Article by Scott Essman
Research by Rebecca Chacon
In spring of 2013, in an effort to illuminate how new digital technologies are impacting filmmakers, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held a series of seminars open to Academy members and special invitees. To explore the screenwriter’s role in this new digital landscape, the Academy presented “Turning the Page: Storytelling in the Digital Age,” hosted by writer John August (Big Fish, Frankenweenie) at the Academy’s famed Samuel Goldwyn Theater on Wilshire Boulevard. August began by introducing the event, stating, “Tonight I want to do something a little different and talk about how technology changes not just the way we make movies, but the movies we make and how it changes storytelling.” August screened a montage of movie clips in which people are unable to get reception on their cell phones. Common to these clips, the cell users are in a predicament that would be easily solved if their phones were working.
The Academy presented “Turing the Page: Storytelling in the Digital Age” at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, CA, on Wednesday, May 15, 2013. Pictured (left to right): Oscar®-winning writer/producer Mark Boal, editor Mary Jo Markey (seated), screenwriter Damon Lindelof, Oscar-winning editor William Goldenberg (seated), host/screenwriter John August, cinematographer Anthony Richmond, editor Maryann Brandon (seated) and Oscar-nominated editor Dylan Tichenor.
August intimated that as technology changes our everyday lives, it might make screenwriting a bit more difficult; it implements storytelling challenges that were nonexistent before this technology ever became available to the public. As August explained, “As a screenwriter, it used to be really easy to get people lost in the woods.” In another scenario, August discussed the challenges of depicting a character doing research. An act which used to be a time-consuming process is now something easily done in our world of smart phones and laptops. Regarding a fairly well-known search engine, August pondered, “A lot of times, the research we would have characters do where they’re talking to people, or where they’re going some place, well, in reality, they would just Google it, and Googling is not cinematic; Googling is sort of a problem.”
Host/screenwriter John August at the “Turing the Page: Storytelling in the Digital Age” presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
August continued, “It’s going to keep happening; technology’s going to keep changing and those changes are going to affect the way we make movies and what we can actually put on the screen.” August’s thesis was simple: technology as an unstoppable ongoing force creates unforeseen obstacles for the 21st-century screenwriter. August discussed how the screenwriter now must adapt to technological advances in this new environment, saying “The world has changed a bit, and technology’s changed the world, and as people who make movies, we have to sort of change with it and figure out how we’re going to do things.”
Of course, the Academy is not about knocking technology. August redeemed the nascent world of mobile communications and desktop filmmaking by saying, “Technology’s not all bad. I actually kind of love technology, and technology lets us do some amazing things.” He then went on to discuss how technology is actually very helpful, by musing, “It was always there, but it was invisible until we made it visible, and digital technology made that visible. It made us able to see this pattern that we not have otherwise seen.” These patterns are that of the aforementioned (now clichéd) cell phone-losing-reception scenario and other paradigms that are now used in order to cope with the barricade of technology. We have become superior observers of movies as technology has advanced, as August suggested: “It [technology] lets us make stories, tell stories, make movies that we couldn’t have made any other way.” He then discussed how, “Digital technology is not just for fantasy; digital technology sometimes allows us to make things that are sort of more naturalistic than we could otherwise do and in some ways hyper real.” As an example of this, the screenwriter of Zero Dark Thirty, Mark Boal, was then introduced.
Oscar®-winning writer/producer Mark Boal
First, Boal referred to the cell phone montage and technology’s role in society, sharing his opinion, “People are so saturated that now there’s a meta form of art on top of the original form, which is like a critique or a satire, or whatever, and that in itself is as popular as the original, so there’s just like this endless kind of media consumption…” His point being, we are all fully engaged with technology on a moment-to-moment basis. He further reiterated August’s point in the introduction, remarking that “our visual eye as an audience has increased, has gotten faster and our narrative sense has gotten faster.” We are able to process, analyze, and then use the story as a form of our own “art,” whether to mock what technology has done to film, or at least comment on it.
Boal then discussed the roadblocks he faced as a writer attempting to depict his characters discovering new information. “If it’s possible to imagine something less cinematic than a cell phone,” Boal said, “it’s somebody typing at a computer — that’s sort of like the price you pay when you try to be really naturalistic; you do get kind of stuck with things that are maybe not quite as much spectacle.” Here, he recapitulated August’s original point: it is difficult to show the action of research. Clearly, it doesn’t make for great cinema when someone is just staring at a computer screen.
Jessica Chastain as Maya in Zero Dark Thirty
Even though Zero Dark Thirty was based on a true story, the film definitely embellished the truth while inventing its own counter-myths. In a scene that August screened from the film, the main character is meeting the team for the first time. As the debriefing commences, there is no way the average person can understand what is being discussed before them; the information is too technical and delivered too quickly to absorb.
Oscar®-nominated editor Dylan Tichenor
One of the film’s editors, Dylan Tichenor, said of the scene, “The concrete points they are making aren’t necessarily important. What is important is the relationship between the two women and the other people, and how the characters relate to each other.” The film’s other editor, William Goldenberg also offered, “A lot of these scenes in this movie, it’s more about subtext…. We’re also getting this idea of it’s a bunch of people in a room in a very low-tech way, and that’s how they found [Osama bin Laden]. It’s not fancy computers; it’s people working hard….” Ironic that the technology which helped create this film, especially the later technical scenes, was downplayed throughout the movie in order to focus on the characters’ inter-relationships.
