A Year in Quotes Part II

East Coast Editor Christopher McKittrick takes a look back over our articles from 2014.

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!

September 10 – Jeff Baena

I think horror films lend themselves to comedy because there’s such heightened emotions. The situations are so absurd that if you ever stop for a second and look at what’s happening, it’s hard not to take it with a grain of salt and laugh at it. It’s the level of absurdity, the panic and manic energy it’s so easy to cross that line and go to comedy.

You can keep working on it forever, but at some point, if it’s meant to be made, someone’s going to have to take the computer away from you. Most writers, if left to their own devices, would just keep working on it and never feel that it’s ready. If it was up to me, I’d be editing this movie right now. I would have kept writing it, kept shooting it forever until I got everything perfect. I guess it’s a function of money and time, that’s what stops you.

Life After Beth: Our Wild Fascination with Zombies

September 18 – James V. Hart

The last thing I do is write the screenplay. The whole process I go through, I have a chart, that I do all over Europe and the workshops. It’s called the Hart chart, or the bridge of tension. The chart comes from answering a series of questions that are necessary. I call them the golden questions. I got them from Coppola when I was working on Dracula and I started using them in my own work. I have to answer all of these questions, which leads me to a character-driven narrative structure. As opposed to plot-driven. I don’t start writing the screenplay until I’ve answered all the questions. There’s a series of sign posts that I’ve come up with that I believe all good storytelling rests on or represents… My goal is to make it a mechanical process. You’ve captured all the lightning in the bottle. You’ve done all this pre-production before you write the script. And then once you sit down to write the script, you’re adapting the information, detail, spontaneity, everything that you’ve done in answering the questions about the characters and the signposts. You’re adapting that to the screenplay format. So for me, I want it to be a mechanical process at that point. You need to change your tires, change your tires. You need a new coat of paint. You need to change your gas. It is a process that I don’t want to be mysterious or mystical. Or inaccessible to people who want to be screenwriters.

Adaptations are kinda how I made my career. You feel an obligation to be somewhat devoted and reverent of the author’s original intent. You’ve also got to craft, structurally, and emotionally, a journey that is gonna get the audience. The Dracula that Bram Stoker wrote had never really been dramatized on screen. All the vampires that came from the Hammer films and from Bela Lugosi had little to do with Bram Stoker’s novel. They had to do with a play that Hamilton Dean wrote back at the turn of the century. So when I read the novel I went, “Wait a minute. I’ve never seen this Dracula. This is not a guy in a tuxedo wanting to suck your blood.”

Sometimes what’s in the book can’t really play on the screen. And the hardest thing to get an author to understand is sometimes the changes are necessary. I try to find the truth in what part of the character speaks to me. An adaptation has to be a new original. But it has to be reverent and respectful of the origins. That’s the toughest part.

Working with Spielberg and Coppola

September 15 – Tracy Letts

And in terms of why I want to be the one to do the adaptation, I love movies and I do think there’s a balancing act that goes on that goes on between trying to create a film and at the same time trying to preserve the thing that made the play want to be a film in the first place. So I just try to walk that line and I think I’m the one who will pay more attention to both of those things than some screenwriter brought in from the outside.

Hey, the movie business is tough. I think if I had just been a screenwriter, I’d still be waiting around for my first script to be produced. I think it’s only because of my success as a playwright that I’ve been able to get some movies made.

Adapting August: Osage County from Stage to Screen

September 16 – Caradog James

It’s hard to edit on the page. In rehearsals, you begin cutting it down. ‘I can get this across with a look or a beat.’ I’m always looking for that stuff. The first rewrite was during rehearsals. Every night, I was taking stuff out of the script.

Caradog James Builds The Machine

September 30 – Joe Henderson

We discuss with the actors before shooting as much as possible line tweaks, and always let them riff after a scene ends. These actors are professionals and live and breathe these characters; as such, when they have a change, it’s usually something that makes us look like better writers.

To me, it’s all on the page. Script first, then personality. If I’m not blown away by the script, I don’t understand taking the meeting, because I can’t imagine hiring someone I’d have to plan on rewriting.

