says the film should be a model for screenwriters everywhere. “This is, by far, Spielberg’s best film,” he says. “I’ve studied it. I don’t write for TV or film—I write fiction—but just the beats, the timing. It’s so perfect. Everything is so well-paced.”works well visually and emotionally, but he finds the aliens’ behavior a bit too puzzling. “If they’ve already abducted people from World War II, why do they need to communicate with music?” he says.
Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Matthew Kressel, and Tom Gerencer in Episode 498 ofAndrea Kail onIf a [movie scene] seems really long, I’ll go back and time it, just for my own benefit as a writer. Every scene that seems really long—every time—it comes out at 3 minutes. Anything that seems excruciatingly long is 3:30. So I actually started timing the scenes in this movie as I was watching it.