MORGAN: I disagree. I think lots of people think they can be a director. I think it's the principal thing that everybody aspires to. I think pretty much everybody thinks they understand soundtracks -- pretty much everybody's got a temp track going on in their head. Pretty much everyone thinks they can produce a movie, they can market the movie, they can distribute the movie better. The problem we grow up with is that film is now so pervasive as an art form that everybody is wildly cine-literate in a way that they aren't fiction literate or other things. We're working in a field in which absolutely everybody is a fully qualified film critic.

ARNDT: I feel like film has become this very self-conscious medium. In a lot of art forms you see a movement from modernism to post-modernism, and I think right around the time of "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." ¼ It used to be that movies were about real life, and after the mid-'70s you started to have movies that were about other movies. As a reader -- I used to read screenplays for a living -- you read a lot of stories that are self-referential. I feel like that's a poison on the industry. I know that one of my rules is, if I've seen it in a movie I don't want to see it in my own script.

DEL TORO: Yes, it's a meta-language. Some people in other arts have done it. During the folk-art movement, Lichtenstein started doing it beautifully. But there is a point where that becomes very emotionally sterile.

MORGAN: Well, if your only reference to the outside world is through film, then all you can do is reference film.

ARNDT: [leans over the recorder] I want to just go on the record as saying: "Star Wars" is a brilliant film, really.

Is it reading too much into these writing nominations and the adapted nominees honors to see any trend here? Does this signify anything?

DEL TORO: There's a compulsion from film to react to the times, always -- if it's the '60s, if it's the '40s, if it's now. I remember when we were at Cannes with "Babel" and "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Indigènes" ["Days of Glory"], seven out of ten10 of the films were about war or the effects of war. And you don't even have to ask why. Film reacts like a nervous system of a society. I think it's a compulsion. The duty right now is to ask questions, not to give any answers. We don't need to comfort anyone.

MORGAN: I think there's a direct correlation between the amount of fact-based films that have been made that are engaging in the real world and the extraordinary blinkered news coverage we get. News at the moment is telling us nothing. So I don't think it's any coincidence whatsoever that filmmakers are taking reality into their hands.

You feel like it's filling that gap.

MORGAN: Absolutely. And the other thing, which makes me relentlessly optimistic, is the downward spiral of movie budgets. Of course, it probably means that none of us will earn quite as much. But the willingness for people to spend less money on films improves every single part of the filmmaking process. There is a direct proportion between the less money you pay people and the quality of their work, almost always.

ARNDT: Except in the NBA.

[Laughter]

Is the state of the original screenplay in bad shape?

ARNDT: I have to make a distinction between original screenplays in Hollywood and original screenplays in the rest of the world. I think everybody here is working to a greater or lesser degree kind of outside of the Hollywood system. For the example of "Little Miss Sunshine," the script was bought by producers and set up at Focus, and it was there for three years and they put it into turnaround. So the film wouldn't have gotten made if it hadn't been for independent money.

YAMASHITA: Yeah, I'm sure if Clint Eastwood didn't come up with the idea to do a Japanese perspective on World War II it ["Letters from Iwo Jima"] would never have gotten made, that's for sure. If I had written it as a spec and shopped it around, it would never have gotten made.