Patriot or Mercenary? Inside the Writers Room at Graceland

October 1 – Karl Schaefer

I don’t like doing too much written work before you get to the script. For my money I would rather have a writer break a scene for the first time in the screenplay format. I don’t like really detailed outlines first. An outline is a narrative sales document that you bulls–t your way through to get the network to say yes. And I don’t want people breaking their scenes for the first time in a form that’s not visual and not the script. The first time you think it through, it’s hard to unthink that. If you’re breaking an idea down in an outline, to try to sell to somebody, that may not be at all how the scene should really be.

If you write a pilot script that is great, a feature script that is great, and original, those things can be worth seven or eight hundred thousand dollars. And here is someone who is a self-starter, who can generate original material. That person is way more valuable than someone who has demonstrated they can be a cog in the wheel.

The thing I’ve learned over the years is that having any kind of a plan puts you ahead of 98 percent of the people. The ugly truth is that it’s really a sales job. You’re always selling: you’re either pitching a script, you’re pitching yourself to an agent, you’re pitching your fellow writers on a TV staff, you’re pitching the director to direct it the way you wrote it.

How Z Nation Writer Held the Zucker Brothers to Ransom

October 6 – Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman

MH: When you’re lucky, you cast people that feel like they fit the role so well, that it almost seems as though the script was tailor made for them in some way. That’s just a very, very serendipitous, happy accident.

CJ: I definitely learned that in the script, you are almost always explaining things a little bit more than you need to. I’ve had this experience on both the films I’ve made now. That by the time you shoot it,and by the time you get into the editing room, so many of these scenes, that you thought were critical and just helping the audience understand what was going on, you don’t need. There’s so much when you’re sitting in a theater, watching a film that can just be conveyed visually, that intuitively implies everything you need to imply.

I found when we were editing this movie, we cut out a lot of the exposition. As the old saying goes, burn the first reel, which tends to be a lot of setup and exposition. You need it in a script, because you don’t have that visual storytelling element working for you. But I really learned that there’s a massive process of reduction that happens as you go from script to shooting to editing. That so much can be told visually. Now that said, I sort of think you still, when you write your drafts, need to start from a place of getting all the information out there in the script. And then have that reduction process happen a little bit later. But it really did surprise me how many of the scenes that I thought were critical, just from an information standpoint, that we ended up shooting and then cutting.

“The Skeleton Should Really be Followed”

October 7 – Waco O’Guin & Roger Black

WO: Screenwriting in particular is tough. That was one of the first things we tried after our MTV show got cancelled; we tried to write a screenplay. With television, they will pay you to develop the idea. And even if it doesn’t get picked up, you get a little bit of money. But with a movie, you just have to spend your own time and write for a month or whatever with no paycheck. It’s really tough – we never figured out exactly how to crack the whole movie script thing. With television, that was a little easier for us…but we kind of did it backwards. Most people move out here and get a job as a PA or something and move their way up, but we stayed in Georgia and just filmed stuff. We filmed and edited as much as we could and kind of learned comedy that way. So we were ready when we got our big break. Everybody kept telling us to move out here and we said we’d move out here when we got a TV show – and we waited until we got a TV show to move to LA. So everybody’s got a different path. I think the thing is to just stick with it and don’t sit around waiting for someone to give you a shot, you know? Just do your own stuff, write your own stuff, film it, put it on YouTube, let people see it…that’s what it’s all about. If you’re good enough and you do that, someone’s going to take notice. There are a hundred different ways to make it – but that’s the way we know. Not waiting on the business, not waiting on Hollywood. Just do it yourself, and if your stuff is good enough, people are going to watch it and people are going to take notice.

A Walk in the (Brickleberry) Park

October 8 – Scott Frank

The box office, for me, is gravy. For me, I just don’t want to be embarrassed. That’s my only criteria is please, please I don’t want to be embarrassed.

