Has your time as president of the Academy changed your opinion on the role of the writer in Hollywood?
No, it hasn't changed my view of the role. You know, Bob Towne once said, very famously, that the reason everyone hates the writer is because nobody can go to work until the writer is done. Everybody's always waiting.
Writers have always been in a position of being rewritten. The difficulty is that too many directors find themselves competing with the writer rather than looking for the truth or the sense of feeling or the dramatic value in whatever the writer has done and trying to express that the best way that they can. Those directors are in short supply. I suppose that's what happened mostly over the years, because of the shifts in the way that movies get made, more and more of us have tried to become directors and direct our own material, so I think the rise of the writer-director is bigger, proportionately, then it was in the past.
No, it hasn't changed my view of the role. You know, Bob Towne once said, very famously, that the reason everyone hates the writer is because nobody can go to work until the writer is done. Everybody's always waiting.
Writers have always been in a position of being rewritten. The difficulty is that too many directors find themselves competing with the writer rather than looking for the truth or the sense of feeling or the dramatic value in whatever the writer has done and trying to express that the best way that they can. Those directors are in short supply. I suppose that's what happened mostly over the years, because of the shifts in the way that movies get made, more and more of us have tried to become directors and direct our own material, so I think the rise of the writer-director is bigger, proportionately, then it was in the past.
Full interview:
The Masters: Frank Pierson
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