The screenwriters I interviewed in 2016 wrote films that had a wide range of success. Their worldwide grosses range from $18,000 to $1.1 billion. Yet each one began with a writer or a writing team that put their words to paper, and ended with those ideas creating a film that reached audiences.
The following pieces of advice come from ten very different writers working on very different films, yet they each speak about key elements of the screenwriting process.
To read the full interviews, click on the link at the bottom of each quotation for the complete article.
Screenwriting is collaboration.
I believe if you’re not interested in collaborating, you should pick a different career. The nature of screenwriting is collaboration. I suppose there are times people write a script, send it to the world, and then never do anything else, though I have not seen it work. Usually even then somebody is handling scripting duties and problems that happen on set.
Writing can be so solitary, which I also like, but you shift gears and get into the trenches and deal with people whose work you admire. Quite frankly, that’s the most exciting part. When it’s Ridley Scott, collaboration is easy because I just revere him. Every day I would just look around and think, “Is that really Ridley Scott sitting there at the table? This is exciting!” [Laughs]. That’s the fun part of the job.
The screenplay as a technical document.
It takes an absolutely fundamentally different part of your brain to write a screenplay. It’s a very technical document that has quite specific rules. The work of art is the film at the end of the road, not this document that is about how to tell the story.
The development of the story – while working with a director in some cases – involves writing a really detailed treatment prose document that everyone can read and get a feel of what it is that we’re all trying to do. That is a really important part of the process even before we get to the blank page one of the screenplay. Then the document itself is super-technical.
On the other hand, I believe that if you want to write a screenplay that is a good emotional experience for anyone who’s reading it, you should somehow try to democratically reach a bunch of different people – producers, financers, actors, a director, production designer, costume designer, composer. You want a whole lot of people to be able to read this one all-purpose document, because you’re not writing different documents for composers and production designers.
Try to contain everything in there to the best of your ability in a poetic way, where readers can get excited because they’re seeing the movie on the screens inside their heads and feeling the emotions in their hearts and in their guts.
What you want to be doing is to create that excitement, and make people want to move forward, give you money for the film, audition for the film, and make the film in all of these different cases. Most of all, you want the director to say, “Yes, this fits my vision and this is the way I want to portray this incredible story.”
Ignore limitations of reality.
I write the story that I feel is the absolute best version of every scene, and then you let the experts figure out how to pull it off. I was on set one day and talking to some of the stunt guys about a very intricate stunt that they were trying to pull off involving some of the Arikara warriors scaling the cliffs with the river going by. It was huge and took a few days. I leaned over and told the guy, “Yeah, I wrote this thing in like fifteen minutes.” I think he wanted to toss me off the cliff.
Writers can create from the warmth of our desks and the real amazing guys are the ones who have to pull it off. My job is to make sure that the words on the page really grab people, and it’s on the other people to pull it off.
Acting teaches you how to write.
I was a professional actor for almost a decade, first in New York and then in Los Angeles. I did a lot of film and television. Quite honestly, it’s how I learned to write.
I never studied screenwriting. I never read any books about screenwriting or playwriting. I learned by being on the set and watching people work. I tried to figure out why I felt something worked or didn’t work.
I did the same thing when looking at scripts with the material I was given to work with as my own process of trying to understand structure, character, and dialogue, and why the writer was doing this or didn’t do this, or why this works or why it doesn’t work.
Beginning as an actor was very much part and parcel of my becoming a writer. I also think that because of that grounding I have a very clear appreciation on a gut level of the building blocks of dramatic structure. As a consequence, I know how to talk to actors in a way that I think is helpful.
Sometimes I’ve seen writers throw way too much at an actor when it’s a much more precise and finite kind of nudge that they need to get them going in the right direction. I’m sure that having been an actor has been helpful in terms of how I talk to actors and how I respond on a set.
I don’t think it’s the only way to become a screenwriter, but it’s how I became one. It was a critical part of what I am and how I became what I am.
Dialogue services an actor.
In television and film, there is only one performance fixed forever for your character. That dialogue will only be said once by one actor. Therefore, you have to do the opposite. You have to leave room for the actor’s creativity and you have to encourage the best possible performance out of the only actor who will ever speak that dialogue.
