BUSINESS

A Year in Quotes Part III

share:

 Compiled by Christopher McKittrick.

For this three part series, I have undertaken the wholly enjoyable task of re-reading the articles first published in Creative Screenwriting in 2014, and choosing some of my favourite quotes. Some are from famous actors and screenwriters, some from less familiar faces, but all have something of interest to say. And if you want to read more from them, I have included a link to the complete article at the end of each quote.

Agree? Disagree? Then use the comments section at the end of the article to let me know!

November 3 – Damien Chazelle

Damien Chazelle

Damien Chazelle

I have trouble facing the blank page. I usually have to sink to a level of self-hatred before I can really get proper words on the page. I wish it was easier. When I was a kid, creativity was innocence and fun. I would procrastinate on homework to do creative things like drawing and writing stories. I wish I could tap back into that. I don’t think I ever had a problem filling the blank page back then. The more you do it professionally and the higher the stakes become, the harder it gets to actually do it, ironically.

Whiplash: a ‘Sports Movie’ about Jazz Drumming

November 7 –  Chris Williams

Chris Williams

Chris Williams

Bambi is my first childhood memory, it’s the first thing I can recall. It’s the movie that told me that my parents were going to die. There’s not a more profound thing to tell a kid, but it did it so beautifully. So we’re not afraid to take on challenging or emotional things, as long as we feel we have something to say about it, and we can do it in a sophisticated way.

It can sometimes fight human nature where you want to want to be told everything you do is amazing, your movie’s great, don’t change a thing, but if ultimately that’s all you ever hear, and people are afraid to tell you they disagree with something, then your movie can never face those challenges, and never get better. So we credit a lot of those successes of those films to the environment that we work in.

Subverting Expectations in Big Hero 6: A Family Film with Emotional Depth

November 12 – Suju Vijayan

Suju Vijayan

Suju Vijayan

For me the key to writing dialogue is to get the character inside and out and then that voice will come out of you. Some are easier to get than others….  It often helps me to think of the actor who would ideally play the character and then channel that voice to an extent. My early drafts definitely have weak, on the nose, ill-conceived dialogue. It’s only in the rewrite that I really get there.

Poorly done exposition is definitely a pet peeve of mine. It really irks me when someone explains something to someone who clearly doesn’t require the explanation just so the audience gets it. It always sticks out like a sore thumb. I know how hard it is to do exposition well – I’m not downplaying that – but I think the best movies dole it out in a way that never feels like you’re being told something. It’s just natural and organic and, in the end, you get all the information you need without ever realizing it.

The Playback Singer: “Tea-related Character Development”

November 13 – Steve Conrad

Steve Conrad

Steve Conrad

The skill is the craft of creating drama through recognizable events for movies that traffic in real events by finding the traumatic moments inside might be considered the quirks of a pretty regular day or a set of common events. Challenge yourself to find the critical hour of that day, the critical inner action that’s going to affect your future success or failure. Getting practiced at that is a skill for those real stories.

I’ve always been in this really narrow compartment in our business insofar as the films that I’m able to do, when they actually miraculously happen, they are usually filmed because an actor who has some sway decides to do them and that hasn’t changed for me. Generally when anything gets off the ground for me it’s because some 900 pound gorilla decided that he wanted to do it that year. Without that, none of things I do would be made. It hasn’t really affected me in the sense that I’ve not written inside of genres that are in the moment, like superhero movies, because that’s not the sort of thing I do. But it’s still always been tough, really tough for me to get a movie made. It remains that way, but in that respect nothing has changed.

I very seldom write seven page scenes anymore. I’ve realized it’s just impossible to sustain in an editing room… I try to eliminate those. It was not so much because of my directing but watching movies get focus grouped and test screened. You  want to fast forward to the greatest hits in the movie so you can count on a good scene coming up to try to draw a reaction from the audience. You try to make sure your movie has those moments that audiences can come together over. That has become a new objective for me in the instances that I’ve been responsible for a movie all the way through. It’ll make you wish for more moments that will draw the audience together.

The Secret Life of Screenwriting

November 18 – E. Max Frye

E. Max Frye

E. Max Frye

I think when writing a script you always ask yourself what a person’s goals are. What are they after and what do they want? There’s a superficial answer with these three characters in the movie and then there’s the real answer. The movie is about the real answer, what these people really want. Then, what are they willing to do to attain that?

Foxcatcher: A Sports Story with No Home Run

November 20 – Jonathan Nolan

Jonathan Nolan

Jonathan Nolan

I view my job in screenwriting mode to pack ten pounds into a five-pound bag. Laying out a feast…’here are ten cool ideas – use four of them to make the film’.

