Highlights - JIM SHEPARD - Novelist & Screenwriter of The World to Come starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, Katherine Waterston
Film & TV, The Creative Process: Acting, Directing, Writing, Cinematography, Producers, Composers, Costume Design, Talk Art & Creativity - A podcast by Acting, Directing, Writing, Cinematography Producing Conversations: Creative Process Original Series
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"It's a thrill to work with actors you admire. And I got to work with Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston and their wonderful actors. The whole business of film runs on compliments because then if you compliment people, you don't have to pay them. And so I got to be on the set in the Carpathians when they were filming, and I got a steady diet of, 'Oh my God, you're such a good writer. This is such a good screenplay!' And I was just basking in it. As a fiction writer, you don't get that very often. So, I was just happy to have a little narcissistic warm bath and float around in that for a while and imagine myself as Casey Affleck's favorite writer, which I think I was for 30 minutes or something like that. Cinema is not very good at interiority. Cinema is good at behavior, at action, at allowing us to figure out through exterior signals what's going on...is very appealing to me. So as soon as you tell me that this was the biggest tsunami ever, I'm like, I want to know more about that. And that kind of childlike wonder about the visual is often what drives me to sit down and do a story in the first place. So I start with a much more visual and a much more spectacular, and I'm sure cinema drove me in that direction in the first place."