“You gotta remember in the entire history of the universe…you’re the only ‘you’ that has ever existed and ever will exist. There’s nobody in existence who is you, and no one can ever see the world the way you see it and can tell the rest of us how it looks. And it might be so different and so beautiful that it changes everything.”

The words are writer Grant Morrison’s, from a talk he gave in 2008 with My Chemical Romance singer and writer of the comic Umbrella Academy, Gerard Way. Never mind if you think the concept is pretentious, grandiose. Put aside those presuppositions and embrace what Grant is saying as if it really is true.

And, guess what, that is how things are. If you’re going to have a manifesto to pin up by your computer, that’s a fine one. And why not have a manifesto? Too many creators lack real ambition for themselves or their work, and I’d like to see more people aiming for the stars and not settling for the soaps.

Having a vision is all about carving out territory that you’d like to occupy. And — guess what — as per Grant’s words you already have what’s most important for establishing a niche; your unique vantage point on the universe.

I wouldn’t have devised The Sharp End, my series about drugs workers, and written the pilot episode, without having various run-ins with drugs earlier in my life, and then becoming friends with not one or two but four drugs workers. The film concept I’m fleshing out from its treatment at the moment owes a lot to my first hand experience of the mental health system. The treatment I recently developed on holiday draws on my friend Vicki’s experience of the UK and mine of Australia. And so on.

All of which is not to say ‘write what you know’ — that’s too simplistic a stricture. But whether you put or find yourself in interesting situations, you can be sure they’ll give you something to think about, and write about, at a later point. And even if you don’t believe you’ve done anything out of the ordinary (which itself would be striking and unusual), then you can still conjure something from what mundanity feels like.

We wouldn’t have Kafka, or at any rate the adjective Kafka-esque, without him having worked in insurance. For better or worse, bookstores wouldn’t be clogged with misery memoirs if people didn’t believe that sharing their grief would help them, if only financially. And Billie Piper wouldn’t have played an escort on screen if Belle de Jour hadn’t blogged about her experiences in that world.

So, presumably Grant Morrison has a secret superhero identity that enables him to write the likes of All-Star Superman and Batman and Robin? Well, no. But he takes another route, turning his life experience and using it metaphorically. And once you’re into that realm, the world is your lobster. (Metaphor, see?)

Cast your feelings and thoughts out into the realm where stories lie, and you’ll bring in a rich haul of books you were read as a child, comics you read under the sheets with a torch, tv programmes that spooked you and left you unable to turn the lights out, puppet shows that captivated you with their berserk imagination, and films that echoed legends you loved when you came across them in a library. And it’s from that swirling galaxy of fiction and the truth that lies behind it you’ll find inspiration for your own imaginings, when you get in touch with it.

Does any of this guarantee you success as a writer? If you’re talking commercial success, not as such. But connecting to your creativity is its own reward, and will give you the fuel to keep going when you’re embarking on the business of writing, of competitions and deadlines and submission and rejection…the path you take before hopefully discovering that writing can be a professional as well as a personal path.

I did something scary last night. I went to see Paranormal Activity in a cinema full of teenagers on a Friday night. Yes, I know I was stupid — but we’ll come onto that. First, let’s look at the film itself.

Like many, I’ve been aware of the film for some time, and knew the story behind the story: Israeli filmmaker creates ultra low-budget horror movie restricted to a home location and four actors, fails to attract professional interest initially, but when he does scores a gazillion dollar hit. Congratulations, Oren Peli.

Using the found footage conceit of Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, the story features a young couple, the tech geek male half of which buys a fancy-ass camera to record the weird stuff his student girlfriend claims has been happening around the house. For him, it’s a bit of fun alongside all the other techno toys he plays with. For her, matters are more serious — this isn’t the first time something like this has happened, and it seems linked to her rather than the house.

That simple dynamic between the couple informs much of what transpires, as spooky shit does indeed happen and tensions raise between him and her. Not rocket science, but when it’s performed in an impeccably naturalistic style by actors who don’t look like Hollywood’s typical buffed and shiny types, it has an air of credibility that’s critical to the film’s success.

