While visiting my sister in Los Angeles over spring break, we went to a reading and interview with Michael Ondaatje, the co-author of The Conversations, which I read earlier in this independent study. Ondaatje and the interviewer discussed the different storytelling techniques he uses in his novels and how they add to the overall narrative. In particular, they discussed his tendency to go off on long-winded, seemingly irrelevant tangents. He read a passage from his latest book, Warlight, where the narrator discussed a minor character for several pages, even though this character ultimately had little relevance to the story. This interested me as I had previously thought that every scene in a story must ultimately add to the narrative or must have a hidden message that affects the plot in some way. It made me think more about the purpose of scenes like this in film. Films are often so tightly woven, where every small detail and scene has a purpose, that wonder if a director could get away with that kind of intriguing, but ultimately somewhat irrelevant, tangent.
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