On Story — Screenwriters and Their Craft

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 On Story

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 Screenwriters
and Their

Craft

austin film festival

Edited by
Barbara Morgan and Maya Perez

U n i v e r s i t y of T e x a s P r e s s Austin

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 Copyright © 2013 by Austin Film Festival, Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2013

Requests for permission to reproduce material

from this work should be sent to:
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Austin, TX 78713-7819
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Design by Lindsay Starr

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements

of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

On story : screenwriters and their craft /

edited by Barbara Morgan and Maya Perez. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-292-75460-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Screenwriters—Interviews. 2. Motion picture authorship.
3. On story: presented by Austin Film Festival (Television program)
I. Morgan, Barbara, 1962–, editor of compilation. II. Perez, Maya, 1970–,
editor of compilation. III. Austin Film Festival.
PN1996.O5 2013
808.2'3—dc23
2013008525

doi:10.7560/754607

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 Dedicated to
Frank Pierson, Polly Platt, Sydney Pollack,
and Bud Shrake

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 Contents

Foreword by Brian Helgeland ix

Acknowledgments xi
Screenwriter Biographies xiii

Introduction by Barbara Morgan 1

1. Inspirat ion 5
A Conversation with Randall Wallace 7
2. Story 25
What Makes a Great Story: A Conversation with Bill Wittliff 27
Steven Zaillian on Where the Story Originates 34
Peter Hedges on Crafting Story 35
Lawrence Kasdan on Story and Theme 36
3 . P r o ce s s 37
A Conversation with John Lee Hancock 39
Sacha Gervasi on Getting Started 48
The Basics with Nicholas Kazan 50
Advice from Bill Wittliff 52

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 Anne Rapp’s Writing Routine 54
Caroline Thompson’s Writing Process 58
Lawrence Kasdan on the Challenges of Writing 59
4. Structure 61
Structure and Format: A Conversation with Frank Pierson,
Whit Stillman, Robin Swicord, and Nicholas Kazan 63
Caroline Thompson on Structure 81
Lawrence Kasdan on the Rules of Script Formatting 82
Visual Storytelling: A Conversation with John August,
John Lee Hancock, and Randall Wallace 85
5 . C h a r a c t e r a n d D i a l o g u e 105
Building Characters and Mapping Their Journeys:
A Conversation with Lawrence Kasdan and Anne Rapp 107
Nicholas Kazan on Writing Characters 115
Crafting Characters: A Conversation with Lawrence Kasdan 117
Dialogue and Finding the Voice: A Conversation with
John August and John Lee Hancock 127
6. Re w riting 141
Writer’s Block: A Conversation with Bud Shrake and Bill Wittliff 143
Bill Wittliff on When to Let Something Go 149
Steven Zaillian on Defining Scenes: What to Keep In,
What to Leave Out 150
Anne Rapp on Keeping the Writing Fresh 151
Nicholas Kazan’s Rewriting Process 152
On Rewriting: A Conversation with Daniel Petrie Jr.,
Peter Hedges, and Sacha Gervasi 153
Lawrence Kasdan on How You Know When You’re Done 155

Contents vii

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 7. Coll ab orat ion 157
A Conversation with Steven Zaillian 159
Peter Hedges on Collaborating 173
Lawrence Kasdan on Writing with a Partner 174
Randall Wallace on Working with Other Writers 175
8. Go Fort h 177

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 Foreword

Is screenwriting an art or a craft? I really don’t give a rat’s ass. A story’s a

story. A movie’s a movie. I want the end product, not how it got there. The
truth is, the Pope gave Michelangelo notes on the Sistine Chapel. The truth
is, the ceiling’s centerpiece, the creation of Adam, is not even an original
idea. Old Mike Angelo adapted it from a scene in Genesis. The truth is, it
was a work for hire.
Another truth is that there are some people who want to believe the
world is a scam, a place where if you can just work out the game, every-
thing falls into place. Read this book. Read between its lines, and do you
know what you’ll learn? There is no shortcut to excellence; there is no trick
to writing a movie. It is hard work. The sacrifice involved is daunting; the
dues you must pay are monumental. That’s what Frank Pierson and John
Lee Hancock know. You get to where you want to be by getting there. You
want to play baseball? Don’t show up in the Bronx and tell them you’re
ready to play shortstop for the New York Yankees. Go to a sandlot with a
bat, a glove, and a ball. Carnegie Hall? Practice, baby, practice. Go on. You
might have the time of your life along the way.
I personally am uncomfortable with the title of writer. I am a filmmaker.
I make movies. Watching them as a boy made me realize there was a world
out there. Movies altered my horizon. As an adult, movies have put me in
a solitary cell for months at a time. They have taken me around the world
literally and figuratively. They’ve introduced me to my greatest friends and
my most mortal enemies. They sprung me from my childhood purgatory
and gave me my life, and I am inescapably in their debt.

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 Despite signing away said life to them, I don’t have a lot of rules about
movies or the writing of screenplays. I just have a few things I know. First
and maybe last, it never gets easier. If it does, you are probably doing it
badly. Writing a screenplay is like digging the Panama Canal from one end
of your brain to the other. It takes about two thousand hours. Put an inor-
dinate amount of time into one end and a screenplay comes out the other.
It is a lonely task. And if it is not sometimes unbearably lonely, you are
doing it wrong.
Having chosen this path, you must never stop. My first representation
was at an agency so low-rent they could not afford to make photocopies.
Every time I wrote a new script, I had to drop off ten copies. Six unsold
scripts later, I received a call: “Your work is taking up too much space.” What
that meant wasn’t exactly clear until two hours later when I was staggering
down Sunset Boulevard with dozens of copies of my unsold screenplays in
my arms. Rock bottom is where you need to get to. It’s where most of the
people in this book have ended up at one time or another. Rock bottom is
where you begin. The first screenplay I sold was the seventh I wrote. Had I
given up, I wouldn’t be typing this foreword today.
That’s about all I have to say. There may be common knowledge, but
each writer sees the world through his or her own prism. That is essential,
because movies are subjective. Never mind the audience as a whole; the
power of a movie lies in how it can affect one single person. Like a tornado
careening past—touching one, leaving another unscathed. Screenwriting
is subjective as well. So are the writers in this book. Thank God. And as
they crisscross a lonely desert, Austin is an oasis, unique in that it knows
something no one else can seem to remember—the script is the star. De-
spite my battle-scarred skepticism of this world, I do not disagree.

Brian Helgeland
Pt. Dume, California
November 3, 2012

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 Acknowledgments

On Story is a compilation of two decades dedicated to the celebration of the

art and craft of storytelling. Since its creation in 1993, Austin Film Festival
has continuously focused on the writers’ contributions to film by recogniz-
ing and championing the work of the writer as the core of the creative pro-
cess in filmmaking. This book highlights the natural progression of Austin
Film Festival’s mission, and for that we owe a huge debt of gratitude to
those who, throughout the years, have made our vision possible.
First and foremost, this book came to fruition due to the contribution,
support, and collaboration from the following distinguished screenwrit-
ers: John August, Sacha Gervasi, John Lee Hancock, Peter Hedges, Brian
Helgeland, Lawrence Kasdan, Nicholas Kazan, Daniel Petrie Jr., Frank
Pierson, Anne Rapp, Bud Shrake, Whit Stillman, Robin Swicord, Caro-
line Thompson, Randall Wallace, Bill Wittliff, and Steven Zaillian. These
screenwriters have been active participants in our annual Conference, and
we thank them for sharing their rich and personal stories.
We are thankful to the University of Texas Press, more specifically Jim
Burr, Nancy Bryan, Victoria Davis, Lynne Chapman, Molly Frisinger, and
Kaila Wyllys, for their support and assistance in putting this book togeth-
er. We thank Deena Kalai, Esq., for her legal guidance in the completion of
this book.
Thank you to the following individuals, without whose dedicated at-
tention and support this book would not have been written: Erin Halla-
gan, Miguel Alvarez, Colter Baldwin, Linzy Beltran, Allison Frady, Jardine
Libaire, Samantha Rae Lopez, Marcelena Mayhorn, Sonia Onescu, and Ali-
son Week.

