Thursday, February 21, 2008

No writer's intentions allowed

My head is fuzzy. But I am attempting to blog a bit and clear out some of my many Mozilla Firefox tabs. I loved this little bit from Paul Thomas Anderson about "There Will Be Blood":

Once on the film's Marfa, Texas, set, Anderson continued to whittle at and refine the screenplay with a dedication befitting his own monomaniacal protagonist, taking particular care to remove anything that risked overstating the movie's themes. He describes one offending scene, between Plainview and the mysterious drifter (played by Kevin J. O'Connor) who claims to be his half brother, in which one of Plainview's lines echoed Eli Sunday in an earlier scene. "That's not something I wrote with any kind of writerly intention — to parallel these two guys," Anderson says. "I didn't even notice it was there until somebody on the set said, 'That's an interesting moment.' And my alarm bell went off: Don't do that! No writer's intentions allowed! When you're working on something, there's always a danger of screwing the screws in so fucking tight that it's not breathing any longer."

(from LA Weekly)

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