Customer Reviews

Conversations with Screenwriters

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This is a collection of interviews with famous screenwriters, such as David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, Callie Khouri, Horton Foote, Anthony Minghella, etc. If you want to really feel as though you, yourself, have had a wonderful conversation with these infamous screenwriters, this is the book for you. Ms. Bullington Katz has an extraordinary talent for asking just the right questions and truly listening to the answers, and I have never read such compelling, engrossing interviews in any book before. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves books, writing, movies, tv, and/or just reading a terrifically well written book! I can't wait until she has another book coming out!

OK, I'm prejudiced. I read many of these interviews in the versions that were published in the Writers Guild of America's magazine and thought they were terrific. I called up my editor at Heinemann and told her that she should get in touch with Susan Katz and collect them into a book. My editor (who is obviously quite smart) did and it makes a swell book indeed. Katz is a screenwriter talking to screenwriters about writing; she asks questions from the perspective of an insider and gets real answers as opposed to the surfacey stuff you tend to get in shorter newspaper interviews. My favorite? Probably the slightly testy interview with Mike Leigh talking about how he used improvisational input from his cast in creating SECRETS AND LIES. (But then, I'm particularly interested in improv used for writing.) There isn't an ounce of fat in this book. Smart, useful stuff.

I've always suspected that writers would be the most interesting of all functionaries in the movies, as they're the ones who think it all up in the first place, and this book proves me right. Fascinating, probing glimpses into the hearts and minds of a marvelous collection of writers. Just buy the damn thing.

A marvelous book for writers-- I ordered copies as Christmas presents for all of my writing students.