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 In addition, we thank all those who have championed and supported
Austin Film Festival over the past twenty years—attendees, panelists,
filmmakers, moderators, staff interns, transcribers, volunteers, Fred Mill-
er, and Austin Film Festival board members Shane Black, Barry Josephson,
and Marsha Milam. We are forever grateful to the late, great Mary Margaret
Farabee, as her kindness, generosity, and endless support helped make this
book happen. We would also like to give a special thanks to Allen Odom for
his dedicated effort and attention to this book. Further, we would like to
thank Keith Carter for allowing us to use his photograph to represent our
book.
Finally, we extend our gratitude and appreciation to those close friends
and family members whose boundless love and support was the driving
force behind the making of this book.

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 Screenwriter Biographies

John August’s screenwriting credits include Go, Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory, Big Fish, and Frankenweenie. He wrote and directed The Nines and
has created pilots for Fox and ABC, as well as the series D.C. for The WB.
August is also an app developer, having developed FDX Reader for iPhones/
iPads and Bronson Watermarker for Macintosh. August’s popular websites
http://johnaugust.com/ and http://screenwriting.io/ provide information
for aspiring screenwriters.

Sacha Gervasi is a British journalist, screenwriter, and director whose film-

writing credits include The Big Tease, which he co-wrote with Craig Fergu-
son; The Terminal, directed by Steven Spielberg; and Henry’s Crime, which
he also executive produced. His directing credits include the Academy–
Award nominated Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren,
and Scarlett Johansson, and the documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil, for
which he won an Independent Spirit Award and an Emmy Award.

John Lee Hancock’s breakthrough as a major player came when he scripted

Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World, and he reteamed with Eastwood for the
screen version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, adapting the best-
selling book by John Berendt. Hancock is a credited writer on Snow White
and the Huntsman, wrote and directed The Alamo and The Blind Side, and
directed The Rookie as well as the upcoming Saving Mr. Banks.

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 Peter Hedges is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and director. He wrote
both the novel and the screenplay for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and co-
wrote About a Boy, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.
As writer-director, his films include Pieces of April, Dan in Real Life, and The
Odd Life of Timothy Green.

Brian Helgeland is a critically acclaimed writer, producer, and director.

His screenwriting credits include L.A. Confidential, for which he received
an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Mystic River, A Nightmare
on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, and Payback. Helgeland also wrote and
directed the films 42, A Knight’s Tale, and The Order, as well as helped co-
write The Bourne Supremacy.

Lawrence Kasdan, a four-time Academy Award nominee, has directed elev-

en films, among them Body Heat, The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist, Wyatt
Earp, Dreamcatcher, Grand Canyon, and Darling Companion, the last two
co-written with his wife, Meg Kasdan. He has written or co-written four
of the most successful films in history: Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire
Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and The Bodyguard.

Nicholas Kazan is a critically acclaimed playwright, writer, producer, and

director. He has penned screenplays for films including At Close Range,
Fallen, and Bicentennial Man, as well as Reversal of Fortune, which was nom-
inated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. With his wife,
Robin Swicord, he co-wrote Matilda, adapted from the beloved Roald Dahl
novel. He is the director of Dream Lover.

Daniel Petrie Jr.’s screenwriting credits include Beverly Hills Cop, for which
he was nominated for an Academy Award, The Big Easy, Shoot to Kill, and
Turner & Hooch. He is the writer and director of Toy Soldiers, In the Army
Now, and several films made for television, including Framed. Petrie was
the co-creator, showrunner, and executive producer of the series Combat
Hospital. He served two terms as president of the Writers Guild of America,
West.

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 Frank Pierson (1925–2012) was a prolific screenwriter whose credits in-
clude Cat Ballou, Cool Hand Luke, and Dog Day Afternoon, for which he won
an Academy Award. Pierson wrote and directed A Star Is Born, Somebody
Has to Shoot the Picture, and Conspiracy, among others. He was twice presi-
dent of the Writers Guild of America, West, as well as president of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Anne Rapp began her screenwriting career with Cookie’s Fortune and Dr.
T and the Women, both produced and directed by Robert Altman. She has
written for Gun, an ABC series, and she wrote Stars Over Texas, a CMT
special starring Dolly Parton. Rapp, also a short story writer and essayist,
is currently directing and producing a documentary about acclaimed play-
wright and screenwriter Horton Foote.

Bud Shrake (1931–2009) wrote the screenplays for J.W. Coop, Kid Blue,
Nightwing, Tom Horn, and Songwriter. In addition, he co-wrote Pair of Aces
and Another Pair of Aces: Three of a Kind. Shrake was also a critically ac-
claimed novelist, essayist, and biographer whose literary archives are held
by the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University–San
Marcos.

Whit Stillman is the writer-director of Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco,

Damsels in Distress, and Metropolitan, for which he received an Academy
Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Stillman also published a
novelization of The Last Days of Disco entitled The Last Days of Disco, with
Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards.

Robin Swicord’s screenwriting credits include Memoirs of a Geisha, Little

Women, Matilda (which she wrote and produced with Nicholas Kazan), and
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for which she received an Academy
Award nomination. She also wrote two Off-Broadway plays, Last Days at
the Dixie Girl Café and Criminal Minds. Swicord adapted and directed The
Jane Austen Book Club and is currently adapting an E. L. Doctorow short
story, “Wakefield.”

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 Caroline Thompson is the writer of Edward Scissorhands, The Addams Fam-
ily, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, The Secret Garden, The Night-
mare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, and City of Ember. She is also the writ-
er and director of Black Beauty, Buddy, and Snow White: The Fairest of Them
All. Thompson is currently at work on adaptations of Melissa Marr’s Young
Adult novel Wicked Lovely and Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece, The Master
and Margarita. In addition, she is writing Marwencol for Robert Zemeckis,
based on the documentary of the same name, and adapting George Or-
well’s Animal Farm.

Randall Wallace’s film credits include Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers, The
Man in the Iron Mask, Secretariat, and Braveheart, for which he received an
Academy Award nomination, a Golden Globe nomination, and the Writers
Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. Mr. Wallace is also
a novelist, a lyricist, and the founder of Wheelhouse Entertainment, an
independent entertainment company.

Bill Wittliff ’s screenwriting and producing credits include The Perfect

Storm, The Black Stallion, and Legends of the Fall, as well as Lonesome Dove,
for which he won a Writers Guild of America Award. His photography has
been published in Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas Cowboy, La Vida Brinca: A
Book of Tragaluz Photographs, and most recently, A Book of Photographs from
Lonesome Dove.

Steven Zaillian has written many critically acclaimed films, including The
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Awakenings, American Gangster, and Schindler’s
List, which won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Zaillian
co-wrote Moneyball and Gangs of New York, both nominated for Academy
Awards, and he is the writer-director of Searching for Bobby Fischer, A Civil
Action, and All the King’s Men.