Then, August asked, “Would we have made this movie differently 10 years ago than you made it now?” because, he explained, “We don’t know who we are necessarily going to follow. We don’t know necessarily what information to hold onto.” Boal retorted, “It feels contemporary to me to trust the audience’s intelligence and not lay everything out for them, and to use subtext. There’s a greater sense of urgency and audiences are like ‘Okay, let’s go, I get it. I get it,’ so, for me, it’s interesting to keep people working a little bit, maybe? And, also, not talk down to them.”
Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez in Argo
In the seminar’s next featured film, Argo, technology allowed the filmmakers to produce a movie that “felt like it was made then, like made in the late ’70s/ ’80s, not a movie that was a period piece” as described by film’s editor, William Goldenberg. August confirmed Goldenberg’s point, by remarking, “The goal was to create something that felt like it could have been shot in that time, but it doesn’t feel like it was edited in that time. It moves more like a modern movie.” On a more technical note, August suggested that, “Well, it (Argo) would have been different because cutting a movie in the ’80s, you would have been cutting on film, you would have been cutting on some sort of Moviola-type device; everything was much slower.” Goldenberg then gave insight into his facet of the industry, stating, “We cut it on an Avid. Almost all features now are cut on an Avid.”
Screenwriter Damon Lindelof
Technology proved a tricky subject to examine when speaking of the next film, Star Trek Into Darkness, because, “The movie is constantly embracing and modernizing that vision of the future, extrapolated from the past,” as Damon Lindelof, the film’s writer and producer, explained. Because the television show that the film is based on was developed in the mid-1960s, the idea of technology in the future as portrayed in the series was different than today’s idea of technology as portrayed in the new Trek films.
With a complex sci-fi/action picture like Into Darkness, technology not only had a huge role in how the picture was achieved in a technical sense, but it also played a huge role in internal crew communication. Lindelof described, “One of the big challenges…was everybody was very fractured. I was working on two seasons of Lost in between this movie and the first movie. Essentially, the story process then just happened entirely digitally. We would just start emailing back and forth or texting, ‘Oh I had an idea’.”
Star Trek Into Darkness
Because key crew on Into Darkness were situated remotely but maintained constant communication through technology, the process of making a film in the new Hollywood does not have to be an entirely face-to-face effort. Lindelof revealed that a movie does not need to be fully written in order for it to start production. “All those things (creative processes such as production design and location logistics) are already rolling as the writers are starting to figure out, like, ‘Oh yeah! Now we should probably know what the second act of the movie is’ and that’s the way that it had to work,” he said.
Surely, this new tech universe is both a daunting and exciting view of making movies in the 21st century. Filmmakers with multiple projects can utilize technology to be connected to each of them at virtually any time of the day. Lindelof also offered his opinion on the evolving screenwriting modus operandi on big studio films. “There’s a release date that you’re basically shooting for, and you put as much into the prep machine as you possibly can as the writing is continuing. I wish it wasn’t that way.”
Rewriting often continues well into the post-production period now on a major film. For example, re-shoots and “additional shooting” were both required on Into Darkness after principal photography wrapped. Lindelof explained how in post, when an element of a scene was incoherent, he was called upon to rewrite. “You guys (editors Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey) were like, ‘This isn’t working’ and we’re like, ‘Well Kirk needs to say, ‘So they saw us, big deal,’’ and so JJ [Abrams, the director] just went and got that shot with Chris [Pine].”
Somewhat amusingly, Into Darkness’ editors and writer discussed a difference of opinion when it came to post-production. Typically, a good portion of what is shot on a large feature film is not used in the finished product. Lindelof explained, “The writers, of course, are saying everything should be in because we wrote it!” This led Brandon to quip, “And the editors are saying everything should be half in because it’s too long.” Of course, the truth is always somewhere in the middle, as Lindelof confessed, stating, “I do have to say that the other teams that were up here [at the Academy seminar], there seems to be a great synergy between the editorial… and the writing, and that’s the only way that it can work.”
At the end of the seminar, all of the guest speakers were asked back up on stage for an all-inclusive final panel. Some of the speakers felt that digital technology, although positive in terms of the speed at which the industry can now create the work, can be aesthetically problematic.
Editor Mary Jo Markey
Markey, also Star Trek editor, added, “Film is a dream, in a way. With all this high resolution stuff, it’s losing that quality. It is so sharp and so real looking that, for me, it’s losing a little bit of it’s dreaminess and its magic. I don’t know that I want to see every crease and every line, every freckle in a close-up.” Besides the danger of cinema losing such fantastical qualities, Lindelof offered, “What’s really important as filmmakers is when we’re having these conversations, you are having them in terms of, ‘Well, why should we do this?’” Certainly, it remains crucial for filmmakers not to abuse technology merely because they have it ready at their creative fingertips, but to ask what it adds to their stories.
Oscar®-winning editor William Goldenberg
Even though doubts remain as to where motion picture technology is heading and how rapidly that world is changing, technology’s infinite possibilities make the entire field limitless for screenwriters. As Boal explained, “I think that what technology does, at least for the kinds of film I’m interested in making, not necessarily just viewing, is it’s very liberating. The good news about all this technology is it creates more opportunities for storytellers. That’s like the bottom line—that’s basically a good thing.”
Goldenberg summed up the unique Academy event when he closed by noting, “The technology gets out in front sometimes, and then the story and the human part of it has to catch up, and I think it goes back and forth. Some of it is scary, and some of it’s exciting.”
