Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy and The King director David Michod on creativity

Westworld series co-creator and writer Lisa Joy and Brad Pitt starrer War Machine and Timothee Chalamet headliner The King director David Michôd conducted different masterclasses at the ongoing Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.

Among other things, both Lisa and David spoke about living the artist’s life, how they create their work and their research process.

“Writing for me is like being a theoretical actor,” said Lisa. “You sit there in your mind and are cloaked in the body of a different character from a faraway land, from a different gender, from the future or from the past. It is about having the eyes of the character and looking around the world to see what’s there.”

David spoke about how reading too many scripts muddles his thinking. “I don’t know how to read a script. I know how to write one,” he said. Speaking “When I am writing, I have realised I need to shed this concern about what happens to the movie. If you spend too much time worrying about what happens to it you can lose the creative joy of making the thing.”

Talking about her research process, Lisa said, “I read philosophy, look at other people’s work. To create any kind of world that is believable you have to look and know what is believable.”