P.M. Lipscomb: Well I love his extreme close-ups where he's like on
his eyeball and waking up into like a little nosebleed and the movie is amazing.
Film Courage: When you begin writing a screenplay I understand you start with a number?
P.M.: Oh yeah well generally say you've already have the idea and that at this point for me
I believe in the incubation period some call procrastination which procrastination does
exist but I do believe your mind your psyche if you're focusing on one specific tale
there's a period of time that you're writing a lot of notes down and then eventually I'll do
a paradigm which for me is writing a line across the top of a piece of paper
and then I always choose a random number and the number for clowning was 34
and I put 34 notches at the top of the piece of paper and for me this paradigm is the only
blank sheet of paper I'll ever face and I'll force myself to put a scene a little one sentence
describing that scene telling myself the whole story on that piece of paper and then from there
I will once that paper's filled I'll translate it over to note cards and as I'm translating
every one of those 34 will become 38 to 40 note cards on the wall and then obviously when you
write it'll become to 100 scenes eventually once you're really breaking it down but for me by the
time I get to writing pages I'll have already told myself the story in its entirety three different
times and so it really frees me up to at that point just have fun with it and also improvise
I like the idea of writing and knowing so much about where I'm going that I can just forget all
of it and just be there and sometimes the story will take some lefts or rights but I know where I
want to try to get to in it and for me personally this all developed out of the need to finish
the screenplay and so for me it's as long as I have the paradigm filled out and the note
cards on the wall then I know that the script will be written is that
a fear of yours I know you you're very much about finishing it but does that plague you
the only time I'm ever feeling a kind of fearful notion as when I'm doing the paradigm because I
think there's still the question mark of will this idea fulfill itself will it fully come to fruition
and so it probably saves months and months of heartache where you have
an idea and if you just sit down and start writing and maybe you get 20 pages into it
and then you get sidetracked and you don't know where you're going well you can come back to that
screenplay for months for me maybe three days to a week if I haven't fleshed out that paradigm fully
I'll generally put it into a very specific drawer with other ideas where they'll percolate longer
and so for me it's once the note cards are on the wall I know that's the next script that I'll write
and then it also helped me like this process has now breached me into being a professional
writer and what that means to me isn't necessarily making tons of money or being able to sell scripts
quite at this particular moment but being able to execute a screenplay in a timely manner
and I think you really have to compartmentalize your process to be able to fulfill that need so
if a studio was like you have 30 days some writers really maybe couldn't sit down and
say they could do it in 30 days where that process kind of lets me know like okay it's here and I can
push this faster so let me see if I understand that correctly so 34 is almost like plot points
yes okay yeah so I'll also decide early on if it's going to be 3x or 2x or 4x
and that's based on the character the genre what's happening in it
but the number is just a random I mean I'll even do stuff as far as googling
that number and reading behind it it's never an odd number I'm an even number guy so I never do
odd numbers every script ends in an even page and it ends in an even number of scenes or I delete
a scene are there numbers that you just think are bad luck no okay no no no no I think that numbers
are telling us a lot and I think if you're open to it you can it they're guiding us in particular
ways now this is going into another notion of life but screenwriting is all about numbers right and
and getting into a scene as late as possible out as early as possible what's the point of the scene
how many pages does that seem I don't know I feel like a lot of numbers I mean it all is broken down
so much as numbers right like even when you look at how many lines can fit on one specific page
so you're always kind of locked into that realm early on I heard david lynch say that
he would use note cards and if he got the 56 note cards then he would know that he had
enough to write a screenplay and so then reading lots of screenwriting books over the early decade
of doing it I ended up grabbing little tiny snippets from different people's processes
and so yeah so that's what I end up doing which is interesting though because I hand write everything
so at some point I end up having a lump of note cards in my pocket because I'm too afraid to
leave them at home because there's just too much information there oh so you take them with you
depends on the story depends on the story like the one that's on my wall right now I'm not I'm
much more confident in what it is it fell out so fast so simple but if it's a very complex thing
I might get more nervous and I'm kind of a nervous person though I go back to the oven multiple times
and check to make sure the thing's off a billion times I'll be out the door like one more second
I'll run back inside check everything again unplug every charger yeah or do you have any note cards
on you right now sir do you have note cards on you no I don't have no cards on me but I about my next
one's on the wall so I always take pictures of it so I can zoom in in case something happens too
and so is that because you're afraid of that you won't remember it or something will happen to it
I'm afraid the building's gonna burn down and it's over and I was gonna have to figure it all
out over again okay but then you don't put it on an app or in the cloud never okay no no no
no no no no only only because I like to physically write I do a lot of typing and then editing when
I don't want to necessarily edit the future films but all my past work I've edited
and did all the sound design and mixing and all this different things generally
for most of them so I like to be as physical and not looking at a screen as often as possible so
even I hand wrote 156 page draft a long time ago when I was first learning how to write screenplays
I had this notion of like what if I hand wrote an entire script and so I had all these note cards up
and I would choose a random scene and write it and then at the end when I had it all written I
would put it all back in order and then I typed the whole thing I would never do that again
but I do think every story is asking a different for a different process like there's a script I've
been writing that doesn't want any pre-production and it just is there and exploring and writing
that but generally I like the prepping part of it does it have anything to do with numerology
I've read a lot about numerology I wouldn't say that this necessarily has to do with that
as much as maybe a little OCD but but also there's a part where I feel like
so I've written maybe 20 30 plus screenplays and I feel like every time I sit down to write
there's always a notion of will I get through this one like I don't know there's always this
kind of notion of like sitting down and saying am I going to make it to the end of this thing
and so I love the pre-writing because it kind of already answers that question for me especially if
it's really alive and like I'm telling myself the story and I'm so entertained I lose a couple hours
while just telling myself it but did you see pie oh yeah wait wait Darren Aronofsky's pie yeah yeah
definitely interesting yeah I'm just thinking of just just some brief scenes just I know it's
not the same but well I love his extreme close-ups where he's like on his eyeball and waking up into
like a little nosebleed and the movie is amazing yeah Darren Arnofsky's the best he sure is yeah.