Please note: Unless otherwise stated, all credits in the book are writing
credits.

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 On Story — Screenwriters and Their Craft

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AusFilmFest_5463_BK.indd xviii 7/31/13 12:37 PM
 Introduction

Stories are elemental to our species. Almost as basic as light, shelter, food,
or water. We’ve needed them from the very start of humanity as a way of
connecting our lives, as a way of sustaining, provoking, and even saving
one another. And the way we communicate stories has evolved with our
technological abilities. Whether they tell tales with blood on cave walls,
with the typewritten word, or with digital images, storytellers are instiga-
tors and guardians of the compassion vital to survival.
As a collaborative medium, film is a unique form, fusing the ideas and
imaginations of a slew of contributors into one entity. Sometimes films
can seem to tumble out of the grand subconscious without any specific au-
thor to credit, but movies generally begin in one mind. This book is about
the moment a film is born and how it evolves, told from the perspective of
its originator—the storyteller.
There are infinite ways to create a story, and this volume of On Story
is less interested in dictating them than in cataloguing the diverse expe-
riences and insights of this era’s great auteurs. The advice inside will be
contradictory, genuine, and kinetic, and the desired result is singular—to
arrive at that feeling when the lights go down and we lose ourselves to a
great story.
Founded in 1993, Austin Film Festival was the first organization of its
kind to focus on the writer’s creative contribution to film. Originally the
Heart of Film Screenwriters Conference, a forum for craft development,
inspiration, networking, and career launching, AFF still hinges on the
screenwriter and has since grown to serve filmmakers, too.

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 When we began, we didn’t know we were filling a gaping hole in the
landscape; writers simply didn’t have an outlet for convening and for dis-
cussion and development. We weren’t sure we’d have the audience to sus-
tain this creator-based venture, but soon enough found that not only was
the audience there, but it was receptive and wanting to be inspired.
We’re still here, growing exponentially every year, and solidifying a rep-
utation as one of the most exciting idea exchanges in the country. It turns
out most writers and creators working in cerebral solitude don’t mind the
chance to mingle, collaborate, and compare notes with their peers once a
year—how lucky we are!
The Film Festival and Conference offers more than 200 films, and 90
panels, workshops, and roundtable discussions led by over 150 industry
professionals. Due to AFF’s devotion to creators and to story, we’re rec-
ognized and known as a one-of-a-kind open and productive summit. Vet-
erans are refreshed by new ideas and old friends, and newcomers emerge
with mentors as well as advice and insight from masters.
Besides an annual Film Festival and Conference, AFF hosts a wealth
of year-round screenings and discussions, and without even knowing how
valuable and illuminating the end results would be, we had the notion to
record every panel, conversation, and presentation from AFF’s beginning.
With over nineteen years now of high-caliber artists talking candidly and
provocatively about their work and about the art and craft of screenwrit-
ing and filmmaking in general, we’ve decided to cull the cream of the foot-
age and make it available to the public.
The resulting multitiered On Story Project includes AFF’s TV show
called On Story, curated from this footage of AFF discussions, presenta-
tions, and Q&A’s, and currently airing on many PBS-affiliated stations and
streaming online; the companion book set, also called On Story, of which
this is the first volume; the On Story archive, the digital preservation of
these decades of AFF footage, which will be donated to and housed and
disseminated by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University; and an
interactive On Story website where one can read more transcripts, watch
short films and On Story episodes, communicate with other writers, film-
makers, and fans, and check out more footage of talks and presentations
(at www.onstory.tv).

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 Candor and generosity inform the culture at AFF. Because our screen-
ings, panel discussions, and presentations celebrate creativity and story-
telling, we have an outstanding array of artists who loyally and happily
participate every year—and we are grateful to them all.
The phenomenal list of AFF participants over two decades has included:
Robert Altman (Nashville), Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson (Rushmore),
Robert Benton (Bonnie and Clyde), James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment),
Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo), Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean), Lind-
say Doran (Sense and Sensibility), Robert Duvall (The Godfather), Ted Elliott
and Terry Rossio (Shrek), Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird), James Fran-
co (Sal), Pamela Gray (Conviction), Buck Henry (The Graduate), Lawrence
Kasdan (Body Heat), John Lasseter (Toy Story), Barry Levinson (Rain Man),
Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (Sideways), Frank Pierson (Cool Hand
Luke), Sydney Pollack (Out of Africa), Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day), Paul
Schrader (Taxi Driver), Whit Stillman (Metropolitan), Oliver Stone (Platoon),
Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands), Robert Towne (Chinatown),
Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy), and Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List).
Film used to be an exclusive, expensive medium. These days, you can
make a film with affordable, bare-bones equipment. The art form is wide
open. The On Story show, the On Story books, the On Story website, and
the On Story archive offer an unparalleled range of lessons on the art and
craft of screenwriting and filmmaking—to professionals, and to any curi-
ous newcomer who wants to take a shot. Los Angeles Times film critic Ken-
neth Turan said about the TV show: “On Story is film school in a box, a life-
time’s worth of filmmaking knowledge squeezed into half-hour packages.”
So enjoy this collection of ideas, use it in your own way, and remember that
the only place to begin a journey is inspiration.

Barbara Morgan
Austin Film Festival Cofounder
and Executive Director

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 1 Inspiration

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 A Conversation with
Randall Wallace

I grew up in Tennessee. My father is from Lizard Lick, Tennessee. The

men in my family are Alton, Elton, Dalton, Lionel, Herman, Thurman, and
Clyde. They call Clyde “Pete,” but no one has any idea why. I don’t know
where y’all are from, but I don’t think it could be more down-to-earth than
Lizard Lick, so I’m one of y’all.
I always thought it was funny when I was trying to figure out how I was
going to get anywhere and get anybody to read anything. I felt there was
this enormous gulf between where I was and where they were. When I was
in college—I think I might have been in graduate school—one of my pro-
fessors said to me, “If you want to be a lawyer, I can show you the bottom
rung of the ladder. When you get a hold of that bottom rung, if you can pull
yourself up, the next rung will be within your reach. That’s how you climb
the ladder and become a lawyer. If you want to be a doctor, I can show you
that, but to be a writer . . . I don’t know where that ladder is.” But there
is one. It’s like the metaphor of dropping into the deep, dark woods and
being lost. When you’re in the woods for a while, you become an expert in
woodcraft, you learn where to find water, you learn how to build a fire, you
learn where to find shelter, you learn where it’s dangerous. You’re follow-
ing your instincts.
I think that’s the gulf—if there is one—between you and me, and that’s
the gulf I’m here to help break down. I’ve been in the woods a bit longer,
but it’s the same woods we’re in together. We have similar needs, and in
similar ways we’re searching.

