People talk about improvisation as if I say, ‘Everybody does what they want,’ and I take a camera and a movie comes out. It doesn’t work that way. Anybody who knows anything about film knows that’s crazy. Unless you’re shooting a war maybe, and even there you have to look for action. There are no accidents in this sense of the specific. A camera breaking down, a location not available, me being broke – those are accidents! You stay up all night long and worry a film to death. To make the assumption that things just happen like that is amazing to me. It doesn’t happen that way with actors.

After Shadows I realized that things work better when they’re written down beforehand. There are fewer problems. Once the script is written, people can act more freely. Otherwise there’s too much tension. It’s too hard to deal with. What happens is that the audience gets the impression of improvisation because the actors interpret their roles themselves.