...it's a little disappointing.

BENDIS: It's funny, being a comic book writer and studying everything I can in order to come up with my own philosophy, having read almost every essay and book you've written about directing film and theater, the person you come closest to in theory is Stan Lee. You know, Stan Lee's biggest philosophy is to make sure they buy the next issue. That's your job. Nothing else matters.

MAMET: [Laughs] I'd never heard that. That's great.

And your philosophy on theater is that it's your job to make the audience wonder what happens next. I always thought it was interesting how close the philosophies were. So the book I use the most when people ask me what they should read to learn how to write comics is your book, "On Directing Film."

Oh really?

It's the best book on how to write comics, because your theory is, "Find the angle with the camera that best tells the story and take that picture." That's a comic book artist's job, which you've now fit into this work here.

Well, it's funny. I do the inverse. When I'm talking to young people or aspiring directors about how to make a movie, I say it's really not like taking a photograph, it's like making a drawing. You have to imagine in your head what you want the drawing to be of such that what you're doing is selling an idea. You're not selling a picture. People, when we get a camera in our hands, a lot of us tend to be seduced by the surroundings. I always call it location sickness. You'll say, "It's a movie about a guy who lost his wallet...but look, there's this huge zoo across the street! Shouldn't I work that in, in some way?" The answer being, "No." And the only way one can get around location sickness is to start with a storyboard. So when you make a movie, the first thing you do is make a cartoon. You make a comic strip. You can call it a storyboard, but that's what it is, is a comic strip. And then you go out to capture on film exactly what the storyboard has.

I like Brian Michael Bendis and I like David Mamet and I assume some of you all do too (NERDS) so go on and read it here. But fair warning, it's a fairly surface-level interview. It will not blow your mind.