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 The Origins of Braveheart

I had married an amazing Irish-American woman. I always said if you

threw her into a barrel of cobras, she would come out with a purse. I want-
ed to have children, and she wasn’t sure she did. She said, “If you get me
pregnant, you have to take me to Europe,” which was her favorite thing, so
I said, “Okay.”
She knew all about her family history because she had Mormon ances-
tors, and they knew everything about where they were from. I was your
basic Southerner; I had no ethnic identity. We were just Americans. I didn’t
actually know until later that that is characteristic of the Scots-Irish, that
immediately getting off the boat, they all said, “We’re Americans.” That’s
why you didn’t have a hyphen. You don’t hear “Scottish-American.” My
family came to America in the 1660s. I don’t know why we didn’t buy real
estate.
I wanted to know what my family’s heritage was in the context of being
a soon-to-be father, so we went to Edinburgh, Scotland. I’d heard that the
Wallaces were from Scotland. At that time, I had been a songwriter and
had been so successful at that that I decided to write screenplays. I wasn’t
getting anywhere with anything. I had sold a few things and had a couple
of novels that had taken me a year to write apiece, and I had made about
$5,000, so I would have qualified for welfare. But we were frugal and had
saved our money, so we could buy the plane tickets.
In Edinburgh Castle, flanking the main door into the castle, were two
statues—“William Wallace” and “Robert the Bruce.” I had never heard of
William Wallace. I had heard of Robert the Bruce, the greatest king of Scot-
land. If William Wallace is standing there with him, he must have been
good. So I asked—there was a member of the Black Watch Guards . . . Does
anyone in this room have a kilt? I will tell you, if you put a kilt on, you will
become a bad mo-fo. You just walk around and look at guys going, “What’d
you say? What?” because you’ve got on a skirt, right? Excuse my French,
but that’s how you feel. This guy is standing there in a kilt, and I said, “Who
is this William Wallace?” And he said, “He is our greatest hero.” I was ab-
solutely fascinated by history, and here is this man named Wallace who is
standing next to Robert the Bruce, and the guard’s saying William Wallace
is the greatest hero. And I had never heard of him. And my name is Wallace.
And that alone just made me think, “What?”

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 I, of course, am with my pregnant wife going, “Greatest hero . . . Great-
est hero . . .” So I said to the guy, “He must have been an ally of Robert the
Bruce and fought the English,” because I knew that’s what Robert the Bruce
had done. He said, “No one will ever know for sure.” By the way, those are
the magic words for a screenwriter, “No one will ever know for sure.” He
said, “Legends say that Robert the Bruce may have been one of William
Wallace’s betrayers to clear the way for him to become king.” I nearly fell
down. I thought, “That’s like being told that Judas Iscariot and St. Peter
were the same individual, that the man who betrayed the greatest hero
then became the greatest king. What if . . . ?” And that’s another great ques-
tion of the screenwriter, “What if . . . ?” What if something about the life
and death of William Wallace was what transformed Robert the Bruce from
being the kind of man who would betray a hero to the kind of man who
would become a great king himself? That felt like a magnificent question.

Those are the magic words for a screenwriter, “No one will ever know for
sure.”

My wife was pregnant, I didn’t have any money, and it was ten years be-
fore I would sit down and tell the story, but I’ll tell you now, the trials and
tribulations. Forgive me for making this too personal. My route is not a
map you can follow, but what my route is, I think, is an endorsement of
your route. I believe when you’re a writer, you’re following a light. It is, in
fact, divine. I cuss once in a while so I don’t sound too much like a Baptist
preacher, which is what I wanted to be and still sometimes do, but I think
it’s a calling. I will not let two things stop me: One is fear of failure, and
the other is lack of effort. Those two things will never stop me. That was
my commitment. I don’t know if I had the talent, the luck, or whatever the
combination of ingredients; I was never going to be afraid to be rejected—
not enough to stop me—and I was never going to not try enough.

I will not let two things stop me: One is fear of failure, and the other is lack
of effort.

I started working, I ended up in television, I had a lot of money, things

were working really well, and then we had the writers’ strike. By the way,
every time we strike, it is a disaster. To strike is to go to war. To strike is to

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 burn your own house down. It is not a good thing. You have to be ready to
fight. I know you always have to be ready to fight, but every time we have
had a strike, it has been awful. And there are guys who would disagree with
me, but we had a strike, the company I was working for was collapsing, I
had a huge mortgage, and I thought I was going to go bankrupt. I was so
nervous I couldn’t write. I remembered my own father having a nervous
breakdown when he was in the same situation.
I got down on my knees, and I said to God, “All I really care about are my
sons. They’re all that matters. Maybe the best thing for them is not to grow
up in a house with a swimming pool and German cars. Maybe they need to
live in a little house like I lived in growing up.” One time in my life I lived
in a house with no indoor plumbing. My father said, “Rich people have a
canopy over their beds, and we have a can o’ pee under our beds.” But I got
on my knees, and I said, “If that’s what’s best for my sons, then let me do
that. Let me embrace this. But if I go down, let me go down with my flag
flying, not on my knees trying to write what I think the market wants to
buy. Let me write what I want to see.” I got up, and I started writing a story
called “Love and Honor,” which is the story that led me to Braveheart.
You’ve got to walk through the shadow of the valley of death. I don’t
know any other way. But it is the way to life. C. S. Lewis said, “If you write
for the approval of critics or the applause of the audience, you have no
hope of writing anything worth reading. But if you write to tell the truth as
you know it and for the love of the craft, then what you write will be worth
reading.” I didn’t mean to preach a sermon, but there you go.

The Inspiration for Stories

I’d like to be more secular, but what I read and what I’m trained in deals
with the search for spiritual meaning. A theologian said, “The genius of
Jesus is that he found the holy, not among the monastic, but among the
profane.” Another said, “Religion is man’s way to God, and is always erro-
neous, and revelation is God’s way to man, and is always perfect.” I say that
to say that I don’t believe in my own dogma. I have loads of dogma. I grew
up a Southern Baptist in tent revivals. We went to twenty hours of church
a week some weeks. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I am full of dogma.
I love it, I discuss it all the time inside my own head, but I don’t believe my
understanding is what I’m trying to get at.

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 What I really want is for the audience to feel. My father was a salesman,
and he said, “People will remember almost nothing of what you say and
only very little more of what you do, but all their lives they’ll remember
the way you made them feel.” All their lives. I remember going to movies
when I was a child. I would go to a movie and come out and think, “My life
will never be the same because of what I just saw.” It’s how it made me feel.
A lot of times I couldn’t articulate that feeling with words. It would almost
be like a song.
I’ll give y’all an example from Secretariat. Secretariat is a terrific movie.
It is all heart and I wanted to use the hymn “Oh Happy Day.” Now I’ll tell
you how I understood this. Martin Luther King Jr. stood up in front of the
world and said, “The children of slaves and the children of slave owners
will sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” And somebody killed
him. And Bobby Kennedy got killed. And students got killed at Kent State
during the protests. And then there was a massacre at My Lai, and a bunch
of American boys had killed a bunch of innocent civilians. And the world
just looked awful. In that time, children of slaves, against all rationality,
sang a song called “Oh Happy Day.” And everybody—you didn’t have to be
Christian, you didn’t even have to be American—could hear the joy in that
song. And it was around that same time that this racehorse named Secre-
tariat came along and ran. He was pure. He was incorruptible. And I saw
those two events, which had no rational linkage . . . In the soul, they were
linked. I’ve listened to “Oh Happy Day” my whole life. I felt this joy. And I
wanted the movie to have that. There were a lot of people saying, “What
does ‘Oh Happy Day’ have to do with the racehorse?” And my answer was,
“Everything.”
In one of the first test screenings I was sitting next to a friend from Dis-
ney—she was a casting director there—and I was worried about the music.
The song came up at, “Jesus washed, he washed our sins away.” It’s unmis-
takable in the lyric, but I wasn’t trying to convince people to be Christians.
I don’t think my own understanding is sufficient to convince people of my
dogma, but I think if I love and I can get them to love what I love, then
we’ve connected the circuit with God.
I wondered how my friend was going to take “Oh Happy Day.” At the
end of the movie, I look over, and tears are streaming down her face. She
says, “I’m Jewish. I want them to sing ‘Oh Happy Day’ at my funeral.” And
I went into the men’s room, and there was a gang member singing “Oh