I believe that the writer is critical to getting a film made. But film is a director’s medium – everything is secondary to the image; otherwise it’s a play. It’s shame that they are making bigger and fewer films, but I don’t mind the renewed emphasis on spectacle and cinema. There are ways to make the Terry Malick films or Kubrick films—all an emphasis on the vision, this hallucination in a dark box. That’s where the writer has to let go a little bit; allow them to go do their work.

Jonathan Nolan on Interstellar 

November 25 – Andrey Zvyagintsev

Andrey Zvyagintsev

Andrey Zvyagintsev

I like to see movies that expose the truth. The job of the artist is to show things as they are, to take a critical look, but not to sway opinion.

Leviathan: The Last American Hero

December 2 – Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby

My only cardinal rule if I’m working as a producer is, does the author know this is going on? Make sure you tell him or her. Other than that, I think you just have to do what you’ve got to do to make a book into a movie, and a movie is a different thing. The people whose work I’ve adapted so far have been so incredibly generous and very smart about that.

Externalising Inner Turmoil in Wild 

December 8 – Nicholas Pileggi

Nicholas Pileggi

Nicholas Pileggi

I think we write the scenes as best we can and sometimes when you’re lucky, the actor has really gotten into that character and something occurs to the actor to try something in addition or better to the script. When your actors are people like Joe Pesci and Bob [DeNiro], they really can improvise. In the “You make me laugh scene”, Joe had actually seen something like that happen in a mob social club with a gangster. He tried it in that scene and I think it’s one of the best things in the movie. The people on the set had no idea what he was going to say and that’s why they all looked so shocked. Joe told Marty [Scorsese], “I’m gonna try something, just keep going.” Joe got started and their fear was that these were lines they hadn’t heard. What’s going on here? And you can see it on their faces. Ray didn’t have a clue what Joe was doing. Marty kept the cameras going and Ray went with it.

You can’t write about the events of these lives just talking about their professional guise. You gotta talk about them as complete characters. Usually, they’re married. What’s the relationship with their wives; with their kids; how does that impact the narrative? The other thing I always did was talk to the wives. Geri was dead by the time I wrote Casino, but I got a hold of her daughter, her sister, who was invaluable, one of her friends who was a hooker, people who drove her around in cars. I went to the courts and I got all the depositions she’d ever given in various cases. In her will, she wrote letters to her daughter. One of those letters is in the book. It’s very important to have complete characters because then people forget they’re reading non-fiction.I get a lot of kids coming to me that are smart, a lot smarter than I was at their age. Now they’re out of college, they know movies and they would like to get into screenwriting. And there have been enough people who have succeeded so you know the goal is there. But what they don’t have is they don’t have any stories, in a sense, because they haven’t done anything. They haven’t lived in a way…most of them have not been the subjects of terrible deprivation. They have good teeth, they don’t have peptic ulcers that no one’s taken care of, they’re not going blind with glaucoma because their mothers haven’t watched their eyes, their mothers aren’t drug addicts where they’re beaten up by boyfriends. There’s a whole series of wonderful material that they’ve happily not had to endure!

So my suggestion to a lot of them, is if you’ve got the time is go out and (get a job) and keep notes. It doesn’t matter what you do. In other words, you can get a job in a company, if you could ever get a job as a reporter somewhere in the mid-West, it doesn’t matter where it is, you don’t have to work for the Times, you’re not going to be a journalist. What you’re going to be is someone in the street finding out what happens. Even if you got a job as a legal liaison, a community affairs worker for the police department, without even a badge, someone who works in a station house, you would see more about life, especially if you are artistically inclined and want to do that work. It’s so much better to get that kind of reality-based experience for a couple of years, any kind of experience. Work in a Big Mac place, whatever is available to you in a professional capacity, you’ll find somewhere in there the idea for a movie. And in there is where you’re going to find a movie that no one has ever seen. That experience you have is your experience alone. Work experience is invaluable because as a result of that experience, and the whole time you’re taking notes, people are exposing themselves to you like you would never get them to expose themselves.

Humanizing Criminals: Goodfellas and Casino

December 11 – Nick Simon

Nick Simon

Nick Simon

That’s the best part about being a writer, too. When it’s just you and your writing partner coming up with ideas and stories, nobody’s telling you not to do anything. So you get to write whatever crap you want. It can be great. It can be awful. The key is to sit down and do it.

The thing that we also took away from getting these movies made is that we really didn’t have an audience in mind for our first script. That was just a movie we wanted to see because we loved that kind of film. I love this type of thriller, and I love these kind of throwback things here. So, ultimately, there was never really an audience in mind. Ultimately, though, if you’re trying to sell something, and you’re trying to make a living at this, you have to have an audience in mind before you write anything. Who’s going to go pay $15 or $12 to see this in a theater?

