This article is based on my work as a screenwriting teacher and my growing frustration with the hegemony of classical dramaturgy, which lays like a wet blanket over creative writing and, not least, reduces film writing to a narrative process without regard or humility for the multimodal qualities and capabilities of film to create sensual experiences for an entangled audience. This article wants to propose another, artistic, method that I call cinematic world-building. The purpose of the method is to give the students a greater understanding of the audiovisual elements’ ability - as units and as cooperating constellations - to build moods, content, and themes without support from narrative and to develop their stories from cinematic spaces. After a few years of research to make it consistent, I tried the screenwriting method’s first steps in a course with a very good reception from the students. Some shortcomings were discovered, but above all, the method was felt to have good potential for further development.