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 Happy Day.” And I went, “That’s the right song.” They felt what I wanted
them to feel, from different perspectives. But that’s what I’m looking for.
The executive who bought Braveheart, the one to whom I told the story,
she’s the daughter of Sydney Pollack, Rebecca Pollack. Sydney Pollack was
one of the greatest directors who ever lived. His daughter Rebecca was a
studio executive. I told her in ten minutes the story of William Wallace,
and she went, “Go write that.” I said, “You want an outline? You want a
treatment?” She went, “What, you think I’ll tell you how to write act two?
Go write that.” That kind of impulse . . . She believes in movie moments,
that there are definitive moments when the audience’s love meter just
snaps and goes, “I’m with him. Whatever else happens, I’m with him.” For
me, in Braveheart, it’s probably when the girl brings him—snaps off the
thistle and gives him the flower—his father’s grave—and he gives it back
to her. I didn’t know that was going to happen when I was writing it. That
was not in an outline. That was not in any historical documents.
I thought, “If he goes back to this village, has he remembered anybody,
and why?” And I felt, “Maybe he would have remembered one of the girls.”
I had them go out on a date. And here’s this great warrior, and he can’t
talk to her. He doesn’t know what to say to her. And they go out riding,
and she goes, “Well, why didn’t he . . .? If he wanted me to go riding with
him, why doesn’t he say something to me?” And they’re about to part for
the night. I’m writing this stuff, and I’m going, “Well, gosh, he needs to say
something.” I can feel her going, “Well, why doesn’t he say something? He
needs to say something.” I didn’t have anything I could think of for him
to say, so she turns in disappointment to walk inside, thinking, “Well, he
doesn’t really like me.” And he catches her hand. I didn’t know he was going
to catch her hand until I wrote it. He catches her hand, and I’m thinking,
“Well, maybe he gives her something. Maybe he brought something to give
her.” And then he gives her back the thistle, and it was like, “I didn’t know
that was going to happen, but, man, I like this guy. I think women are going
to like him too.”
During the testing of the movie, one of the key players in the process
walked into the editing room, and I was sitting in there with Mel Gibson,
and this guy said, “Listen, all this stuff you guys are putting in the movie
about women . . . Women aren’t going to like this movie. This movie is for
fourteen-year-old boys.” And I went, “You’re dead wrong!” And then we
do the first test screening, and when they killed her, for the women in the

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 audience, there was not enough that we could do to the English that was
sufficient. The women were the ones that wanted retribution.
And then in the final scene the axe is dropping toward William Wallace’s
throat. I can see myself sitting in the room of my house—the same room
where I said that prayer, by the way. I was writing that the axe was falling
toward his throat. And I knew we wanted to see the axe fall, but I knew we
could not film the axe hitting his throat. That just wasn’t ever going to be
in the movie. So I thought, “Well, what do we show?” And, you know, this
is really funny, I say I write from the point of view of each character, but
ultimately I also write from the point of view of an audience member.
The axe is dropping toward William Wallace’s throat. I wrote that, and I
thought, “What happens in the last fraction of a second of his life?” And I
thought, “Well, let’s be with him. Let’s be with him as the axe is falling and
he knows it.” What would he do? And I thought, “Maybe he would turn and
look for his friends.“ And I wrote, “Then Wallace, at the last fraction of a
second of his life, turned his eyes to find his friends, because he knew they
would be there.” Not until that moment did I know she was between them.
And I wept. I wrote it, and I wept. And I think that if you’re not prepared
to go to that place, then you should not be a writer. I think you should find
another ambition. I think you should go find something that would pre-
vent you from having to look for what would move you enough to make
you weep in front of a group of strangers, because that’s what you do when
you make a movie. You want a group of people to open up their hearts and
strip away the walls and the fears, because in a theater, we’re naked. The
screen in us, the screen in our hearts, it’s the most powerful medium that
anyone has ever created for communicating that. It has music. It has narra-
tive. It has intimacy. It has grandeur. That, to me, is part of what I want to
feel when I’m doing a movie. What’s hard for me when I’m writing is when
I don’t want to feel that, when I am so angry, when I am so afraid, when I
am so—whatever—in my own crap, that I don’t want to go to that place
and I just write crap. And it’s like . . . A screenplay is a prayer.

I wrote it, and I wept. . . . If you’re not prepared to go to that place, then
you should not be a writer. . . . You should find another ambition.

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 I believe when you’re writing and you feel you’re getting out of your own
way that is what is divine and deeper than all of us. We’re all individuals,
but we’re all alive, and that life is God. God is in that life. And I think a big
part of writing is listening to God.
I was about to say I’m a lot more mature now than I used to be, but I’m
sure that’s not true. The idea of compromise drives me crazy, that we’re
not doing it the absolute best way we know. But what I think has to go
with that feeling is humility, in the sense that somebody else may have a
better idea or a perspective that will bring us to another idea, and we can
talk about it openly enough to find out why the person doesn’t want to do
it our way. That’s one aspect of it. There’s another aspect about screenwrit-
ing that’s even deeper. I think when you’re writing a screenplay you should
write without any consideration for whether something is filmable or not.
You do not let yourself—in your directing head—limit your writing. Write
whatever you can imagine. Then when it comes to being filmed, the reali-
ties can actually be more inspiring.
I’ll give another example from Secretariat. We had a really small budget
for Secretariat relative to . . . I don’t know how many of y’all saw Seabiscuit,
but our budget for Secretariat was a third of Seabiscuit’s. And we had a scene
with a character named Eddie Sweat. He was Secretariat’s groomer, and his
hands were on Secretariat more than any other human being. So, though
he was not the legal owner, that was his horse. And there’s a moment in the
movie in which Secretariat, before the Kentucky Derby, has been ill. Now,
there was a scene in the screenplay in which Eddie walks in and Secretariat
eats. And that’s really all that happened. That scene was sort of necessary,
but I just didn’t know how to make it interesting as a director.
We were about to tear down the set—the finish line of the Kentucky
Derby—and the guy said, “Randall, we’re going to tear down the set. You
need to shoot anything else?” Then I went, “God, it’s so beautiful.” And
then I had an idea, and I went, “Go get Eddie.” Nelsan Ellis, great actor.
I scribbled some stuff down on the back of a legal pad, and I handed it to
him and said, “I want you to walk out on the track and shout this.” And he
walks out on the track, and he shouts these words: “Hey, Kentucky! Big
Red ate his breakfast this morning! And you’re about to see something
like you ain’t never seen before!” Every time that scene plays, the audi-
ence cheers. That’s the movie moment, but it’s a moment that came out
of a complete . . . I would have looked at it as a compromise. I guess that’s
really my point, to always be open to possibility. They tell me in Raiders of

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 the Lost Ark, when Indiana Jones shoots the guy with the big scimitar, that
was unscripted. Or, actually, it got scripted in the moment. Harrison Ford’s
back was hurting, and he was supposed to do all sorts of other stuff, and
he went, “My back hurts. Why don’t I just shoot?” And then it became the
great moment.

Writing for Love. And Career.

