ED ZWICK - Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer - Glory, The Last Samurai, Shakespeare in Love, Thirtysomething

Film & TV, The Creative Process: Acting, Directing, Writing, Cinematography, Producers, Composers, Costume Design, Talk Art & Creativity

Ed Zwick is a writer, director, and producer who's been active in the film industry for over 40 years. He has been nominated for two Golden Globes for directing the films Glory and Legends of the Fall and received an Academy Award as one of the producers of Shakespeare in Love. Zwick continues to work with his longtime friend and partner, Marshall Herskovitz, at their company Bedford Falls, where they created the widely loved TV show Thirtysomething. His memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions details many of his greatest experiences in the film industry.

"We often talk in our work about the octane of truth, when you're at the gas station and they say, do you want low octane, middle octane, or high octane, and it's a very interesting set of decisions that one makes because it's actually not hard to know the truth of any circumstance or the truth of any story, but to actually partake of it, to actually come closer to it, and still be respectful of the audience's experience. Because obviously, 100 percent octane, we would fall asleep within five minutes because nothing happens. You know, it's about trying to reconcile the compression of drama, the reductionist nature, how things stand in for other things. And in that regard, screenwriting and film are much more like poetry than they are like prose.

Things stand in for other things. A close-up, as someone looks at someone and things change, could have been three pages of an introspective narrative in Proust. A little bit of action that takes place in three minutes could have stood in for a war in Tolstoy. So some of it is sleight of hand, but it becomes about trying to understand how to use compression so as to give the simulacrum of real life, so as to give an approximation of verisimilitude.

And often that's something you learn because audiences do want to feel that they're seeing something that's real because when it's just pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, then it's comic books without exposition, without introspection, without internal sense. So it's trying to find some middle space between those, some liminal space."

www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Ed-Zwick/212290077
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001880/

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