What was interesting was the response of a lively young audience to all this. Which broadly broke down into how girls responded, and what boys did. I was…fortunate enough…to sit between groups of each. For the girls, the film was a communal experience — they asked each other if certain bits they’d heard about were about to happen and said they’d hold hands when they did. For boys, it was more of a rite of passage — prove you’re not scared by the film by making comments which establish you as the funniest in your group…or indeed, the whole cinema.

I’d forgotten how crass teenage boys can be, and a lot of their comments were crude and misogynistic, inviting the female actor to show her breasts and making suggestions as to the bedroom antics of the characters. Since they spent much of the time in the bedroom at night, this meant ample opportunity for the actors to be coached in sexual technique by 14 year old lads. No wonder, I realised, that teenage girls are flocking to Twilight: New Moon, in which young women are wooed by emo vampires and handsome werewolves: Britain’s teenage boys might be devils, but they’re not silver-tongued.

The cinema did quiet down when tension rose in many cases, demonstrating the power of timeless techniques to captivate attention. And Peli did at least one original and clever thing that showed a smart understanding of the horror genre and how to subvert it. Normally in films of this type, there is an expert who comprehends the nature of the evil at hand, and passes on that knowledge to the protagonist, who has to to do whatever themselves because of the tendency of the expert to die before they get the the chance to do their thing.

In this case, the expert — a professor — appears early in the film, to establish that it’s likely a demon behind what’s going on. And comes back later, when things have got out of hand. At which point, the prof hightails it from the house because he’s so scared. It’s a simple but brilliant move establishing just how dismal things are looking for the protagonists.

That said, it’s also a sneaky way of setting up a sequel. The expert alluded to an even greater expert who would be able to come in a few days and give the pesky demon some exorcise, but the film ends before that comes about. And leaves open the distinct possibility of that alpha expert getting involved in the next part of what could become a franchise. I don’t need to resort to occult tools to indicate the likelihood of this occurrence: cold hard cash points to its inevitability.

You’ve got to hand it to the people involved in Russian intelligence. Given the one we met in tonight’s Spooks I’m now convinced they spend their time playing in string quartets to relax, chewing over reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and doing crosswords in Mandarin. This, at any rate, was the impression given by Lucas, who’d spent four years being interrogated by Oleg, only to find that Oleg was now in London, and wanted to meet him at the White Cube — presumably wanting to check out the capital’s art scene while he got on with a spot of espionage.

All well so far, and the references to Trollope and Dickens further cemented Oleg’s cultural gravitas. But I got the sense Oleg knew his 19th century literature more than he knew Lucas. Mention was made to the fact that Oleg knew the inside of Lucas’s head inside out, but there seemed little evidence of this penetrating insight, or sense from Lucas of what it felt like to be confronted once again by his tormentor. Whether that was how David Farr wrote things, or a function of a script development process that emphasised moving the story forward at the expense of character insight, I obviously can’t say.

As torturers go, Oleg wasn’t a match for young David Platt on Coronation Street, but to be fair we weren’t seeing that side of his character. Instead, he’s in London to warn MI5 of a plot to…well, blow stuff up is what it amounts to. He reckons he’s got inside info — for a price. But will the Brits pay up?

Something failed to convince about this episode, and ditto the last Spooks I caught. Which is a shame. At its best, Spooks has brought intelligent drama about world issues to a mainstream audience that might otherwise shy away from issues of geopolitics. And it’s done so by combining that gravitas with characters you can root for and a good bit of whizzbang action. This time out — I’m not so sure. The whole business of Oleg and Lucas being in contact seemed unnecessarily protracted to take in a false start: I felt shortchanged of story, unusual for a series in which I’ve sometimes had to strain to keep up with the amount of story information.

Lucas, incidentally, sports the kind of Russian prison tattooes that have cropped up in the media a few times of late, for instance in Croneberg’s Eastern Promises, and in magazine supplements I’ve chanced on. Never mind the significance though — what really matters is that it’s eye candy, as is Lucas’s American lover, who is seen topless. Something to please everyone I guess, and another sign that Spooks is changing by getting all sexed up.