I’ve been very, very lucky. I’ve been doing this since 1984 and for the most part I’ve been able to do whatever I wanted to do wherever I’ve wanted to do it, which is pretty lucky. I’m certain that any day now that will stop. Most of the time I’m working on something I really want to be working on, unless I’m doing something for the money. And if I’m doing something for the money, it’s so that I can afford to do something I really want to do. Or pay for another year of NYU for my oldest daughter.

Sometimes you don’t get a lot of credit… I remember reading a review in Rolling Stone where Peter Travers was talking about all the great gobs of Elmore Leonard dialogue there was in Get Shorty, all of which was my dialogue that he was quoting. So, you don’t get a lot credit for it. It’s a tricky thing.

For me, at least, the only way I know how to write a movie is to organize them a certain way and that is knowing where I’m going, for the most part. I know other people don’t work that way, but I’m a little OCD. I need to know everything and it has to have a certain kind of structure that I can see.

Bringing Elmore Leonard Into Sight: Part One

October 9 – Scott Frank

I don’t know how to count drafts. People always ask, “How many drafts did you do?” I’m just always writing and revising. And I don’t know what you call a draft at all. I occasionally turn the script in to get paid, but I’m just constantly working on it. There’s all this time before the movie gets green lit, and then I’m continuing to work on it once it’s green lit and we’re rehearsing it and then even during shooting I’m doing some work on it if there’s stuff that needs changing… I know that I work for a year on every script probably by the time I’m done. So, I know I don’t have a first draft much before four to six months. Then I know I’ll do many, many, many more drafts after that pretty quickly. But that first draft is a pretty polished draft because I’ve rewritten it so many times already.

I am no good without collaboration. I am a complete fraud without somebody helping me.

I think movies are collaborative. You can’t escape that if you’re a screenwriter. People have to come in and they’re all going to start talking about the script. It just is the way it is. A suggestion isn’t writing, even a line of dialogue. You still have to write the movie and take these notes and put it all through your point of view and then when you have a director on, you have to make sure you’re supporting their point of view. Because you can’t force a director to do something they don’t understand, even if you hold a gun to their head, they’ll do it poorly. You hope you and the director have the same point of view.

When you work on something for a very long time and very intensely, you become too close. You need to see your work through someone else’s eyes at a certain point. And it’s scary to do that because you’re worried—you give over a lot of power to somebody. Because if they don’t like the work, you become very vulnerable and it can take a long time to recover from that or to regain your own perspective and go, “Wait, OK, they don’t like it but I still like it” or “They don’t like it, and they’re right.” You need somebody to come in and start to give you a little bit of perspective, and react to the material—because screenplays, more than anything, are meant to be reacted to.

Every writer, every director, it’s all different. These are shotgun weddings that sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. Part of your job as a writer is to figure out what sort of collaboration this is. Ultimately, it’s about picking the right director, and that’s a piece of casting. And if you cast wrong, you’re done for. But if you cast the right director, even if they might have a difference of opinion or see things sometimes differently than you do, if they’re the right director it becomes a healthy give and take because you’re challenging the material. You’re asking the hard question. And the material is always better for it, having gone through that process.

Bringing Elmore Leonard Into Sight: Part Two

October 14 – David Trottier

About 95% of the flashbacks in unsold scripts don’t work. In first-time scripts, usually a flashback is used as a crutch; a cheap way to introduce exposition.

Generally, we should not tell the reader about the past until that reader cares about the present. Am I just force-feeding the audience to get across some exposition?

To Flashback or Not to Flashback, That is the Question

October 15 – Michael Hauge

Writers resist the idea of following a formula for creating emotion and telling a story. I think that’s a mistake – because a formula is like a recipe. It says that when you consistently do the same thing, you can consistently get the same result. What you always want to create is an emotional experience for your readers and audience. If you look at movies across the history of cinema, you will see they use the same devices, principles and techniques to do just that. What it doesn’t mean is that every movie is going to be the same. It just means that there are certain qualities, and if they are part of the story you are telling, then the movie or screenplay stands a much better chance of touching an audience deeply. Which will ultimately lead to more work or getting your script sold.

