One of the great filmmaking misconceptions familiar to anyone who’s ever read a screenwriting manual (or spent time with low-level Hollywood development executives) is the notion that movies are external and books are internal — that the advantage that literature has over cinema is that it can tell us what people are thinking. This canard that movies aren’t good at conveying characters’ thoughts has endured in spite of how easily disproven it is. Even a casual study of Bergman or Ozu, or more recently Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, confirms the exact opposite truth: that depicting characters’ interior lives is one of the […]