To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first
writing a story. Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain
measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere, and these it
seems to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the
dull shorthand of a script. One can reproduce an effect caught in
another medium but one cannot make the first act of creation in script
form. One must have the sense of more material than one need to draw
on. "The Third Man," therefore, though never intended for publication,
had to start as a story before it began those apparently interminable
transformations from one treatment to another....
"The Third Man" was never intended to be more than the raw material
for a picture.... The film, in fact, is better than the story because
it is in this case the finished state of the story.