The Pyramid: Learning from Wes Craven 

December 17 – Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh

If the proposition is that a screenplay should have three acts, I would say that’s not rocket science, because you can’t help but have three acts. You set up the premise. You challenge the status quo. Then you resolve this. Those are the three acts. That’s all there is to it.

I personally believe in a well-structured film. I don’t see the screenplay as something that should be separate from the film. I don’t make a screenplay, I make a film. But it still has to be well-structured, there’s no getting round it. It’s essential and as important as having a well-structured building. But I have little time for the industry that has grown up around theorizing this.

There are things you find in my films, which I don’t know how I or anyone would arrive at by sitting in a room writing a script and then going about interpreting that script. Things that are idiosyncratic, behavioral, the space between words, organic sorts of things. That isn’t to say I think writing good scripts and interpreting them is in any way not a good thing, as brilliant films have been made since the beginning in a conventional manner, with scripts. There are people who have the skills to do all of those things. But, for me, it’s about integrating the casting, the performances, the direction, the writing, through one unified process in a particular kind of genre, which is my own idiosyncratic one.

The medium is film. People ask me about how I improvise and then add the screenplay. I never think about the screenplay. I think about the writing, the literary position of what people say and the rhythms of it and the cadences of it – all those are of consideration because I’m a writer – but the actual existence of a screenplay as an artifact in its own right is no more important than the plans for a building. You don’t think about the building plan, you think about what the architect has achieved in the building.

Up until the talkies came in people made films in a very liberated way. They didn’t have to worry about scripts. Back in the silent days in Los Angeles people got up every morning thinking “what shall we do today?” and off they went. Then the talkies came in and it became terribly script-bound. I wouldn’t want to ever be misquoted as saying you should never make movies with scripts, because of course that works. There are some great, great films that have had scripts.

Mr. Leigh on Mr. Turner

December 18 – Dan Sterling

Dan Sterling

Dan Sterling

It’s extremely important to write women well, to make them realistic, funny and flawed, which is even more true in feature films where one or two or three, and often none of the main characters are women. With TV it’s tougher to be lazy and inaccurate in your portrayal of women due to the focus on sexuality and likeability. You have male viewers being repulsed by women that are too overbearing, and female viewers who are especially harder on women. I try to take notes and instead of complain, take opportunities to be more creative.

No film has ever sparked a war; comedy makes fun of everyone. Comedians shouldn’t be held accountable for acts of violence – and those we satirize shouldn’t be silenced. Sarah Palin is hilarious, and I would never want her silenced. It informs the debate. The problem is the people who make the threats. If Iran made a comedy titled Eat Shit and Die, America, I’d be the first guy in line – but then again I have a Pollyanna view. If all countries made satirical movies about each other, and that was the only way we all fought – what a great world we’d live in.

The Interview: an “Act of War”

December 22 – David Guion & Michael Handelman

Michael Handelman and David Guion

Michael Handelman and David Guion

MH: There are a lot of writing teams who split up work and have one person writing one scene and the other writing another. Frankly, that sounds a lot more efficient. [Laughs] We sit here with a single computer, take turns typing, and we hash it all out.

DG: We do a lot of that kind of thing, and we’ve also done a lot of uncredited script doctoring where we come in for short periods of time and try to fix something. In both cases you are storytelling, but you’re also solving a puzzle. You have to keep certain pieces in certain positions, you have to respect certain conventions of the film that you’re in or the universe that was created in the previous films while at the same time trying to inject something new and fun and telling a fresh story. There is a lot of moving of puzzle pieces and structural and logistical problem solving that comes with that. It’s different from creating your own story from scratch and building your own universe from the ground up.

MH: Working on a sequel on the other hand, there’s something sort of nice in it which is that you know how these characters talk, you know how they act, you know who’s playing them. You can envision exactly who they are. You’re not creating these characters abstractly and hoping that someone will embody them eventually the way you picture it. You’re writing for preexisting people. It actually makes it a lot easier to create the dialogue and you can think, “Oh, if we put these two together here, what kind of argument would they get into? What kind of funny situation would arise?”

MH: I think at its worst, screenwriting can be a helpless and terror-filled experience. But I think at its best the fact that you can’t control it can be very fruitful. When you’re collaborating with really good people, the adverse of that happens. You’re getting credit for other people’s great improvisations. In this case if Shawn or Ben were very enthusiastic about an idea, that enabled us to roll with it and take different directions that we wouldn’t otherwise have done.

