There’s a King Crimson track, an improvisation called Trio that can be found on Starless and Bible Black, played when the band were knackered towards the end of a European tour in the seventies. Out of nowhere, the band conjure a plaintive melody that seems to sum up exactly where they are at the moment, and which drummer Bill Bruford doesn’t contribute to. There’s no need for him to: what’s there is perfect already. All the same, and rightly, Bruford is credited on the track with ‘admirable restraint’.

In any creative endeavour, what’s not there can be just as important as what actually is. This principle reaches its pinnacle in the sculpture of someone like Henry Moore, say, where the work is defined by negative space, but it also applies in screenwriting.

For instance, Spartan, the thriller written and directed by David Mamet. An excellent movie in so many respects. One of them being Mamet’s typical economy. Like, even though the story is about the kidnapping of the president’s daughter, her identity as such is never once mentioned in the film. We soak up that knowledge as part of the context the characters operate in.

Mamet is similarly economic when it comes to the end of the film, set in the UK. How do we know that? For many directors this would be an opportunity to do a Cool Britannia montage, or at the very least picture someone arriving at Heathrow. Nothing so crass for Mamet. Instead, we become aware of the shift of country because of a scene set in a television showroom, where prices are displayed in-store in pounds. Of course.

This principle of economy, of making the biggest difference through the smallest piece of information seen or heard, is central to effective screenwriting. And it makes the screenwriter’s job one of providing an epistemology for the viewer. Let me explain. Epistemology is about how you know what you know. And the screenwriter’s job is to parcel that valuable information out to the audience gobbet by gobbet, ideally so that by the time the actual story starts, they’re already immersed in the world it depicts. This is done masterfully in Dirty Pretty Things, the superb Stephen Frears directed thriller about refugees and their lives in London.

The first ten minutes or so of Dirty Pretty Things is a masterclass in writing and direction, with information planted through every possible means, directly and through nuance, about the characters’ lives and backgrounds, the world they inhabit, and more. And it also demonstrates the principle of deletion alluded to earlier: what’s not there is just as important as what is. And in the opening section of the film, you won’t see a white face at all. Interesting, and very relevant to the film, which is about a world that the white majority just don’t get to see.

Sexy Beast is, more contentiously, another film I’d say depends on deletion of information for its power. It’s the tale of how Ray Winstone is coaxed from retirement in Spain to do one more underworld job by Ben Kingsley. That, at any rate, is what’s going on in the surface. But every time I’ve viewed it since, I’ve become fascinated by another theory, which is never articulated in the film but explains a hell of a lot to me. We know from the film that Ben Kingsley feels betrayed by Ray Winstone leaving him, bereft of his best friend. Only, I think it goes further: I believe that Ben Kingsley’s character, knowingly or not, is in love with Ray Winstone’s.

Viewed this way, Kingsley’s appalling strops and changes of mood start to make some kind of sense. And I don’t think it’s an accident either: why else would the film be called Sexy Beast, and spend its opening scene with Ray Winstone’s hunk of a man sunning himself by the pool, if there wasn’t some sort of erotic element to the story? Of course, the very notion would appal Ben Kingsley’s character and he’d tear your ears off in protest, but where Sexy Beast is concerned, it’s one of those things that, where once seen, it’s never unseen.

Myth has always been one of the sources of the stories that we watch on screen, and fantasy and myth are closely linked. But their relationship is not always a comfortable one, and a couple of recent films point to the importance of getting the mythic elements of a story right when tackling tales with an element of the fantastic.

The Golden Compass had everything going for it before it reached the screen. An immaculate literary pedigree that had made Philip Pullman’s works popular among children and adults alike, a strong cast, and a big budget; all helped psyche people up for what could have been a wonderful trip to the cinema. So where did it all go wrong?

Fundamentally, the story – at least as portrayed on screen – lacks a mythic dimension. Oh, it’s got fantastic tropes by the dozen: parallel worlds; a heroine who’s that fantasy staple, a Chosen One; a magic device in the form of the Compass itself; tribes who are analogues for cultures in our own world; armoured bears; airships; and more besides. But for all that – and a lot of it looks impressive onscreen – there’s something missing. And that’s where contrast with Disney’s Enchanted proves useful.

Enchanted is a very self-conscious film, Disney creators having fun with the Disney way of doing things. The story starts off in traditional 2D animated style, but soon its princess heroine is transported into our world, along with her prince. Initially befuddled by the emotional and other complexities of this 3D place, and her first exposure to irony, the princess finds that this world as well as her own can be a place of romance, and wins the heart of the man who helps her survive in New York, whose girlfriend ends up disappearing with the fairytale prince back to his animated world. It’s a delightful tale that dances between traditional Disney values and the world its contemporary audience inhabits, and is a much more satisfying experience than the empty antics on display in The Golden Compass.

