writer grinding his or her shoes against curbs and cobblestones stuck with me. The story is always out there, the details around the corner or down the alley.
As a documentary filmmaker, 'Meru' was an irresistible challenge. You can spend years searching for the right story, but this one had all the elements: the obstacles, the characters, and the drama.
I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
I spent 12 years doing different things in film trying to figure out the story I wanted to tell.
I don't have a grand strategy for my career. I just look for good material, and good stories. I look for good scripts.
I'm working on a few different films and I'm just searching for the right new story to tell. As a director, you just have to kind of like just get through the first project before starting on the next one.