At least the series is looking for ways to stay topical. The previous episode featured a gang of anti-capitalist cyberterrorists, tapping into concerns about international banking and using the internet as a plot device in interesting ways: the public, or at any rate those not watching kittens tumble round spindryers on YouTube, got to vote on which of the assembled billionaires they had captured would be executed. Not a bad idea, come to think: it might give the likes of Jedward something to think about if the stakes of losing X Factor were more lasting than 15 minutes of fame.

Critical response to the Coen Brothers is interesting. A lot of people appreciate their witty and artful style, but question whether there’s any substance to go with it. That may have been a valid point for quite a few of their films, but No Country For Old Men should have made abundantly clear that the Coens are serious men beneath their playful surface. That film, make no mistake, was about death, and tackled the subject with suitable gravitas even if some people got caught in the trappings and believed they were watching a thriller with a cop-out ending.

Now they’re back, and A Serious Man is another film that establishes them as perhaps America’s most consistently interesting filmmakers of recent times. And yes, as the title suggests, this is serious business. Mortality is once again under review, though the emphasis here is less on the end of it all than the fascinating matter of how to cope with the vagaries of existence, and whether the journey we take through life has any meaning or is merely a question of coping with randomness.

In the thick of it is Professor Larry Gopnik, who is not having an easy time. His wife’s affections have gone from him to widower Sy Ableman, universally respected in his (Jewish) community and understood to be in want of a new life partner. Even Larry acknowledges Sy’s moral authority, and — accepting that his marriage is at an end — moves into a motel with his hapless brother. Beset with gambling debts, and later accused of sodomy, Larry’s brother is in a real mess, and Larry would love to support him. The two men make an emotional connection in an abandoned swimming pool, a redemptive moment that seems to signal a new beginning…but things aren’t that simple in Larry’s life.

Seeking guidance — Larry is also contending with his son, who has joined a record club in his name; and a moral dilemma about what to do regarding a student who tries to bribe him after failing an exam — the professor turns to three rabbis for some hint of how to conduct himself. From one rabbi he gets nothing beyond a rambling yarn about a dentist who discovers that one of his patients has Jewish letters marked at the back of his teeth, a story which promises everything but is ultimately as baffling to the rabbi as the people he tells it to. Which leaves Marshak, the senior rabbi…and he only speaks to teens when they have their bar mitzvahs, spending the rest of the time in bearded contemplation.

It’s all too much for Larry, and he is left reeling about his place in the universe, his responsibilities, and what the meaning of any of it all may be. It doesn’t help Larry that his academic discipline is physics, and his particular fascination is quantum theory. In a world where seemingly anything can happen at any moment, with meaning ever-elusive if there is any to be found at all, how can a man rely on anything, and how can his family and community rely on him?

There are no answers, just elusive hints as to the pattern of reality. Larry has a car crash at the same time as one Sy Ableman dies in. Marijuana smoked with his foxy neighbour slows the universe down to a crawl and gives his mind a chance to roam, but no solutions are forthcoming. Is it any wonder the one rabbi is so taken with the story of the engraved teeth when life seems so resistant to revealing meaning?

All of which might sound mighty, well, serious. And it is, to a point. But remember too that this is a film from the Coen Brothers, and the big issues are wrapped in and around healthy doses of dark humour, visual splendour, and skilful use of music. A Serious Man is a fine film that makes me wonder all the more what the Coens will be creating for our delectation as they age and, perhaps, become more serious themselves.

People ask me what script doctoring entails, and the best answer is ‘it depends on the script’. Sometimes it’s a matter of ensuring the structure serves the story well. Sometimes it’s about finding ways to bring characters to life. And yes, an understanding of how a script works is of course part of the toolkit. More importantly though, I see my role as developing a relationship with the writer/filmmaker that will help them make the most of their material, to bring out its and their best qualities in ways that will shape the way they approach writing and filmmaking in the future.

