Nobody's permission required

I make documentary films about things I believe matter, and every documentary requires access, which requires convincing someone to let you in, which requires patience I do not entirely have. I have been working on a documentary about seasonal agricultural workers in Almería since 2022 and the permission process has taken most of that time. Screenwriting requires nobody's permission. This is the thing I keep returning to. I write a character into a room and nobody can refuse me the room. I write screenplays for features I don't have the money to make, which is not unusual in the Spanish independent sector, and I write them as a different kind of creative practice, disciplined and precise and unobstructed. I live in Malasaña and I write at a café on Calle del Espíritu Santo on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The screenplay I'm working on is a political thriller set in 1982, the year of the first PSOE electoral victory, following a woman in the Interior Ministry during the transition. The period interests me because everything was in motion and people were making decisions with incomplete information about what kind of country was coming. That's the condition my documentary subjects are also in, and the condition my scripts try to inhabit.