Write what you love, but you’ve got to survive, you’ve got to make a living,
and you’ve got to be in dialogue with other people who may not love what
you love or may want to do something that feels to you like it’s in real con-
tradiction to what you love. I don’t want to make it seem as if I’m saying
that it’s always worked. In a way, I guess it has worked, but there have been
many, many years when I’ve been in the middle of feeling that I’m writing
what I love, and nobody’s biting.
John Hancock tells a great story. You may have heard this. He went to
California for the first time and got a meeting with Kevin Reynolds, this
really successful director. And Kevin Reynolds said to him, “If I give you
some advice, will you promise to take it?” And John said, “Yes. I will.” And
he said, “Go home. Either you will take my advice, or you will live in defi-
ance of me and keep finding a way to go on.” And I think that’s what it is
for me, the sense that God is shining on me. I don’t think there’s any doubt
that I’ve got rewards and things that I feel like I didn’t earn. But I also know
it can be a really wretched place when you have money and even some no-
toriety and even some attention, and you still don’t feel that you’ve done
anything. And what works in both of those places, I think, is to keep trying
to get what you love into the situation you’re in.
I’ve learned a great deal in writing television and all sorts of other
things, and I think we all have to ask ourselves all the time, “What do I do
now?” I tell you, it’s a really funny thing. The time after Braveheart won all
of those Oscars was one of the worst periods of my whole life. My marriage
fell apart, I felt isolated from all my friends . . . My only answer was to put
one foot in front of the other, to put my pains and my worries and my
anger all into the furnace and use that as energy to keep going. And what I
did next was, I wrote a story about men who were . . . I was offered The Man
in the Iron Mask, and on the surface it didn’t have anything to do with what
I was feeling, but on this deeper level I thought, “Okay, this is about guys in
their forties who have achieved fame, and now the world treats them as if

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 they’re irrelevant.” And that’s the way I felt after Braveheart, like everybody
would say, “Oh, you did Braveheart. Well, you can’t do anything like that
again.” I thought, “Well, I will be me in this story. I’ll keep trying to bring
that struggle into my writing.” Even to find a place in which . . . Again, I’m
far too personal, but during We Were Soldiers, my father died, and my wife
of twenty years and I divorced. I had a lot to deal with. It wasn’t until this
point that I felt I could make a movie about joy. So my sense is that that is
our journey, and that every time you put a pen to paper, you’re performing
an act of courage and faith.

On Rewriting

I think it was T. S. Eliot that said, “I’ve had a great day writing. This morn-
ing I put in a comma, and this afternoon I took it out.” And I don’t think he
was just being an Irishman when he said that. I think he was meaning that
you get to a point at which you’ve considered everything, and you go, “You
know, this is the best I can make it.”
I want to be practical about this, as well as theoretical. I have a really
great friend, Jack Bernstein—Jack wrote the original Ace Ventura: Pet De-
tective. Jack and I are really close. Jack is a liberal Jew from Miami. I am a
conservative Baptist from Tennessee. We are the best of friends. I couldn’t
do without him. Jack is the guy I trust to give the roughest of my rough
drafts, because I can hand him what I’d be embarrassed to show anybody
else, and he’ll find what’s good in it. He understands what’s bad in it, but
he’ll go, “Well, you know, this is intriguing to me.” And that’s the stage of,
“I know it’s good enough to give to Jack.” And then it’s like, “How do I know
when it’s good enough to give to somebody else?”
There’s always, for me, a big, hold-your-breath . . . No matter how many
times I’ve written, no matter how many screenplays I’ve written, no mat-
ter how many revisions I’ve written, I’ve had to take a deep breath to let
the script go and let somebody read it. But I think there’s still an internal
mechanism to go, “I’ve taken this one as far as I can get it.” I also think, by
the way, sometimes I have to write and sometimes I have to put the screen-
plays aside for a while. In Braveheart, I wrote twelve drafts before I called
it “draft one.” There were twelve drafts. I’ll set it aside for a little bit and go
on and work on something else, and then I’ll go back to it, read it again and
study it. But I keep going through it top to bottom.

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 My writing approach is, “Just start and keep going.” Give yourself a
quota of pages. You have to. I have to. Maybe you write differently. Give
yourself permission to write badly. Embrace that. Do it. Just keep the pen-
cil moving or your fingers going. If I do five pages a day, it doesn’t make
any difference whether they’re any good. The next day, I may go, “Oh,
you know, I’m gonna change the story from what I had in those previous
pages.” I don’t go back. I just write as if it were already changed. Just keep
going. A character may be a woman on page 15, she may be a man on page
45. I’ll figure that out later. Just keep going. Then I’ll go back to page one
and start again.
I’ll go through, and the ending may be, she kills him, and then he kisses
her, and they get married, and he shoots her, and they all live happily ever
after. I mean, I may do that to give myself a rough, dead ending, but I don’t
know what the beginning is until I know what the ending is. So I keep
going back and forth, like a woman with long hair, just combing. If I get a
snag, I don’t try to tear my way through it. I skip over it and work that snag
out later. That’s how I do it.
There’s so much filmmaking consciousness now that didn’t exist when I
grew up, and it largely is a technical issue. Somebody—I think it was Para-
mount—recently made a deal or set up a little fund for people to make
movies with their cell phone cameras. And now we have editing equip-
ment, and you can, on your Mac, do all sorts of things. And by the way, in
Secretariat, we have the most eye-popping horse-racing footage I have ever
seen, and a lot of that was shot with an $800 camera. If we can do that,
then the means of making a movie gets more and more accessible. But the
need to tell a story that holds together in feature-film length is still the
economical way to do pictures. All of it is, so far, sustainable in the enter-
tainment medium.
I think there is the danger of becoming so practical-minded that you
don’t continue to reach. I was in my forties when I wrote Braveheart, so
one of the things I tell my students at Pepperdine is, “You’re sitting there
feeling all this pressure that you don’t know your greatest story or what
your definitive story is yet.” And a lot of those pressures, I felt. If I can’t
tell my parents why I want to do this writing thing instead of going to law
school, and if I can’t justify it for myself, I’ll never have the chance to fol-
low my dreams. And there is a horrible bit of pressure that goes with that.
So everyone feels, “Well, I have to write the great screenplay before I’m

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 nineteen,” and I just have to say, “That didn’t happen for me.” Margaret
Mitchell wrote one book, ever. Only one. Worked on it ten or twelve years.
One book. Gone with the Wind. And I think if that were the only one most
anybody wrote, most people would feel that was a pretty great career.
I think a great thing to do—I don’t follow this principle, mind you—is
to try to listen more than you talk. I think it’s really important to be as
good as you can be as a writer, but if we’re only talking, only writing, and
not living, then our writing is empty. Some people start making films when
they’re too young . . . It’s one thing to have the perspective of youth, but
don’t just make films all the time. Do other things. I think writers ought to
act. I think writers ought to play sports and exercise. I think they ought to
do community service. I think they ought to build things. A lot of writers
have been carpenters. William Faulkner worked in a post office. When he
finally had a bestseller, he said, “No longer do I have to be at the beck and
call of every SOB who has two cents to buy a postage stamp.” But it was
probably good for him to do those other jobs, too.
If I have a message it would be, “Try to take the pressure off yourself.”
And I think the way you do that is by writing every day. You can find an
hour or two to write every day, but you can’t write eight hours a day. I
can’t write eight hours a day. Write some every day and do some other
things, and those other things will help sustain you and take the pressure
off. But if you’re here, and you’re not writing five days a week, then you’re
not going to be happy. That’s why you’re here, I think.

