ImRonHoward

Your cable is out, but you're curious about Dark Tower...okay! Good!

I can't really say much about Dark Tower, except there's a lot going on and it's pretty exciting. While schedules and conflicts, etc, made it impossible for me to be the director of this first movie installment, it's looking very likely and fingers crossed, but I really can't say much more about it than that. Stephen King is very excited about the script, I'll say that, and Nikolaj Arcel our director is doing great work on that script and preparing. Do we have an absolute green light? Nope, not quite, but fingers crossed!

Great question! The biggest thing is to never stop writing, and to keep building an outline or something so you're collecting your own intellectual property at all times. Even while you're going out and starting to take meeting. Now, the development game is not what it once was, and even though you have some heat from having something optioned, you want to take advantage of every one of those get-to-know-you meetings that you possibly can, and open up relationships with development executives, because that's so important. Interesting rewrite jobs might come your way--those are great for paying the bills--but more importantly, you're developing relationships with the gatekeepers, the people who can help you get things done. That's really important.

But vital is to not just have one calling card, okay, you got an option, that's great. You want to keep being as productive as you can and collaborating. As this one that's been optioned moves forward, my suggestion would be to stay as nimble and loose about continuing to collaborate and take on collaborators. It's been your baby, but that's not really the way film works. There are two or three key voices that often enter into the evolution of a screenplay, and the collaborators, directors, producers, and studio executives love somebody who can continue to advance by having that creative conversation, taking some notes, building upon the good ones, and being smart about editing out and weeding out the ideas that are not compatible with the screenplay. So, the more you can demonstrate that, the more you just build good will and that creative muscle that most great screenwriters need to have.

The Andy Griffith Show was such an amazing experience and so many lessons, just like the Opie character, there was a lot to learn being around those people.

I think that the number one lesson was probably that trying to achieve a quality entertainment is something that requires incredibly diligent focus, care, and dedication. Andy embodied that. At the same time, you could work hard on the creative problem solving. You could respect the audience and try to achieve a level of quality, but you can also have fun and laugh.

In fact, the creative, collaborative energy could be really intoxicating and thrilling to be around. But it also required this sort of equilibrium between focus, professionalism, and an ongoing sense of play. Because you are engaging in sort of make-believe to try to help achieve the goals of any scene, no matter what the genre.

That's a really good and complicated question, and of course it's a judgement call. It's like anybody writing about those people, of course they’re editorial decisions. Even in a documentary you're editorializing and making judgement calls that reflect something that you the story teller believed was important or significant or interesting.

In the case of a narrative movie, we never call them historical fiction, but of course to make a thing fit the story fit into a couple of hours, you have to make all kinds of decisions, and you also have to create very often scenes that you know didn't exist. But the goal is to create scenes that actually advance people's knowledge and understanding of the “big picture” thematic relevancy of the scene, and what the characters have gone through. So, you do try to reflect aspects of the characters that you believe are true. Peter Morgan, who has done a lot of this writing--he wrote Rush, Frost/Nixon, but he also wrote The Queen--and he's done a tremendous amount of narrative storytelling built around real characters and real events. He didn't invent the quote, but he likes to quote somebody who said, "Sometimes you have to lie to get the truth, so you have to invent in order to convey a significant idea." So, generally those are the sort of guidelines that I try to follow, all the while making sure that I'm putting the movies best foot forward as entertainment and something that is going to engross and deserve to be seen on the big screen.

Pervysage... uh, what do I want for Christmas? Well, you know I'm in that fortunate position that when I need something or really really want something, I have the luxury of being able to go out and get it. So what I really want, as corny as it sounds, is health of family, as much togetherness that we can muster now that everyone is grown with lives, careers, and children and so forth, and I want that holiday to be, you know, that time of the year where you kinda focus less on goals and immediate accomplishments, and just more on that connection. That's the Christmas gift for me.