Inside Secrets: Chuck Russell Reveals Untold Stories Behind Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx’s Iconic Film Collateral
Ashely
Gotcha. And maybe you can just speak to screenplay structure. You’re talking about knowing where you’re going, how into the sort of that paradigm, beginning, middle, and end, you know, midpoint inciting incident, act breaks. How much do you sort of put stock do you put in that?
Chuck Russell
It depends on the project. But I do. In fact, I like writing synopses. A lot of times, I’m asked for synopses after a show and what people call synopses now are usually really short anyway. But I like writing a synopsis, it may seem like busy work to people, but oddly, interesting things come up. So I’ll write a synopsis, it’s not really, it’s certainly no, it’s no more than about 15 pages. But I’ll sketch in the scenes for myself, not not to be presented to others. So it’s a little better than an outline. The reason one of the reasons I do that is I in horror films in particular, and in action films, I’m looking for set pieces, you know, I want to tell a great story. But the set piece you have to have a strong, you have to have a strong Christmas tree, then the set pieces are the decorations, they’re the you know, where you’re putting a bulb, how often are you having a scare, different people have rules to these things. I keep thinking it’s good to break the rules. But but I look for the strongest story characters I love, for whatever reasons, I got to care about them. Then part of the structure is, let me look at let me look at what I’ve structured. And why is this scary? Because if it’s not scary, in a horror genre, I mean, that is, it’s still the number one thing. I could be scary funny. I do sort of action horror. A lot of times, I think the blob was a little bit adventure horror, action horror. But you still need to see where your character scenes and where is your audience getting antsy in this genre, we better keep them entertained.