When to Stop Researching and Start Writing

Do not research. Research is a bad thing. I mean it. If you know enough
about the story to be interested in writing a screenplay, write the screen-
play. Then, when questions come up, go back and look those up specifically.
It’s just fact-checking then. Research is not what people go to the movies
to see; it’s the why of the story. The heart of the story is the how, but the
soul of the story is the why. Just write with your heart. You know about
something, and whatever it is about that thing that made it rattle around
in your head, your knowledge of it is superior to 99% of any people who
are going to see the result of your labors just by the simple fact that you’re
interested in it. It’s like, “Well, I’m interested in this story because there’s a
moment in here when I know this woman went out on the front porch with
a shotgun. I’m interested in that moment.” Write that story.

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 When I heard about William Wallace, I knew, standing there at the gates
of Edinburgh Castle, that there would be a scene in that story where he’s
standing in front of the men on the battlefield, and they’re outnumbered.
So I wrote that scene. It was later when I found out, “Okay, William Wallace
was a general, and he won the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Oh, okay, then I’ll
call it ‘The Battle of Stirling Bridge.’” What I was most interested in was,
what would he say on that battlefield to make someone stay? What would
make me stay if I were one of those warriors?
We shot it in Ireland, and there were all these guys . . . We used the Irish
Army Reserve. We didn’t even have to give them haircuts. They showed up
looking like they were . . . And the first scene I ever saw filmed of any of
my work was the speech at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. I just arrived in
Ireland, and I’m waiting for this scene to shoot, and there’s seven cameras
going, and all of these hours being dressed up as Scottish warriors, and
their axes are rubber, and their spears are over their heads hitting each
other, and they’re Irishmen. They’re all painted up in blue, and they’re
waiting for this to go, and the seven cameras are all set up, and then they
call, “Action!” Mel Gibson comes riding out on his horse, and the horse
can smell his adrenaline. The horse is just jerking every which way, and it’s
perfect for the scene. His head’s kind of bobbing this way and back, and
the wind’s whipping his hair across his face, and you know, “Sons of Scot-
land, I am William Wallace!” And all 3,000 of these Irishmen are just like,
“Argh!”
He goes, “And I see before me a whole army of my countrymen coming
in defiance of tyranny,” and the electricity is going through our spines. And
he goes, “You’ve come to fight as free men, and free men you are. But what
will you do with your freedom? Will you fight?” And what is supposed to
happen is, one of the guys is supposed to step forward and go, “No, not
against that. We’ll run, and we’ll live.” And then he finishes the speech
about, “Yeah, you’ll run, and you’ll live, at least for a while,” you know, and
the whole dying-in-your-bed thing, but these are Irishmen. And there are
3,000 of them, and they’re dressed in battle war paint. He goes, “You’ve
come to fight as free men, and free men you are. But what will you do with
your freedom? Will you fight?” And all 3,000 of these Irishmen go, “Yeah!”
so seven cameras: “Cut!” “Cut!” “Cut!” “Cut!” “Cut!” “Cut!” “Cut!” Then Mel
says, “Look, guys, this is a movie. We’re not going to kill anybody today.”
And what was really funny, the previous day, they had been the English-
men. But if there had been any Englishmen on the other side of the field,

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 they would have killed them, because the moment was real. That does not
come from research. It comes from the living moment.
My point is, I always thought—and I’ve tried this through trial and
error—if you say to yourself, “If I don’t know enough about the subject
to write about it yet, then I will read two books,” your sense of your own
ignorance grows faster than your confidence in reading. You go, “Well, I
have read these books, but I know that there are these other things that I
need to read too. Now I need to read five.” And it recedes from the impulse
of why you wanted to write in the first place.
I wanted to write the story for that moment. I wanted to get to, “You
may take my life, but you will never take my freedom.” I wanted to hear
that guy stand up and say that. To me, the life of writing is the life of nur-
turing your own enthusiasm, your own passion for writing. You’ve got to
nurture it. If you don’t like it, change it until you do like it. I’ll finish a first
draft—a rough draft—and I’ll turn it over, and I’ll pen it out, and I’ll turn it
over, and I’ll write, “This sucks, because . . .” And with my friend Bernstein,
I’ll ask him, “What do you hate about it?”
“Well, you know, there’s none of ‘this’ in it. There’s not enough of ‘that’
in it. I mean, what would it be like if you liked it?”
“Well, it would have the same . . . Blah, blah, blah.” And it’s asking those
kinds of questions. But you’ve got to be in love with it. And I don’t mean
that you don’t do research, but sometimes, at the very minimum, write
your pages while you’re doing the research. The other problem about re-
search is that we find out something, and because it’s taken us a long time
to find it out, we want it in our story. Then it’s really hard to go, “Well, I
know they used to call . . . In the 1880s, the Democrats called the Republi-
cans ‘copperheads,’ so I’m going to put that in there,” or something. What
makes the story have bite is that it feels relevant to people.

What makes the story have bite is that it feels relevant to people.

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 2 Story

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 The process of finding the story you have to tell is wondrous, frustrating,
humiliating, and joyous. It is an all-encompassing experience. ★ peter
hedges (About a Boy, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape)

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 What Makes a Great Story

A Conversation with Bill Wittliff

I’m very different from a lot of writers in that I never want to know in
advance what’s going to happen. If I know what I’m going to write before
I write, there’s no sense of discovery left for me. There’s no journey, no
adventure. Usually what I do when I write an original, I start with either
a character that interests me or an event. If I start with a character, then
I bump the character against an event to see how the character responds.
Even one event will slightly change that character. Then you bump that
new character against another event and he will react differently than he
would have before the first event changed him. If your character comes
alive, you start following him. For me that’s the great joy of writing. It’s
when, as a writer, I totally disappear and become both an observer and a
participant. But I never want to know what’s going to happen in advance. I
don’t think it’s a particularly smart way to write because when you get in a
jam, you don’t really know how you got there because you didn’t think your
way there, you felt your way in . . .

What Makes a Great Character

For me, the best stories are about characters that you genuinely care about
in a story that really moves you. If you have a moving story but not a mov-
ing character then you’re just telling a story. But if you have that combina-
tion, a moving character in a moving story, then you have a chance to find
meaning both in the character and in what the story can deliver in terms
of that character. I know that sounds a little awkward. Basically, drama is
complicated, but at its base it’s very simple. Drama is conflict. I want to get

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 through that door, and some guy says, “I’m not going to let you through
that door.” Now you have conflict. Then the story becomes, how does this
character get through this door, and some guy isn’t going to let him. That
creates drama.
I get a lot of young people who want to talk about drama and story,
and I tell them if you’re writing a story where this happens, and then this
happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, that’s not an in-
teresting story. There’s not a dynamic there. An interesting story is, this
happens, and then this happens, but then this happens. A perfect example
of this is Jaws. It starts with a girl calmly swimming out to the bell. Then
something hits her from underneath. You’ve just created a dynamic. What
happened? She’s disappeared, and you haven’t seen the monster. You’re
creating it in your head. Spielberg was brilliant at that with Jaws because
it’s a long time before you see the shark. You see the effect of the shark, so
it’s working in the mind.
The trick to telling a story is not to tell everything. It’s to tell just enough
so the audience is leaning forward, waiting to see what’s going to happen
next. Meanwhile you give them enough so that they can anticipate what
might happen next. If you give them signals to anticipate and you don’t
deliver, you better one-up it or they will be disappointed. Screenwriting is
much more like writing poetry—the real juice is not in the lines but that
space between the lines. If the lines are done right, the audience makes the
jumps. If you tell them everything, they’re just observers. If you do it right,
they’re participants. That’s what you want. That’s what all great art does. It
makes the audience a participant instead of just an observer.