I knew something was wrong with The Golden Compass when its young heroine, Lyra, pulls the wool over the eyes of some of the bad guys with fast talk. Oh, it establishes something important about her character, but it felt like a scene out of a bad episode of a soap opera when what was called for was Lyra to display an element of the trickster. Only, none of the characters, not even the excellent Nicole Kidman as the villainous Mrs Coulter, were given dialogue that had any sense of the epic about it: the beats got you from A to B alright, but with no scope or depth in the process. Instead, it all seemed prosaic, even as armoured bears and flying witches battled warriors with wolves in the arctic wastes.

Enchanted, by contrast, was so secure in its grasp of the mythic that it could afford to play games with it to create a new kind of story that felt just as right as older ones, whether Disney or the ones they nod to. Its creators had the courage of their convictions to shape something that you’d never expect to emerge from Disney, by following its own emotional logic of combining the world we all inhabit with the world that Disney films are typically set in.

Emotional logic is the key phrase there. Where Enchanted shamelessly plays with your emotions, The Golden Compass barely registers a flicker, though by rights it absolutely should be pressing all kinds of buttons. Even with whole armies on screen, and the lives of experimented-on-orphans on stake, it was hard to feel much of anything in The Golden Compass. Whereas Enchanted had me as soon as its princess heroine appeared in New York, stranded in a world beyond her comprehension but still true to her desires and convictions.

On paper – although when I say that, I mean ‘in theory’ rather than ‘in the script’ – both films had plenty going for them. They certainly move their stories forward efficiently through the use of appropriate beats. But here’s another difference: whereas the beats in Enchanted all have some sense of depth to them, some resonance for the viewer from their connection with stories that have gone before, and the emotions they stir; The Golden Compass paints a new world and forgets to make it resonant with other fantastic milieus other than at the most superficial level of CGI. Instead, we get lush settings and concepts aplenty, but nothing to engage the emotions, beats that move the plot forward but fail to ensure suspension of disbelief. Which proves to me that suspension of disbelief – essential in any story concerned with the fantastic – is less about the amount of money spent on the set, than how it engages the imagination and emotions. I watched countless Dr Who episodes as a child captivated by the ideas and relationships central to the stories, despite the most perfunctory attention given to environment and costume. But The Golden Compass, for all its rich trappings, failed to captivate me for a moment. And Enchanted, days later, is with me still. Like the princess it stars, I feel a song coming on…

My friend Fran has occasional film evenings called War & Meat, when a group of male friends will pile around his place to watch violent films and eat tasty animals. Hence I know what the combination of Zaitochi with meat and potato pie is like, and can recommend films to accompany haggis or black pudding.

I suspect that The Unit has its origins in a similar lads’ night in. Only, its hosts were Shawn Ryan, creator of awesome cop drama The Shield, and David Mamet, who wrote Glengarry Glen Ross and Spartan, two of the best films ever. Needless to say, Shawn and David are men’s men, and I don’t doubt that they ate something damn tasty together as they conceived their joint venture, a tv series which tells the story of a covert military operations unit, and the wives of the men who make up its ranks.

Some of the episodes are written and directed by David Mamet, though I’m not sure they can be reliably said to be much superior to those written by other members of the show’s team. The feel of Mamet and Ryan’s creation runs through the whole, regardless of the individuals involved. The show’s Special Forces heroes snatch hostages from under the noses of incompetent FBI agents, go under deep cover in Afghanistan and are nearly let down by their lack of affinity with donkeys, and plant bugs in situations that smoother espionage professionals shy away from. It’s compelling, elegantly plotted stuff, and thoroughly enjoyable in a way that the more cynical Spooks shies away from.

Please don’t read that as a dismissal of Spooks however: instead, it’s an endorsement of the clever and credible multi-faceted plotting of the show’s most recent series, all about the role of Iran in the modern world, and the response of existing powers towards it. Unusually for a tv show, Spooks gets better with every series: I was none too fussed by the first few, but have been increasingly gripped by the way that the plots are fuelled by high stakes beats derived from what feels like detailed research, and the necessarily painful and compromised decisions that the protagonists are drawn into.

Sure, it has its less credible aspects too, mostly to do with the interpersonal relationships of its characters, but this is still television of a very high calibre. And season six was the show’s strongest outing yet, save for the last episode, when the Iranian storyline finished and a weaker story about the Venezualan president was featured.

