The one thing that's closest to my story is the thing about trying out for the juvenile delinquent role and getting it. That was the start of my acting career... which I've resumed, by the way.
When you're 89, dementia develops. I mean, I've told a story onstage, and I'm telling it with a full heart, and I forgot the damn punch line.
The story of how Chile, in the decades after its 1973 coup and death of democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, became one of the most neoliberal societies on the planet is well known.
I mean, the shoe - there is a music to it, there is attitude, there is sound, it's a movement. Clothes - it's a different story. There are a million things I'd rather do before designing clothes: directing, landscaping.
The most difficult story that I've ever been involved in breaking on any of my shows was 'The Constant' episode of 'Lost,' which was when Desmond was consciousness-traveling.
Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.
It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.
There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.
But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.
It's like being involved in a detective story, looking for that thing that nobody else has found.
What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.
The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.
Anyone can write a detective story about a detective who fails, for Pete's sake. That's pretty unambitious.
I did my very first film with Kirk in Detective Story when he was the greatest, greatest star in the world. I fell in love with him, had a crush on him then.
A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.
Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.
I have never read horror, nor do I consider The Exorcist to be such, but rather as a suspenseful supernatural detective story, or paranormal police procedural.
It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.
Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.
