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In the screenplay there are both fictional characters based on composites of people I've read about and known and characters based on actual historical figures who were involved in the Matewan Massacre. Mixing the historical and the fictional is something that has been done numerous times, but it's…

The first step in making Joe's pacifism acceptable, maybe even attractive, was to make him seem a familiar rather than exotic character. So I made him a Wobbly. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was a very home-grown, American, populist, working-stiff kind of organization. It had little of …

When thinking in pictures it's important to consider whether a certain image will have the same meaning to someone else as it does to you. No matter what your experience of the Vietnam War, Platoon is a rugged movie to enter into, a meaningful assault on the senses. But the images in it are bound t…

I eventually got to make movies through writing. I had to get a literary agent to sell my second novel, and his literary agency had a connection with a Hollywood talent agency that handled books as potential film "properties." I contacted that agency, wrote a screenplay to show them what I could do…

I "started" as a fiction writer, publishing some short stories and a novel called Pride of the Bimbos in 1975. The novel was originally a movie in my head. I started with a couple scenes that I saw dramatically, saw the setting, imagined a certain graininess to the image, heard a country Western so…