Write a screenplay

“And that's when a friend of mine showed me a screenplay. But it wasn't any old screenplay. It was The Deerhunter. I had seen the movie twice but now I actually had a real screenplay in my hands. So I decided I would rewrite the screenplay. Not the real screenplay, but I would copy the script to paper by typing the whole story. I would copy a handful of pages every day. Funny thing was that at I began to think I was writing The Deerhunter. Sure, it was out already as a movie. But I felt I was writing it for myself. Sounds weird but I really began to know how a story went. And that was my lesson in screenwriting.”

“I have no idea why I wrote it, I had no experiences of any of that. But I had a job so I settled into a hotel in Toronto and wrote with the producer coming around every day. I finished the first draft and then realized that we had to shoot 3 days away. I went over it on the week-end and handed it to the 1st AD and they began shooting on Monday. From there I was now a real writer. And a first draft. I was lucky.”