Directing a movie requires very different skills. Even on just a personality level: an author can be reclusive, but a director has to be extremely social, becau

Directing a movie requires very different skills. Even on just a personality level: an author can be reclusive, but a director has to be extremely social, because a film is made by a large crew of people. And there's the obvious other skills too (this interview is from American Film magazine): Stephen King: The movie is about all these vehicle goings crazy and running by themselves, so we started shooting a lot of gas pedals, clutches, transmissions, things like that, operating themselves. We had one sequence: The gas pedal goes to the floor, the gas pedal goes up, the clutch goes in, the gears shifts by itself, the clutch comes out and the gas pedal goes back to the floor again. We were able to shoot everything but the transmission from the driver's side door. The transmission was a problem, because we kept seeing either a corner of the studio of a reflection. So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what's happening here, right? I'd crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party. Nobody wanted to say you've made a terrible mistake. I didn't get this job because I could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King. So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I'd crossed the 180-degree axis and that this simply wasn't done, and although I didn't understand what it was, I grasped the idea that I was breaking a rule. Later on, I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I said, "What is this axis shit?" and he laughed his head off and explained it, and I said, "Can you break it -- the rule?" He said, "It's better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship Potemkin" (which I never have), "it crosses the axis all the time, and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets away with it." Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: "What's this about crossing the axis?" and he burst out laughing and said, "That always gets me." And I asked if you could do it, and he gave me this startled look and said, "Stephen, you can do anything. You're the director." Then he paused and said, "But it doesn't cut together."