In 2005, I visited my home state of Texas, spending time on a ranch outside the town of Post. Then spending some time on a large ranch outside Archer City. I was taken by just how few young people I saw anywhere.
I think my mission, if I could call it that, as a storyteller is to try and find ways to show how similar we are and not how different we are.
We can't assign beliefs to people who don't have a voice to express them. And we can't assume what someone thinks.
Think about 'GoodFellas': It could be a textbook on how not to write a screenplay. It leans on voice-over at the beginning, then abandons it for a while, then the character just talks right into the camera at the end. That structure is so unusual that you don't have any sense of what's going to happen next.