When you watch very fine actors work, you realize how much they can do with how little. You do not want to stuff that actor’s mouth full of long sentences with relative clauses, you don’t want to stifle the performance, and you don’t want to write on the nose with the characters saying out loud exactly what they’re thinking with no subtext to it.
You have to let the actor bring the subtext to life and write as economically as possible so that the actor’s facial expressions, gestures, and inner life is expressive underneath and around the dialogue. You want to get the maximum expressivity out of the actor to support that dialogue.
Robert McKee, Author of Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for the Page, Stage and Screen
The Eternal Now.
I don’t like flashbacks. What I did in Sully – and I try to do in anything that deals with the past impacting the present – involves a storytelling theory that I call “the eternal now.”
We carry with us everything that has happened, and not in an esoteric kind of way. We have it in us, and we are shaped by what has gone before. We have a handful of memories that we can easily access, but for the most part we forget the majority of our days. Then there is what is happening right now, and how this moment impacts our future. So it’s always eternally now.
Using that as a rule in storytelling, especially a subjective story around one particular hero and his journey, it allows for a camera to lean in a little closer, go into the actor’s eye, or drift past his shoulder and take you anywhere because you’re entering his bloodstream and memory.
As long as you come back to where you started that, then it’s not a flashback. It’s literally what the character is living through and allows the audience to join in on what could be very distancing, but works in reverse and makes us feel more in touch with Sully. It becomes more intimate.
Rewriting makes screenwriters better writers.
Everyone knows the saying “Writing is rewriting.” But when you’re essentially forced to take three or three-and-a-half years to rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite, it’s almost like performing a task forensically. In a way, you become clinical about it because you’re living in slow motion.
Imagine doing a task that you love and know how to do in slow motion over and over again. It gives you an edge. At least for me, it gives you an insight that I just think no other version of writing a script could ever give you. For that, I am so grateful.
Weirdly, doing it in slow motion for three years made me a faster writer. It’s almost like athletics – you train and practice the same move over and over one thousand times so that when you do it it’s in your muscle memory in a way it never was before. I will be forever grateful to Pixar for giving me that time.
Writers are as important as any other talent on a blockbuster.
More often than not, especially on these big movies, writers are treated as disposable, interchangeable parts as opposed to integral parts. A lot of my job as the producer is to remind the director, the studio, other producers, and movie stars that the writers are as important as any of them.
I think it’s not a coincidence that both Deadpool and The Martian were successful movies and movies that had the same writers from start to finish. I’m a big believer that having one writer the whole time is better than having a lot of different writers coming in and punching up scripts because I think it makes for a more organic, singular movie when you have that.
Studios can surprise you.
When we wrote stuff like that we thought the studio would never let it see the light of day, but it was therapy for us so we put it in the script. But God bless Fox. The new regime of [Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairman and CEO] Jim Gianopulos, [20th Century Fox Co-Chair] Stacey Snider and [20th Century Fox President of Production] Emma Watts let us do what we wanted to do and what needed to be done to reinvent Deadpool on screen after X-Men Origins: Wolverine. When you think about it, it’s 20th Century Fox, which is a very traditional studio, and the kind of things they let us get away with is unimaginable.
I always quote the line that Rhett wrote that Vanessa says right at the end about Deadpool’s face: “It’s a face I’d be happy to sit on,” When Rhett wrote that and I read it, I loved it and it’s one of my favorite lines in the movie. But I thought to myself, “Fox is never, ever going to make this movie.” [Laughs] Again, God bless Fox for letting us do it right and letting us do it the way it really needed to be done. It was a very, very bold decision; one that took six years to make, but God bless them for making it because they let us make it right.
Find universality through specificity.
You try to write things as specific as possible to your feelings and experiences in the hope that through specificity you gain universality. Through specificity, your work can actually leap outside of your own head and start to connect with other people in ways you didn’t plan and didn’t realize.
I had a very strict idea of what the end of Take Shelter was. I know exactly what happens, and it’s fascinating to see people respond to it in their own ways. The beautiful part of storytelling is that you’re not just telling people a story, they’re also telling you something about themselves too through their reactions. In that situation you’re in a conversation with your audience. I really can’t think of a more rewarding or fulfilling result for something you’ve written. It’s active, kinetic, and really humbling.
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