I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.
My writing has a lot of surprising twists.
You set up a story and it turns inside out and that is, for me, the most exciting sort of story to write. The viewer thinks it's going to be about something and it does the opposite.
With 'Badlapur', I wasn't even thinking about casting. I was wondering whether any producer will want to make a film with a story like this. It is not your expected, feel-good, or even your regular thriller.
When I go to the cinema, I'm often frustrated because I can guess exactly what is going to happen about ten minutes into the screening. So, when I'm working on a subject, I'm always looking for the element of surprise.
Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.
The key is to constantly keep the audience surprised. If they feel like something is going to happen, or they think from an educational standpoint that something is about to happen because of all the moving parts, it is your job to break that expectation and show the audience something different.
I never work from an outline, and often I don't know how the story will end.
I like to take certain aspects of genre fiction and modify them in my own way. 'Your Republic Is Calling You' follows the form of a spy novel, but it leads readers into a world of Kafkaesque irrationality.
Filmmaking is not a balancing act, although some directors think it is. I don't believe in it. I like ups and downs. They're the best way to translate my feelings to the screen.
I love the Coen brothers. They're so brilliant, and they always surprise you in one way or another. 'A Serious Man' was awesome. I like stuff like that, that kind of throws you for a loop. It takes you on a journey that is unexpected.
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.
If you like a story that's totally different and won't know which way it's going... where it's go ing to end up and which way it's going to take you, then I think my work fits the bill.
The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.
A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.
One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
Episodic TV is notoriously brutal because just when you think 'I've got this, I know this character' you can pick up the script for series four and you die in the first episode - or your character suddenly transitions from a woman to a man.
The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it . . . a wild book.
I don't want to make a perfect film because perfect films are boring and cold.
Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don't see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that's a great thing to build upon.
What I like about 'Taboo' just in general, even in writing it, you are not certain what the motives are sometimes because these characters are so odd that you let them speak for themselves and you're never quite sure where it's headed.
'American Honey' takes you into the feelings of a girl travelling through the United States while giddily in love. You see modern America through her intense feelings. But again and again the film pulls the rug out from under your feet - scenes never play out as you expect.
One week, you can have a real heavy romance 'Chuck' episode, and the next week it can be some kind of murdery mystery. It's not like doing a procedural.
For film and theater, you know how the story starts; you know how the story ends. With TV, you don't. It's literally like living real life in character.
