I know what you're thinking. Mike Olson's interview with Crispin Glover in this week's Time Out New York is so good. I only wish I could read more. Well today's you're lucky day!
Here, part of Crispin's answer on what he thinks of the poem Beowulf:
I've always had an interest in etymology and looking at words in the dictionary and seeing what languages they derived from, and I understood Old English at a pretty young age. I more concentrated on the etymological elements more than the story elements. At this point in time I knew about the original structure of the story and I could see what the screenwriters had done, also writing and editing and working on my own films, I have a great deal of interest in story structure. I find this topic endlessly fascinating and one of the most intriguing things that the human psyche deals with. And I can tell that the screenwriters very, very expertly went into the original prose or poem as it was frozen from time from the oral tradition and written down, that they had respect for the structure that was put forth at that time that had imbued the characters and structures with psychologies that you could argue would have been told possibly at points in time in the oral tradition and that perhaps were lost or, if not, even without that it is apparent that these characters are explored in such a way you can see that there is a truthful psychological background to what each of the characters are doing, why they're doing it and what that means within the tangents as to how they effect each other and the moral elements itself. I'm sure that sounds very rambling. But the fact is that they've done a very good job of exploring both character psychologies and moral elements within the story, and have extrapolated it in an expert structural fashion that I think is still respectful to the original structure and prose that exists.
And it went on like this for 45 minutes.
