Download scripts of award contenders:

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Our culture is marketing, this is what we do, and what is marketing? Trying to get people to do what you want them to. It’s what drives our consumer culture, it’s what drives our politics, it’s what drives our art. Music, movies, books, fine arts, it’s part of every research grant proposal. I don’t want to participate. I don’t want to tell you how to sell a screenplay or tell you how to write a hit, or tell you how to fit into the existing system. I want to tell you that I have a hope that there’s another way to be in this world, and that I believe with courage, vulnerability and honesty that the stuff we put into the world can serve a better purpose.

The way movies work now, and I’m talking about mainstream industry, the only goal is to get you to buy a product. The only goal. THE only goal. The ONLY goal. THE ONLY GOAL. And this intention creates the movies that we sit through, and the movies that we sit through create us. In government we’ve been reduced to the same game, through trickery, obfuscation, bullying, fear mongering. The goal of marketing a candidate is achieved. I don’t understand many things, I don’t know as much as I’d like about anything, but I’m a human being and I won’t be in competition for the right to be treated decently.

I won’t play that game. Nor should anybody have to. And in turn I will try not to use whatever access I have to the public sphere to sell things, including myself. The world is very scary now. It always has been. But something grotesque and specific to our time is blanketing us. We need to see that it is not reality, it is a choice we are making or allowing other people to make for us.

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"Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope. It’s done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it. It has profound importance in my life. Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world. Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do. Try not to."

"Well, I don’t have to tell you that we weren’t trying to write a screenplay that was perfectly-structured. We were just trying to make it make sense. I remember, even without Roman, the first structural question, which may seem absurd now after the fact, was the question of which revelation comes first, the incest or the water scandal? And of course, it was the water scandal. When I realized that, I realized how foolish it was even to have asked the question. But the water scandal was the plot, essentially, and the subplot was the incest. That was the underbelly, and the two were intimately connected, literally and metaphorically: raping the future and raping the land. So it was a really good plot/subplot with a really strong connection. In the first draft, as I recall, it was pretty much a single point-of-view. And in the second draft I tried changing that for purposes of clarification and I think in the end, that’s what made the second draft weaker than the first draft. It’s one of the very, very few detective movies, including The Maltese Falcon, which has a singular point-of-view."

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After I finish every film, I look at what I might do next. I would get the draft of Inception out and would read it, again. I would show it to Emma [Emma Thomas] and sometimes show you [Jonathan Nolan] to get more thoughts on it. But I never knew quite how to finish it until I realized that the antagonist of the film should be the guy’s wife.

It completely unlocked the end of the film. It completely unlocked how you could make something that a wider audience might care about. Because to me, whenever you deal in the world of esoteric or overly complex science fiction, or heist movies, or film noir, you’re working for a smaller audience. If you’re going to do a massive movie, though, you’ve got to be able to unlock that more universal experience for yourself as well as for the audience. That’s what it took for me. As soon as I realized that Mal would be his wife, it became completely relatable.

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"I presume that Herb means that inherently you cannot be commercial and artistic. You cannot be commercial and quality. You cannot be commercial concurrent with having a preoccupation with a level of storytelling you want to achieve, and this I have to reject. I don’t think calling something ‘commercial’ tags it with an odious suggestion that it stinks…I could’ve done probably 30 or 40 film series, I presume that I’ve turned down at least that many, with great guarantees of cash..of financial security, but I turned them down because I didn’t like them. I didn’t think they were quality, and God knows they were commercial."