Case in point: I had a meeting with a filmmaker who’s done some shorts, and has a knack for editing other peoples’, about what kind if feature he might like to make. He started to tell me about this science fiction epic, and as a fan of science fiction and his style I looked forward to what he was going to say. Only, what came out of his mouth was dry, unexciting. I figured if he had a problem making it fun in an informal pitch, what hope was there of imbuing the project with the life it needed to go through rewriting and pre-production and the rest of it.

Then I asked him what the inspiration for this space yarn was. It was like a switch had been flicked. Suddenly animated, he started telling me about his childhood, spent partly in Africa. And a particular bar, which he’d served at as a 12 year old and where the clientele included former spies and military experts who’d worked across the continent and been involved in its intrigues and battles over the last forty years.

Excuse me? All of a sudden I was seeing on my mental cinema screen a multi-strand narrative where several stories entwined about this fabulous location, where a young boy served beer to mercenaries and assassins, a sweeping epic about post-colonial Africa and the continued influence of the west on countries striving for independence. How come the guy who’d lived through this wanted to put robots and lasers in place of this rich seam of personal material? Who cares? What concerned me was hauling that story out of him and getting it on paper. If it fucked him up in the process, well then he’d better do a good job on the script so as to be able to pay a therapist’s bills later.

In truth, I do have some sensitivity to the personal issues that can come up when someone is developing a screenplay. I spent several highly rewarding sessions meeting a woman who wanted to turn her life story into a film. My job was to be a counsellor as much as a hardnosed film pro, and it was a privilege to see her act out scenes that she’d never been able to capture on paper because of her serious dylsexia, bringing raw memories of a painful childhood to life in the back room of a city centre cafe.

Right now I’m working with someone on a feature that will be shot next year. Again, the process is defined by the person. My role at times is to provide tools for the filmmaker to explore his story from different perspectives and learn from them. That has entailed pretending to be one of his favourite directors before now, and even writing essays from their perspective. We’ve also explored ways to heighten the mythic aspects of the story, and I’ve made specific suggestions about making some scenes more extreme to really exploit their cinematic potential. Sometimes my role is to keep an eye out for the whole story, and see that it functions. At other times, I aim to provoke new concepts and images from the heart of the raw material that makes it tick. And yes, I can do script reports for what they’re worth — more valuable in my experience is the ongoing relationship than the paper trail it produces.

Let me tell you about G. In his teens, he met a young woman he adored, and they had three children. To support the family, he worked as a builder’s sidekick. The builder introduced him to amphetamines to help him work long hours and bring in more money, but it wasn’t long before he was spending that extra money on more amphetamines, and then…

Fast forward. G’s problems with speed are such that he is declared mentally ill. Which is true enough: phets fuck your head up. But the label ‘mentally ill’ gives G a label to hide behind when he’s dealing with the authorities. And he’s doing a lot of that now, his relationship having fallen apart.

For a while, G is put in a ward with men in their seventies and beyond. He steals from them, offers his body to them in return for money that he spends on drugs. And moves from there to a hostel where he is ultimately expelled for dealing drugs to other residents. By this time he’s using crack and heroin as well. It’s possible that by introducing another hostel resident to amphetamines that he initiated an incident in which that resident attacked a staff member with a knife. That person’s life was saved principally because a colleague also on duty had serious martial art training.

I mention G — a real person — because he is unquestionably the closest I have come to meeting a worthless human being. But does such a vile individual deserve to be killed because of his socially corrosive behaviours? That’s the question which underpins Harry Brown, a British film of sombre power which I urge you to see as soon as you can.

Michael Caine plays the title character, a pensioner and former marine who loses his wife and best friend in rapid succession, the latter to the gang of feral youths who rule the rundown estate the action plays out on. Writer Gary Young’s script is stark and apparently simple, each piece placed precisely to create a morally complex story that’s a world away from most vigilante films. Daniel Barber’s direction is terse, a sober palette and well-judged music bringing out the atmosphere and nuances of Young’s writing. And Caine’s performance is subtly powerful, proving once again that given the right material the man really can act.

