Today’s interview is with James Schamus. And Schamus is unique in that he is both a screenwriter and a movie executive, co-president of Focus Films, the specialty division of Universal Pictures. He’s been working with director Ang Lee for 20 years and his writing credits include The Ice Storm (1997), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and the just released film Taking Woodstock (2009).

This exclusive interview on CinemaBlend. com offers an interesting insight into a creative individual who is both a writer and producer. Here are a few excerpts from the interview:

How do you include the producer part of your brain when you’re writing the script?
I’ve been doing it for 20 years with Ang, and Ang constantly tries to use that on me. I’ll be on set, and I’ll say, ‘We’re losing light, we’ve got to make the end of the day, just cut the scene here, it’s fine.’ And he literally says to me, ‘But James, your precious words!’ On a certain level, once I’ve gotten through a first draft, let’s get to know these stories, after that screenwriting is basically an instrumental craft. [You never walk out of a movie and think] ‘That was one of the shittiest movies I’ve ever seen, but the screenplay was fantastic!’ That never happens. On the other hand, you don’t come out of Hamlet and go, that was the worst production of Hamlet I’ve ever seen– boy, Hamlet must suck. So writing for the screen really is a rhetorical task as much as it is an artistic one. Writing for Ang, I’m trying to write something that’s going to get him a little bit scared, a little bit excited, enough to commit two years of his life and let him take the driver’s seat from there.

What’s the thrill that comes out of writing that you don’t get in your day job running Focus?
You get to live in a fantasy life a little bit for a while. You get to see something in your mind and follow it, there’s freedom there, funnily enough. Writing, I think for most writers and screenwriters, 90% of the work is when you’re walking the dog, taking a shower, staring out the window, these characters are alive and you’re trying to grasp that almost meditatively.

“Trying to grasp that almost meditatively.” I always find it so fascinating to hear writers describe their creative process – and I resonate with Schamus’ description. In the online class I taught this quarter, we got into some discussions about how we can approach our stories as if they — somehow — exist already. The characters ‘live’ in their own story world. The story is an organic entity with which we engage through imagination, brainstorming, perhaps even “meditatively.”

For the rest of the interview with Schamus, go here.