DG: One thing that I never realized until we started to have movies produced is even if you are the only credited writer on a project, you’re only a partial contributor to what ends up on screen. I’m not even talking about directorial choices. Even lines or much of what you’re implementing are ideas coming from other people. It cuts both ways. Ricky Gervais is great at improvisation, and we get credit for it. [Laughs]

Night at the Museum: Writing for Ben Stiller and Robin Williams

December 23 – James Lapine

James Lapine

James Lapine

I’ve written about a half dozen screenplays and a lot of it just depends on whether they’re self-generated – which some of them were, they were original ideas that I wrote. Some of them were adaptations, some of them were rewrites, some were for producers…but this was the first time I actually wrote with a director, and I liked that very much. My wife is a screenwriter and we’ve been married almost 30 years, so watching what she’s gone through in the screenwriting world has been entirely informative in its own way.

In theatre, the writer is pretty much the king. The writer really has a lot of sway and that’s not, as you must know, the case in movies so much. That’s more of a director’s medium. So I think as for me being open, I really wanted to write the adaptation – but I also didn’t want to be a prisoner to it, particularly seeing as it was my initial creation. The irony was that I was more willing to change things than I think Rob [Marshall] was! Rob really wanted to hone pretty closely to the original material, so it was interesting. But as a writer in general I’m pretty open – sometimes maybe too open. I just think you need fluidity – you need the free flow of ideas and if you get rigid, particularly adapting something, or rigid to a precept of ideas, it often can really work against the excitement that can come out of writing and directing.

Into the Woods: Writing Without Limitations

December 24 – Shawn Christensen

Shawn Christensen

Shawn Christensen

As a screenwriter I had sold four or five screenplays – two commercial scripts, which were food-on-the-table spec sales, and then three or four smaller movies – and they weren’t panning out the way I wanted. They were getting shelved or made into movies that were completely rewritten. It was a really horrific experience to be honest. One of those situations where you get rewritten and no one talks to you for a year and you don’t meet the director and yet you go to the premiere and see your name up on the screen with people you’ve never met and had no association with. I was questioning the industry and questioning my writing. I had to get down to basics and make my own little films.

How do you convert an Oscar-winning short into a feature?

December 29 – Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater

On one hand, for all the time I spend writing it’s kind of an insult, but on the other hand it’s the ultimate compliment. The screenwriter in me is insulted, but the director in me is complimented because I want it to feel real. The only way I know how to do that is to actually have it be very tight and rehearsed for it to feel loose. The actors have to know it and feel it so well, so that’s more of the filmmaking process that brings that out. It does start with words on page, believe it or not.

I would think every film ever made or any script every written you feel like you’re challenged. I don’t know anyone who’s like, “Oh, this is easy.” I mean, what are you doing if you’re not trying to break new ground? I think the challenge is just inherent in the form itself. It’s always going to be tough. I think you just get obsessed with a story you’re compelled to tell and then that’s the fun part. Then the challenges present themselves. It’s usually in how to tell it. There are a lot of stories that seem to have limitations that make it impossible to pull off, but that’s you challenging yourself as a storyteller to do something you haven’t done before. I want to tell a story in a new way.

I think I have spent much of my life thinking there were new ways to tell stories or that cinema had this endless ability to perceive of things differently from other mediums that I hadn’t necessarily seen yet. There are so many stories in the world, but how to tell a story is the fun, challenging area. Sometimes a more traditional approach is the best way to tell a story, and I’ve made movies that are pretty straightforward and clean in their storytelling, so I revel in that and take on other challenges with the film that are more daunting, like making a period film. Every film feels like it has its cross to bear and has something that is going to make it very difficult.

I think I always approached film from more of a structural point of view of storytelling. I’m always finding a form, and often that form has a lot to do with the time element of the story versus the plot. There’s a time element to all of our lives just inherently and the way we process every day, so I think in a lot of my storytelling methodologies time has largely replaced the notions of what a plot is, which to me feels kind of constructed. Not that life doesn’t occasionally offer up a plot twist, but it’s always offering you time linearity. It is kind of funny that the guy who makes films in real time, which I’ve done a few times now and is a challenge, makes this time epic. I think it evens out my ratio. I think I’m back within the statistical norm! [Laughs] When you spent 4200 days in production on one film, it really changes your averages.

“I want to tell a story in a new way” – Linklater on Boyhood

2014 quotes featuredIf you enjoyed these quotes, don’t forget to check out A Year in Quotes Part I!

2014 quotes featuredIf you enjoyed these quotes, don’t forget to check out A Year in Quotes Part II!

share:

image

Christopher McKittrick has interviewed many top screenwriters for Creative Screenwriting Magzine. His publications include entries on Billy Wilder and Jim Henson in 100 Entertainers Who Changed America (Greenwood). In addition to Creative Screenwriting Magazine, McKittrick writes about film for <a href="http://www.ThoughtCo.com.">ThoughtCo.com</a>

Improve Your Craft