I could get you to name me any two movies coming out right now from Hollywood, whatever the genre, and I bet I could show you twenty-five things they have in common. Even if one is a horror film and one is a love story, the essential elements of plot structure and character will be evident. This is true for any art form. If you learn to paint perspective, does that mean you are a cookie cutter painter? DaVinci understood perspective and so did Monet and Picasso and Edward Hopper. Does that mean their paintings all look alike, or lack originality? Some writers say, “Screw formula, I‘m going to write whatever I feel like and see what comes next.” That’s fine if you’re brainstorming, or if your process is to simply let your ideas flow. But if you don’t then apply the “rules” of storytelling and screenwriting, your script will get tossed when it crosses the desks of agents and studios.

The goal of every script and every film, regardless of the budget, must be to generate revenue – otherwise it won’t get financed. But the lower the budget of the film, the smaller the audience has to be to turn a profit. The smaller the necessary audience, the more latitude you have with how much you vary from the mainstream formula.

I think we all have a fear of not being good enough – not just as writers, but as human beings. So instead of putting our work to the test, we will unconsciously look for ways to escape judgement. Saying, “I don’t believe in formula,” is one way of letting ourselves off the hook, and of avoiding the hard work of mastering our craft and risking comparison to successful movies. It’s a lot easier to say, “I want to be unique and different,” that it is to truly declare, “I want to be great.”

The paradox screenwriters face in marketing their work is that the two primary things that filmmakers and financiers look for in a story are familiarity and originality. If you write something that is so original that we’ve never seen anything like it, then we won’t see your movie, either. Audiences want to know, to a certain extent, what to expect when they go into a movie theater or turn on their televisions. That’s why genre films and franchise TV series are so popular – we like to know what we are in for when a movie or episode begins. But conversely, if your story is so familiar that readers and audiences think, “I’ve already seen this a dozen times; there is nothing here that surprises me or keeps me guessing,” then your script will be passed over, or your audience will change the channel.

In originating and developing a screenplay, you must ask yourself, “What are the antecedents to my story? What other movies can I point to and say, ‘Because those movies made money, so will mine.’ What films in the same genre, with the same tone, appealing to the same audience, show that my story has commercial potential – that it can elicit emotion in the mass audience?”

Then you have to ask yourself, “How is my story different from all those antecedents? What am I adding that an audience has never seen before? What makes my story unique?” When you combine those two qualities, you can employ the formulas and principles and techniques to maximize the emotional experience, and still create a screenplay that reflects your own voice, your own talent, and your own unique vision.

Building A Better Script: Michael Hauge’s Blueprint

October 28 – Stephen Beresford

It’s easier to write a film than a play. I think, because you have another arm to storytelling that you don’t have on stage. You can say, “He puts a telescope up to his eye, and we see through it the coast of 18th century Spain and the camera sweeps down over galleons.” Those sentences can sweep off your fingers. You may end up in a fight about it with someone telling you that you can’t have six galleons, they’ll only give you one, but you can still describe it visually that way. You can’t do that on stage, you are ham strung. In film you get away with so much more.

Don’t write people off as stupid or as having too short attention spans. People are as good as what they’re given, so give them the best.

Pride: “Prejudice Can’t Survive Proximity”

October 30 – Hossein Amini

Whenever you’re a screenwriter on other people’s movies, sitting at the monitor watching an actor change a line or do something differently than you imagined it, you think, “They’ve just destroyed the scene”, and get depressed. But as a director, I’ve found that I kind of enjoyed it, because it liberates the scene and adds an extra layer to the performance. And now I feel that if you shoot a scene exactly as written, it’s quite dangerous, because it can be a little bit dead. You want the actors to improvise based on a mood or an atmosphere they’re feeling on set. I wish more screenwriters were allowed in rehearsals and read-throughs and allowed on set, because dialogue between a writer and an actor is incredibly rewarding.

Americans Behaving Badly

If you enjoyed these quotes, don’t forget to check out A Year in Quotes Part III!