For the most part, the story is credible in its action. Arguably the climax is overegged, but to me the weight of the emotions and ideas justified a move into high stakes territory that’s a touch Hollywood in comparison to what’s come before. It’s powerful stuff, make no mistake, and bridges lo fi realism with a more mythic dimension — the subway tunnel that the gang hangs out in is a potent symbol of the hell that the estate has become, and if you’re thinking that the dealers Michael Caine despatches at the start of the film are caricatured I can assure you they’re credible to anyone who’s met the likes of G and his associates.

Harry Brown is a potent social drama that would be easy to mistake for an action film, and some may look on it in that way. It’s evenhanded in its portrayal of the people who Harry targets: it’s clear that they’re victims not just of a gun-toting Caine but a fucked-up welfare system and the abandoned families in its charge. Equally though, they’re morally bankrupt thugs perpetuating a culture of violent drug-related crime. Put those two pictures together, and Michael Caine in the middle of them packing a .38, and it’s clear why this is a rich film that will inspire debate.

As for G…I wouldn’t kill him. Not myself. But I can understand why others would. If he does come to a sticky end, it will likely not be at the hand of a vigilante, but of someone in the criminal culture he’s part of and ineptly tried to rip off. Will I mourn him? I doubt it. But I’d spare a thought for his former partner and their children, victims of a weak and callous user who loved amphetamines more than he loved himself.

Terry Gilliam has provided cinema with some truly striking images. Anyone who’s seen Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen will have been treated to a phantasmagoria of memorable sequences. But then there’s the Gilliam who brought us The Fisher King and its fascination with Jungian imagery, something that’s come to a head in his new film, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.

As you’d expect, the film is a visual treat at times, but a mightily laboured one, co-scripted by Gilliam himself. Ultimately it’s about Gilliam himself, and his conviction that he’s creating magic for a world that wants hamburgers instead. Dr Parnassus is the elderly figure standing in for Gilliam, a bearded man who may be wise or may simply have lost it. That’s what we’re led to think at first anyway, before the Imaginarium is revealed in all its glory — a fantastic opportunity for transformation that can lead people to a very personal kind of heaven or hell.

Conceptually it’s interesting enough, but there’s something tired-looking about Gilliam’s trademark version of spectacle in a world where Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman are peddling equally unlikely redefinitions of reality. Besides, they’re inhabiting this territory with something to say, and it’s really not at all clear that Gilliam has any substance to his work at this point.

Imaginarium is like watching Gilliam undergo a therapy session which he’s managed to persuade someone else to foot the bill for. But I really don’t see why I should have to suffer for Gilliam’s art. And that’s exactly what I did when there was some toe-curling stuff between Dr P and his daughter — is she 12 or is she 16? Same again when Tom Waits turns up as the devil. It’s a pretty credible performance, Tom getting maximum points for using his distinctive voice to good effect.

Somehow it all seems pointless. When everything is so massively Symbolic, then nothing has significance. Amid all the tiresomely surreal imagery, Gilliam has forgotten what a story is, intent as he is on bringing to life the film’s central image, that of Dr P’s magical mirror.

Mirrors only ever show who’s looking into them versions of themselves. Stare into them too long and the effect can be pretty psychedelic without actually meaning anything. And that’s what we’re presented with here, as Gilliam rolls out one startling image after another. With Gilliam himself cripplingly self-conscious about the yarn he’s telling, there’s no room for the true richness that comes when a creator loses themselves in a story.

What does Gilliam see in the mirror? A crazed dandy trying to bring magic into a world that doesn’t deserve it. Which makes you wonder how he ever gets a film made at all, if that’s what he thinks of his audience.

Contrast the riches of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Donnie Darko, or Oldboy with this overdecorated bauble, and it’s clear that Gilliam is treading water at a time when other filmmakers are surging ahead. Whether he’s got it in him to renew his focus, or prefers to examine himself from yet more angles in his doubtless baroque shaving mirror, is a matter for Gilliam to decide.