Full Disclosure

But the passage of time is not only an important part of what's going on in the films we've just been talking about -- it's part of the nuts and bolts of making these things happen. Time is the key to the whole thing. Because I can only define character and all those things by constantly referring to the time span. Whether I'm getting a ripple of laughter or making something specific happen, I'm going, "OK, at what time does it happen?" The first ground rule of improvisation is that it happens in real time. You can't do it unless you enter into that convention: An actor can't pretend that an hour passes by in 10 minutes, an hour has to take an hour. Then it becomes real. You look at my notebooks, and I constantly do things like this with my notebooks. [He takes out a piece of paper from my reporter's pad, and blocks off sections with the headings: "1979," "1980," "1981," "1982."] And we'll talk through what happened at each of those points. OK, Christmas, now what were you doing at New Year's. I mean, it all becomes back-story, it all has to be destroyed -- it becomes a discipline, so that by the time you get to the time present, which is the dramatic action, the script will say "Saturday, Week 1: Funeral, Hortense," and we can go and develop that scene. It's important that we decide what day of the week it is. Now in most films and most dramatic works the actors don't know what day it is. But in my films, they'll tell you what day it is, what week it is, what month it is, what year it is, and you ask them what happened in relation to what happened in the past, and they'll know it. I may not bother to make that a factor that you the audience particularly know, but at least we've dealt with it, because then the actors know where they are in it.

Of course, time is admittedly, for me, a personal preoccupation. Even the time I've taken on this paragraph takes me that much nearer the grave. It's true. And the number of babies that have been born since this conversation began is horrible -- and that's frightening, because the world ain't got no bigger.