Creating a Structure

Linklater: You have to follow [a question] through production, post-production, and then some. If you can ever get into something and have it all figured out, then you probably shouldn't make a film about it. Then, you're done. The making of the film to me is the final exponent, the final piece of the puzzle that you've been working on. To me, the bigger part to the puzzle is really trying to crack the narrative back of it, how to tell the story.

Woody Allen's films are all these accumulations of all his ideas. The way his particular genius is, these things are just flowing out of him 24/7. In so many of his films, he creates a unique narrative structure — like Deconstructing Harry — to hold this basketful of ideas that don't have other homes. The out of focus actor? You don't make a whole film about that, but you realize he's not telling just one story; he's creating structures to house all these disparate ideas. He does that over and over. That's a narrative triumph, to find the housing for your particular idea.

Mark and Jay Duplass: We heavily outline before any writing happens. We used to use note cards, but now we've gone green. We have abandoned thoughts of three-act structure and differences in plot types, etc. We are trying to function more from our guts. Follow our instincts, get out of our heads.

David Wain: I always lay in a subplot around 10:30 in the morning. That's by far the best time. The worst time is 4 p.m.

Cody: I know it's a real idea when I turn into a crazy person and have to immediately lock myself in a room and write and ruminate for hours. It's like A Beautiful Mind, but with bad dialogue instead of equations. My husband knows when I have a story going because I get really quiet. It's all I think about until I've regurgitated every detail and shaped it into a draft. Obviously, I have ideas that aren't as exciting to me, but if I think they have the potential to sell, I'll write up a quick email and pitch it to my agent. Not as exhilarating, but it pays for preschool.

Feig: Usually, it'll be something like, Hey, it'd be fun to write about this subject matter. What kind of characters would be the most interesting in this world? Structure is usually what comes last. I always want to figure out the characters and their personalities and then set them loose in the idea so I can see where they naturally take me. Then I play out the story and try to twist and turn it as much as I can.

I really block out every day. I kind of set aside from 9 a.m.–6 p.m. every day and just sit there. Sometimes, the writing process is going out and walking around or going out to have lunch and taking the computer with me. But it's basically going, I'm just going to sit here and be open to whatever is going to come into my brain for this. And also, I always set a goal when I'm writing a screenplay: five pages per day. As long as I hit five pages per day, within 23 days or whatever, you will have a first draft.

Cody: I hate outlining, but the suits make me do it. Sometimes, I don't like structure; I like telling a meandering story and letting the characters determine the outcome. I've been surprised by the ending of one of my scripts more than once. Like, when I was writing Juno, I was sure Juno was going to have sex with Mark, the Jason Bateman character. Then I got to that scene and realized, Oh shit, she doesn't want to do that. So I switched directions. I can't make all those decisions in advance. I don't know who the character is until I've spent some time writing for them.

Curtis: I seem to remember the first instinct for Four Weddings and a Funeral came from that being, as it were, a subject I was interested in: how to find the right girl. That's what I spent my twenties doing, so the fundamental subject was right. And then I thought, I've been to 70 weddings in the last three years, so I thought I've got lots of stuff around weddings.

And then there was a particular sort of structural instinct where I got very annoyed about films where you see a couple meeting and then you cut, and then they'd be going out with each other, and you'd think, What happened? And then they'd start going out with each other, and then you'd cut, and they'd be having a fight. And you go, What? And so I thought, Wouldn't it be great to have a film where you saw every single minute a couple was together, apart for the six hours of sex? And if you look at that film, it's sort of what happens. You see every single minute that Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant spend together. So that was the sort of mixture between autobiography, jokes in terms of weddings, and a sort of structural idea.

Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter: We don't write a word until the entire movie is thoroughly outlined. This document is just for us and it usually runs 8–10 pages. It's simply a scene-by-scene map of story, character, transitions, important lines, and hopefully, a few good jokes. Any important subplots will be covered in this outline. Of course, there are always discoveries during the writing — which can include ways to improve the subplots.

There's always crucial information that requires an elegant layering into the story. How to do that — and where to do that — that's what the outline is for. In terms of jokes, well, here's our dirty little secret: We're not funny. We think we have a good handle on character and hopefully, we understand story. After that stuff is working, we can usually generate some comedy. But it never starts with gags or jokey callbacks.

Nichols: I start with note cards, so I write every idea I've had for a scene and everything else on a note card, and I throw them on the floor. It's a good way to break up the linear process of it all. The problem is, when you're literally writing an outline on a page, you've got to start somewhere, and then you have to go to the next thought, and you don't always have that next thought, but you have all these other thoughts.

Slowly, they start to take form and shape and they go up on a cork board and before you know it, I could watch the whole movie on note cards before I even start writing.

Holofcener: I used to do [note cards], and it really just fucked me up. It would sort of kill the fun, and it would make me realize that I didn't know how to structure a screenplay. Or I didn't have the answers that you're supposed to have when you outline a script, and I figured out somehow that I didn't need to have the answers. And I would just start writing and see what happens, and usually, what happens is a mess, but a fixable one, and that's kind of how I start.

I generally have no idea [where a story will end], at least consciously. With a script like Enough Said, I knew I wanted her to become a better person at the end, to learn a lesson, and shut off the judgmental voices in her head, but I didn't know how that was going to happen or what that would look like.

Bell: When I start writing, I string together my favorite ideas, my greatest hits, and I start to figure out a road map for those people or those ideas and thoughts and thematics. And then the story, the overall umbrella of the story, sort of exists already, but then you kind of fit in these puzzle pieces in the thing you want to talk about.

Linklater: To me the dialogue comes kind of last. To me, the dialogue is the final coat of paint. My films are all dialogue, but I swear to god, that's what you see at the end. You look at it and it's that coat of paint. But to me, what fascinates me more is the architecture beneath it.