Anything Goes : How to Shoot a Feature Film in 15 Days (And Survive to See Profits) excerpt by Stephen Mitchell

It was after I had gone back to the John le Carré novel Smiley’s People for the umpteenth time that something dawned on me about storytelling. What matters is not that which you tell the reader—or show the viewer—but what they think they read or saw. I remembered the story as a linear narrative. However, reading it again after the passage of time, I realized the story was actually written as a series of interviews between the character George Smiley and a number of other characters that had interacted with the narrative that I had remembered but had not been written—the linear narrative existed only in my memory of the story. This realization changed the way in which I would approach filmmaking and from that point on, I didn’t shoot what I wanted the audience to see, I shot what I wanted them to remember. I found that I could intimate things about the story without actually having to film them; things that would become part of the action in the viewer’s memory.