The problem for Spooks is where to find more characters, since they’re more than prepared to sacrifice ones they’ve spent a lot of time developing into three-dimensional personalities. And where are you going to find characters that have the guile and resourcefulness to survive in the world of international espionage?

I think I have the answer. She’s well known to tv viewers already, has a certain lads’ mag appeal that can only boost the show’s ratings, and has recently demonstrated a lethal ability to get what she wants in a no-holds barred battle of wits with her brother. I’m talking about Sarah Platt, who has managed to escape Coronation Street and indeed Weatherfield, and is now living in Milan after planting drugs on her brother David – who everyone thought was the cunning one, but is now shown up as a rank amateur - following his attempt to derail her wedding. More than the journalist character recently introduced into Spooks, Sarah Platt has the capacity to use deceit in the pursuit of her objectives, and a career in espionage has got to be more compelling for her than working in whatever bit of a spurious family business has taken her to Italy. Or be braver still and go for the double – hire David Platt too, and you’ve got an agent who’s prepared to kill himself to get the job done, and whose smouldering antagonism towards his sister will work just as well on Spooks as it did on Coronation Street.

I’m a sucker for a good zombie film, and for some reason there seems to be no shortage of them recently. I Am Legend is the latest in the crop, and it’s the zombies that let the film down unfortunately, since the director chose to have them portrayed by digital animation when real flesh would have been so much more expressive.

Still, some good choices were made in other respects. The abandoned and overgrown New York the story takes place in is amazing to behold, with deer and lion in the streets, and subtly effective sound design hinting at other fauna. But is it any more effective than what was done on a much lower budget in 28 Days Later? The answer has to be no, which is a shame though there’s still plenty to like about this film.

What really got me thinking was a clever, if perhaps slightly over-seasoned use of an interesting device when Will Smith’s character meets up with a mother and son who’ve also survived the apocalypse (brief recap: it was Emma Thompson’s fault). Now, both the adults are used to being the alpha characters in their stories, with a subordinate kid or dog that does what it’s told. They’re not used to having to treat anyone as an equal, because for years now in Will’s life there hasn’t been an anyone. Instead, he’s lived a prolonged teenage existence where he collects weapons, fantasises about the mannequins he has arranged in a DVD store, and plays Bob Marley loud as he drives round the city. Having met someone else again, he and the woman are going to have to work at adjusting to this new reality where power and gender are once again part of the equation.

There are a few ways this could be handled. And most of them would be either dialogue-heavy or overly symbolic. What I Am Legend does instead is use a device I call the One Step Remove…let me tell you about the first time I rumbled this gambit.

In the wonderful Broken Flowers, Bill Murray is searching for an ex who may be the mother of his son. At the end of the film, he has an encounter with a teenager who reckons Murray may be his father, and the story is all the more interesting for it: the boy fulfils all the criteria that Murray ascribes to his son, but is not him. He is one step removed: the boy, and maybe Murray, have made an attribution error that saves us from who knows what schmaltz may have ensued in the hands of a less talented director than Jim Jarmusch.

Another form of One Step Remove is when a character imparts information from another source than what we can see and hear onscreen. It could be a will, or a psychic reading. At any rate, information that changes the state of the person hearing it, probably creating a turning point in the story.

It’s also what’s happened on a message board debate I’ve been following, about whether or not to ban one member for alleged misogyny. Some of the posters implied that the continued presence of the accused would result in them leaving. One of the board moderators noted that this could be an inappropriate form of leverage to use. Later, a poster popped up to declare that several of the board’s members had indeed stopped posting: by getting him to announce it, they had effectively done exactly what the moderator had raised concerns about, but did so through another poster. Not contributing to a debate is one thing: telling others that you’re not contributing is another, a piece of information in its own right, and one particularly suited to the environment of a message board where the participants know each other through their screen interactions. That’s a binary position: they’re either there or not. By getting a third party to declare their status as non-participants, they found a third position to take, one in which their very silence has meaning.

So, the One Step Remove - essentially a way of dealing with a writing challenge indirectly rather than head-on - is an interesting and nuanced strategy when used well. Which is what they do with it in I Am Legend. When Will Smith and the female survivor meet up, all the potential dynamics between them are dealt with by the inventive device of the woman’s son watching Shrek, and Shrek and Donkey articulate the different strata of powerplay that exists between the two characters, both at times having their voices doubled up by Will Smith, who has watched the Shrek DVD plenty of times since he holed up in his post-apocalyptic hidey-hole. Nice one. Very nice one in fact. And it leads me to think what use of the One Step Remove I can make in the screenplay I’m currently working on…

So, where next, Wes Anderson?

