Horton Foote

About the work.

So suddenly you're in a room with David Mamet or Horton Foote or.

And

they treated us like peers.

I think, I think that I'd had a ni- I had, had a nice career of, of, of, of various jobs, theater and movies, television.

And on this track, I, I had, uh, uh, uh, just the Horton Foote projects.

Yeah.

Starting with To Kill a Mockingbird, Tomorrow, uh, The Chase, Tender Mercies, Convicts.

Yeah, I'm sure it does.

I, I, I've told this story to many people before.

You know, I always told Horton Foote he should see this movie.

He was 93 and still writing.

I had never been here, but it really is known in the field.

Um, there were things like The Orphan Cycle, the series of plays by Horton Foote, who was one of my most favorite, favorite playwrights, that I'd, I'd been a real admirer of that and many other things about Hartford Stage.

So that's then why I applied.

Oh, excellent.

Um, uh, I, I...

Oh, I have so, so many.

I mean, some of my favorite things here, I mentioned Horton Foote.

Yep.

I really love those movies, particularly Tender Mercies.

Like, all of Horton Foote's work I really gravitated toward.

And so I just started to try to m- as, as any writer kind of does, I think, when they're starting out, just try to mimic him and try to find where my own slant fits into that kind of style of writing.

And I think it took three or four scripts for me to finally get my first job, and I left Filmmaker Magazine and was a screenwriter for many years.

They would tell you one thing, but their actions would be more to the, more to the truth of what they [laughs], what they meant.

And so I just kind of grew up really certainly watching that.

And again, like back to Horton Foote, Horton Foote's a master of that kind of dialogue, right? Of saying one thing but doing something else, and the audience, like, understanding that.

When the story artist would come in and say like, "I think we can put more subtlety in your writing by showing it rather than having the character say it," I was already, uh, kind of equipped to hear that, and that's not every writer.