"The action of a scene must accomplish at least one of three goals:
1. Advance the flow of events (the plot) toward its inevitable conclusion (climax and
resolution);
2.Advance the audience's understading of the main characters by illuminating them through
their behavior;
3.Advance the audience's understanding of the overall story by providing expository
information.
Scenes are stronger when they utilize a combination of the first two goals... Adding
conflict or physical movement to an expository scene strengthens it. Combining exposition
with either of the first two goals makes it stronger still.
When the scene is properly conceived, all three scene goals relate to a film's plot directly
or indirectly.
To start it? Well, since we started writing
we don't do an exhaustive outline--
--or any outline. The rule is, we type
scene A without knowing what scene B is going
to be-- or for that matter, we type scene R
without knowing what scene S is going to be.
What happens with us is mostly that we tend
to write fast at the beginning, then get very slow, then
we speed up once we really have to confront the structure.
And also, because we're doing our own thing,
we can get stuck and literally grind to a halt and put it
aside for a year even.
Bill, you once said you were in a spot where you didn't know
what was going to happen next.
Well, that's what we do. We write ourselves into a corner
purposely--
Because we think if we can go into a corner where there's
no way out, and then we take a week or a few days or a month even,
and find a reasonable way out without making it absurd, then
nobody in the audience is going to sit there and get it within
a minute and get ahead of us.
We just drive. You know, it frees everything up. We just
get in the car and drive. I drove across the country fifteen
times but together we've only done it five times.