The Darjeeling Limited is a pleasant enough diversion, though not from Anderson’s concerns. Once again – see Royal Tennenbaums — he tells us a story about a dysfunctional and emotionally constipated well-to-do family, in this case three brothers led by Owen Wilson on a self-conscious spiritual quest by train through India in the hope of the sort of catharsis that you just know Anderson is going to pull away from you before feeling kicks in, after offering just a glimpse of it.

Last time round, in The Life Aquatic, I really thought Anderson had started to develop a new shtick, but it looks like once again I was glamoured by the whimsy and the ever-ravishing visual treats. The Darjeeling Limited is very linear, as you’d expect a train journey to be, and there are certainly some interesting stops along the way as the brothers fail to get to grips with each other or the culture they’re travelling through.

There’s a hint of something different when the brothers are exited from the train and get involved in the lives of some villagers after saving the lives of two out of three young boys from drowning, but pretty soon it’s back to business as usual for the siblings. Which, I suppose, is Anderson’s point. This is emphasised by the fact that one of the brothers is a writer who writes obviously autobiographical stories, and the ominous dialogue line ‘to be continued’: like the characters, Anderson has taken himself to India, and found only himself. Which is no surprise, as fans of Buckaroo Banzai will be aware: ‘Wherever you go, you’re always there’.

How then, does one account for the groove that Wes Anderson finds himself in, compared to the myriad of story types that someone like filmmaker Michael Winterbottom or comics writer Alan Moore gets involved with? In the case of the latter, he’s very conscious of his writing being part of a whole imaginative realm he calls Ideaspace, which all stories belong to, and which in Moore’s case he travels in freely to produce graphic fictions as varied as Top 10, Promethea, Swamp Thing and From Hell.

You may or may not believe in Ideaspace to the degree that Moore does, but I’d argue that his belief in it provides him with an endlessly rich source of potential material to work with. And that’s the important thing. Wes Anderson’s work clearly delineates a narrow range of concerns with a small palette of stylistic tics, both of which, if The Darjeeling Limited is anything to go by, he’s in danger of exhausting. He’s self-aware enough to know he’s in a box, but – at the moment at least – he can’t seem to get out of it. Moore, by comparison, is immersed in the wider world of story, and of the parameters which different genres and story types place on stories he’s interested in telling. That knowledge gives him the freedom to play with abandon in what seems to be the most limited of toyboxes, such as superhero comics.

Take a look at WildC.A.T.S, a collected edition of which is available. Not one of Alan Moore’s finest hours: it’s work for hire, a job he was given by publishers Wildstorm in the nineties and which he took on knowing he had the craft skills to accomplish thoroughly and with finesse. And that’s exactly what he does. Only, he does more than that. His awareness of the rules governing writing extends to his willingness to play with them, something that Wes Anderson and many other writers and film makers, could never do.

As an example, there’s a riff in WildC.A.T.S about a hotel on an alien planet with a low-level probability field: “You’re staying in Coincidence Mansion. Go between the fountains, straight across the plaza. If two of you start humming the same tune or speaking the same sentence, then you’ve found it. Have a pleasant stay.” It’s a neat background detail, the kind of thing Douglas Adams would come up with. But, of course, as writers we know it’s important not to use mere coincidence to move the plot forward. Only, Alan Moore does exactly that, using the notion of the coincidence field to generate a solution to the problem of a dying android his team mates can’t help: one of the other guests has been trained to repair just such a model of android. It breaks every rule in the writing handbook to use this device, and that’s precisely why – on this occasion — it actually works and why Alan Moore is celebrated as a shaman genius writing century and genre spanning narratives and why I get hired to write plays to train prison officers and brochures to promote kitchens sold by silver foxes who will seduce your wife with the promise of the kitchen of her dreams by painting a watercolour of it in the showroom. Harrumph.

So, how do you get out of the Wes Anderson rut and head for weirdbeard Moorish genius? For one thing, by becoming aware of the presuppositions going into your work, even before you’ve put a word on the page. For another, by learning to recognise your default settings, and opting to do something different. The more familiar to you the word is that you put after the ones you’ve already written, the less chance there is of surprising yourself – and your audience. Not that audiences want to be surprised every time, as the popularity of James Bond films bears out, but without something new in the mix, you’re not going to be pulling them in on a regular basis.