So far they are conforming to pattern, alas! I mean I am suffering from the usual delusion that the play was ready before we went into production. It happens every time. I give my publisher the finished text of the play so that it can be published not too long after the opening in London, but by the time the galleys arrive they’re hopelessly out-of-date because of all the changes I’ve made during rehearsals. This time I gave them Hapgood and told them that it was folly to pretend it would be unaltered, but I added, “I think it won’t be as bad as the others.” It turned out to be worse. Yesterday I realized that a chunk of information in the third scene ought to be in the second scene, and it’s like pulling out entrails: as in any surgery there’s blood. As I was doing it I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA—the double helix. There was only one way all the information they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the same. So the answer to your question is that the rehearsals are going well and enjoyably, but that I’m very busy with my pencil.

As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds. The writer’s secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind.

We thought that there were certain possibilities, in terms of physical movement, in terms of community, and in terms of what dance could address in our society. And those were the issues that we went after. And we worked with a great deal of rigor. Which is to say, we were very, very dedicated. We worked six days a week, we worked at least six hours every day. We did not perform much at all. It was really about the experience of learning and exploring and growing, for five years.

What is rewarding about the priesthood is, one, that you have an incredible privilege of being privy to some of the most extraordinary things about people. I mean, as their parish priest, you visit people who are sick, say, on their death bed and they tell you things that they probably have not shared with any other person. You are privileged to bring the Holy Sacrament to people at a time when they are probably at their lowest. But you also have the privilege of meeting up with people at their moment of great joy, when they are getting married, or when they have a child baptized.

They’re very quiet coffee shops, and there are some positions in which it’s easier to write. Somewhere there’s an outlet, and you can keep your back to people. I’ll write for about two hours and then get up and walk with my iPad to the next coffee shop, about 10 minutes away. When you walk, you get a little fresh air, and I’ve heard moving around is good for you while writing. When you write in an office or at home, you end up sleeping. You can’t sleep at a cafe since you can’t lie down. I think that’s good, and it’s become a habit. I wrote Parasite half in Seoul and half in Vancouver.

I wanted to create a very delicate and detailed film where you would feel like you could even smell every single character.

There were times when I thought I wanted to be a cartoonist. If I weren’t a film director, I think cartoons would have been a good alternative. But I never properly studied drawing, so my drawings are strange. But when I’m prepping films, it’s good preparation — and comforting to me — to do the storyboards. It’s fun, too, like drawing a whole comic.