Jez Butterworth interview

In The New York Times, Erik Piepenburg talks to Jez Butterworth about his new play, Parlour Song, and his writing career so far.

Screenwriting and playwriting always strike me as like different sports that I can play. It’s like cricket and football; they don’t really have much to do with each other except a lot of strenuous activity. I can go from doing a play to doing a screenplay and it’s like one feeds the other in some way, I’m not sure exactly how. They come from very different places inside of me, I think. I do a lot of screenwriting with my brother John Henry. There’s a lot of craft involved. There are tricks you can employ in screenwriting to get yourself out of trouble that are useless to you in the theater. I wouldn’t say that playwriting comes from a deeper place, necessarily, but it is certainly more unconscious in me. I once had a laptop computer that had half a play in it and half a film in it, and it was stolen. I could recreate the screenplay word for word, and I couldn’t remember a word of the play.