sean penn on tree of life

"The screenplay is the most magnificent one that I've ever read but I couldn't find that same emotion on screen," Penn told Le Figaro. "A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What's more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly."

referencing Sacks' The Anthropologist on Mars

In a case study in that book he was talking about a man suffering from paralysing nostalgia who painted watercolours. He suggested that the impulse to become nostalgic comes from the same part of the psyche as does the impulse to create, and that both creativity and nostalgia are born out of a need to repair things that are broken or to complete things that are interrupted. So we feel nostalgic about the experiences we feel were interrupted and ended too soon and they are also the experiences that might lead us to want to write. And I think all of the plays I’ve written in some sense have kind of been an attempt to complete something or to repair something. And I think as well that all of the plays in that sense have kind of failed, and so you write another play to have another go, or to look at it from a different perspective.