Our scenes often begin by specifying the location and the date and time. Several months after the first scripts had been written, we reread James Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy, and noticed that he starts each chapter by specifying the city and the day where the action takes place. Surely, this was a subconscious influence on our approach.

Still on the topic of James Ellroy, we love the way he integrates his small plots into the grand scheme of History (with a capital H) and we take something of that away for our own scripts. So even if the action in our story is taking place in a contemporary setting, our heroes won’t affect the course of history. In fact, they are much more likely to be affected by it.