Some words from Ray Carney

We have a mistaken notion that you make a movie after you've decided what you want to say. It's actually the reverse. You learn what you want to say by making the movie–like conversation, which would not only be more boring, but stupider, if we tried to plan it out in advance. Use film to learn.

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Consciousness cannot precede expression. If you can storyboard your film in advance, if you know what's going to happen, how your characters are going to react and feel at every moment, save yourself a lot of time and trouble, skip the shoot and publish the storyboard. As Robert Frost said: No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.Knowingness is the curse of our art. The director knows what his characters are; the characters know what they themselves are; and the viewer knows what everyone else knows. Watch your mind at moments when you don't know something: when you meet a new person; when you hear a loud sound at night but don't know what it is; when you're running out and looking for your wallet or keys. How does your mind function differently from when it is on autopilot? Most of the important parts of life are lived not in the state of knowing, but of not-knowing. Get that into your work. Let your characters experience it, let your viewer experience it. Look at the scene in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice in which a loud sound is heard off-screen and a pitcher of milk spills. Why is it more powerful than if the cause of the sound were shown or explained? Don't explain more than life does.

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If you don't change your mind about your characters and their situations several times as you make your movie, you aren't holding yourself open enough. You aren't allowing yourself to learn. Cassavetes re-edited his films over and over again, as his understandings of the things he had filmed changed.
The solution most movies urge is a continuation of the sickness they depict. They give characters problems to solve and then show them going about solving them. Their narratives are an extension of the business ethos that causes most of the problems in our culture in the first place. These movies never question the belief that we are what we do, what we control, what we own. We live in a capitalist culture addicted to the virtues of doing. But life is less about doing anything, than being something. If your film hinges on a figure's doing or accomplishing something, you are part of the sickness. You are making feature-length commercials for IBM.

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Ever notice how much more interesting a movie is when you channel surf into it ten minutes after it has begun? Or how fascinating even a dumb movie is for at least a few minutes before the idiot plot kicks in? It gets boring the minute you figure it out, or as soon as the characters are given a road map to follow. How can you keep that openness in your movie, that state of uncertainty in the viewer (without, of course, relying on Hitchcockian tricks to stoke up fake dramatic interest)?

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Why do we think film should be easier, purer, more idealized than life? Don't spoon-feed the viewer. Don't give him or her predigested bits of knowledge. The experience of a good film should be as demanding and raw and unassimilated as the experience of life.

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