Pacing the dimmed interior and wearing corduroy pants and aged Converse Chucks, Tom Rickman held chorus to a band of cineastes and writers alike. Rickman, the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of 1980’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” spoke to a crowd of students Wednesday night in Gorgas Library.

Rickman, who is working on a project that is in the negotiation stage, took a few days off at the request of longtime friend Billy Field.

“It means a lot to me personally that he would take time out of his life and do this,” said Field, a filmmaker and faculty member at the University.

Though Rickman has achieved respect as a screenwriter, he said he prides himself as “being able to throw myself into a project and dramatize it.”

He started at the University of Illinois, where he adapted a Flannery O’Connor short story and made a movie that earned him recognition at the American Film Institute. Also, while on the campus he started a theatrical group known as In Session that performed in an abandoned train depot.

After being recognized by AFI, he was quickly picked up by MGM, and before he knew it, his name was emboldened in black and white as the credits rolled. Since then, he has been part of several films.

Though he writes his own material, Rickman is also part of the Sundance Lab and has started his own writing clinic in Tahoe. He said is an avid believer in what the written word can do.

The discussion for most of the night was conveyed through watching clips of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and discussing the process of understanding how one goes from the internalization of those images to how they make the page and eventually the screen.

“Screenwriting is trying to get the images on the page,” Rickman said, because, after all, “movies move.”

When someone asked what makes a good script, he replied, “Energy, you find places to stage something that give it energy, because movies are energy.” And when someone asked him what his favorite script of all time was, he stammered for a moment and then replied with “Treasure on the Sierra Madre,” discussing the themes, dialogue, and how the characters are inhabited by the actors.

Rickman said he draws on all sorts of inspiration from Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to Sam Shepard.

Both Rickman and Field said anyone can make movies in today’s world. All it takes is a camcorder, some actors, and a computer. Rickman said Hollywood is changing, and he said it is exciting to see where it has gone.

He said movies are being made for more money these days, and that the person who can tackle the Internet will be onto something.

Field said, “Now any school can be a film school… If something inside you tells you that you have a movie to make, then get out and do it.”