"I like theater, but theater is theater and movies are movies. They should be separate. We should talk about sequences - and there are usually at least five or six sequences rather than three acts - which are broken up into sections and scenes"
"Scorsese talks not about three acts in a script, but rather five sequences. You watch Fellini films, like Nights of Cabiria (1957), or La Dolce Vita (1960), or 8 ½ (1963), you get a sense of not a three act structure, but of episodes with one character going through all these episodes, and then you get to the end of the film and there’s a sudden realization or a moment that pulls a loose string suddenly taught through the whole movie you’ve been watching up until that point.
I have different mental models of what a film can be. And if you pay too much attention to those books by Syd Field and Robert McKee, they’re only presenting one cultural paradigm, and that’s really really dangerous to the act of creation and to our cinema, which needs new ideas and new blood now more than ever. Hollywood films have become a cesspool of formula, and it’s up to us to try to change it. I feel personally responsible for the future of the American cinema, but so should you."
I have different mental models of what a film can be. And if you pay too much attention to those books by Syd Field and Robert McKee, they’re only presenting one cultural paradigm, and that’s really really dangerous to the act of creation and to our cinema, which needs new ideas and new blood now more than ever. Hollywood films have become a cesspool of formula, and it’s up to us to try to change it. I feel personally responsible for the future of the American cinema, but so should you."
Dr. Evil: Austin caught me in the first act, that's all backwards, what's with that?
