Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
—Philip K. Dick
It was during my research into the fantasy genre, being as I was a complete fledgling when I accepted the helm of what was then Dreamenders Labyrinth (I loved that title, as I did everything in the original story.1 Breathtaking as it was, the lot of it would have been incomprehensible to the common audience), that I discovered the then-brand-new style of war board game, the "role-playing" game. The preeminent one appears to be set in a sort of Tolkien mishmash close enough to our Hearth that I researched it as well. I became enamoured—not with its mechanical view of life and battle (inherited as it was from chess and war reenactments)—but with its potential to structure improvisation.
I long had been in search of a way of allowing Stanislavsky Method to run wild, so to speak, without completely losing the plot. A new manner of filming where the actors rewrite and co-direct the movie as you go. Most of my colleagues think me mad! I may be. I am a director who wishes to minimize my role rather than maximize it.
The structure of these games, if properly modified, seems to allow for more freedom, ironically. I needn’t interfere with performance at all or impose my will if we incorporated chance using the game as a model and hew to some semblance of the plot.
Because the script had already been pushed by studio and religious outcry to alter most of the text’s intent, I decided to incorporate the basic concept and the opening but let the characters as inhabited by this cast decide the rest. To many purists this may seem disrespectful. Hear me out—I am a purist myself. If I cannot follow the story’s original intent, I feel the most respectful thing is not to make some changeling of a tale (something superficially retelling the story, but losing the soul), but to make a new work of art inspired by the original. This way, when the novel is published, there will be two works on the same themes, but one will not interfere with the reading of the other—they may, in fact, enhance each other. One will be forced to separate them.
Perhaps I fool myself.
I am not the first to use an oracle to construct a narrative. I was told by a fellow on a recent shoot that Philip K. Dick used the I Ching hexagrams to decide what would happen in a book about a world where the Nazis and Imperial Japanese won WW2 and split America,2 but also a book where our world reveals itself to one of the characters through a parallel book. Dick’s works always seemed alive to me. Self-aware. I do not have the control of a novelist, but I am not after control. I’m after the electricity of a living story where anything can happen.
But, my love...what we wish to be is who we are.
—Ashur Shadowbringer, Dreamenders Labyrinth
The only path to life is chaos. I believe art is not what is planned or executed precisely, but a series of accidents curated by the taste of the experienced artist. Take thousands of photographs of a moment. It is the choosing of the single photo from those thousands, with instinct and taste, that makes an artful and unique work. In this spirit, to the dread of my peers in the industry, I have a method of improvising at every stage of development where each prior work is but a guide. I let actors completely alter the script and let the edit find the film’s way back to the original story. I have done this in several acclaimed dramas. It is more work, but brings to life an otherwise stillborn medium criminally referred to as "movies." It is the only way to bring the nuanced energy of the theatre to the pre-recorded and edited. With The Realm, I plan on bringing this methodology to genre work for, I believe, the first time. Improvisation terrifies some directors. I think you'll find rethinking your job and responsibilities, and what "structure" should be, may ease your terror.
The script is a blueprint, and ultimately while its foundations must remain and reassert in the edit, the performance must be alive, and living, must emerge from your performers. The first instance of this is in the writing of the script itself. The characters should be allowed to divert the entire plot if necessary, if it serves their needs as people and if it leads to greater catharsis within the plot. At that point, as a writer, you should reevaluate whether you are writing the story you thought you were—and I suggest you listen to your intuition, or gut, as it were, and not try to wrangle the plot back to some outline or structure. Is this what your character does in this situation? Then that's what they do. What are the consequences of that action? How do you keep the story going in the shadow of those consequences? If they veer too far from the story, a rewrite can bring them back onto the path. The same is true of the actors. They should sense the point of a scene and head instinctively toward it, but detours can happen and can be invaluable. When they veer, they are telling you what they, as performers, need from the story. Feed it, but leave a trail of crumbs back to the point.
Having said that, the plot is not the point. Literary teachers will tell you the story is the beats of an outline and the plot is all the detail hanging from it, but that is silly jargon inverting the common parlance. I have no respect for such double-speak. When people talk of plot, what the common man hears is an outline, and a story is something we've been telling around the fires since before we had words. So, when I say the plot is not the point, I'm referring to the story beats. The idea of where you want the story to go, where you think your characters and actors will take you. Let it go—or, to quote a pop song, "hold on, loosely."3
Smith did not read the original story, but the second draft by Peter Alan.
The Man in the High Castle, 1962.
“Hold On Loosely” by .38 Special, which would have been a new single at the time, in 1981.