Developing Voices for Your Characters

I’ve got a pretty good ear, and I listen to people. I always have. I come from
a country family, all of whom were great storytellers and great at mim-
icking other country folk. It just kind of comes natural in my bloodline.
The trick is just carefully listening to people. There are certain rhythms of
speech depending on what part of the country you’re in. It used to be what
county you’re in. Dialogue is revelatory of character. Also, the silences, the
space between words. You just listen. When the characters take over, they
tell you how they want to talk, and they tell you what they want to say.

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 Building Tension

You build tension by letting the audience in on a piece of information that

the characters in the film don’t have. Hitchcock said it best—what you
do, you show a lovely couple, and you love the couple because they’re so
sweet. Then you send them out to dinner. And while they’re out, a guy
crawls under the house and loads up fifteen sticks of dynamite under the
living room floor and sets a clock. So we know there’s a bomb that’s going
to explode. Then he switches to the young couple eating dinner, and then
coming home. And you cut between them and that ticking clock. That’s
tension. Is it going to blow up before they get there? That’s tension. Num-
ber one, it’s about caring about the characters; number two, letting the au-
dience in on something that’s going to affect those characters unless they
get out of harm’s way. There are other ways to create tension—the desire
of characters, a story about someone who is desperate to attain a certain
thing. You can create a lot of tension by showing how close they come to
their goal without reaching it or the hurdles they have to jump.
The tension in Black Stallion initially was on the ship when the horse
was locked up in the corral on the boat. The ship was burning and was
about to go down, and nobody was concerned about that horse except
the kid. The fire’s raging, the boat’s sinking, the poor horse is locked up,
the kid releases the horse, and it jumps over the side. And the next thing
that happens is the same kind of thing—the horse is in the water, but it’s
tangled in all these ropes, and you think it’s going to drown. It regains its
balance. Meanwhile the kid is about to drown, but when the horse swims
by, the kid is able to grab the rope, and it is the horse that pulls him to the
shore. Another one in The Black Stallion is when the kid wakes up and there
is a snake. The snake coils and hisses and is just about to strike, and the
black stallion stomps the snake and kills it. What’s important here, always,
is that you care about that kid and you care about that horse. Otherwise
you’re telling a story with no emotion.
Whatever story the storyteller wants to tell, he or she tells it from or
through a certain place with people that are believable as people in that
place. Or you can go the other way and bring outsiders in. The place is as
important to cast as your lead actors, in my view.
Lonesome Dove, the novel, is about this group of ex–Texas Rangers down
on the Rio Grande River. Lonesome Dove is just this tiny little town, but
that town was as much a character in that miniseries as the actors. What

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 we did, we went down to the Rio Grande, and we found a spot that was
both harsh and barren but visually interesting because you could see the
Rio Grande from both directions. We simply built Lonesome Dove, and
nowhere did it have a sign that said Lonesome Dove. Everybody who was
there knew it was Lonesome Dove. That’s how careful you try to be with
this stuff. It all has a logic.
The other thing about place—and this is important if people want to
get into film—is actors. Their performances will be much better if you put
them in a setting authentic to the story you’re trying to tell. That’s true of
costume, too. They absolutely feed off a place, feed off what they’re wear-
ing and how they look. It helps them transform whoever they are in real
life into whoever they are in the film, which can sometimes be an even
more real life, which is great film. That’s what happened on Lonesome Dove.
Tommy Lee and Duvall . . . I was with both those guys when they got their
costumes. When Robert Duvall put that hat on and sucked his teeth and
smoothed his mustache, he was transformed. He became Gus at that mo-
ment. It was awesome.
I saw that happen with Sissy Spacek too. She put on a housedress for
a little film I had written called Raggedy Man. She looked at herself in the
mirror, and all of a sudden, she became Nita. What’s important is that
those costumes be right, the settings and the furniture be right, because it
makes them believe they are in this other world, and then they become an
integral part of it.
Things are important like Gus’s hat, or if he wore a certain kind of boot,
or if he had a pocket watch that belonged to his father. I will write minutia
like that into the script knowing that sometimes it will be ignored, but
also knowing that a sensitive actor will get it and will demand that watch
because it gives him or her a little piece of business that they can relate
to when they do the scenes. You can also do that with physical gestures. I
didn’t write Gus sucking his teeth and doing that thing with his mustache.
That was a piece of business that Duvall came up with that absolutely made
that character more real and more individual. You’d never seen that before
in any character or any film, and that was Duvall’s. As a writer, anything
like that that illuminates the character, I’ll write it in absolutely.

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 Common Mistakes to Avoid

I would guess that the most common mistake new writers make is that
they are hesitant to accept the responsibility of creating new worlds. Un-
less you’re doing a nonfiction thing, you’re casting yourself in a some-
times-uncomfortable role as a little god. You’re creating a world that, as
of yet, does not exist in the real world. But if it’s done right, like in great
movies, those worlds become more real than the world we walk through
and drive through everyday. Most young writers don’t yet have the cour-
age to accept that responsibility. I would urge young writers, the first time
they write, don’t reach too close, reach way out there. You may miss, but
you may hit some things that you never would have dreamed you’d hit if
you never reached for it.
So much of showbiz these days is about fame and riches. A lot of writ-
ers would like to have a piece of that. A lot of times they make the mistake
of writing what they think the market might be interested in, rather than
reaching deep down into their hearts and saying, “Here’s something that
matters to me. Here’s something I genuinely want to say,” and then being
bold enough to say it.
Most film schools teach filmmaking and screenwriting through movies
that have already been made. A lot of kids think they need to make Star
Wars, Citizen Kane, whatever. Not a lot of film schools that I know teach
them to reach down with both hands into their own beings to see what
they have as unique individuals on this spinning globe. That’s where the
great storytellers come from: those that reach down to see what they have.
You may miss, but you’ll never know unless you reach.

The Tools That You Bring

I made a deal with myself some years ago that no one would see my first
drafts, because if I thought people were going to see my first drafts, it
would limit what I wrote. What’s deepest in all our hearts as storytellers is
this soul-deep desire to communicate. You want applause, you want people
to approve. Sometimes you don’t give yourself a chance to be really bad. I
made the deal with myself. That way I could be as bad as it was possible to
be, and I wasn’t at risk. What I learned was about 70% of my first drafts
were awful, but there was 30% that was better stuff than I ever would’ve
gotten on paper if I was limiting myself because of fear of what people

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 might think. I’d urge young writers, first write for the content of your
heart. Don’t worry about what other people might think. Just cut loose,
let whatever inner urge they have to be writers, storytellers . . . Find a way
to get it on the paper. Incidentally, I think writers write. And when it’s
good, they’re glad and they keep writing, and when it’s bad, they throw it
away and they keep writing. I don’t think there are any tricks or shortcuts
to being a writer and writing well. Writers write. They write and rewrite
and rewrite. At some point you either know it’s as good as it can possibly be
at that particular moment in your life, or you know you’re just not mature
enough yet to tell that story. So you just stay at it.

I’m amused when some people say writing is so lonely. It’s not. When
the characters hit the paper and they’re real flesh and blood and they’re
breathing and they’re talking to you and they’re talking through you, it’s
not lonely at all. You’re sitting there with a roomful of people you’ve come
to love and partially understand and who are doing interesting things. It’s
not lonely. It’s the great joy of creation. It’s great fun.

Recommended Reading

There are two books that I think are really terrific. One is by Stephen King
and is called On Writing. It is a terrific book. Also, The Courage to Create,
which is not just about writing but also about the courage to create. It’s not
about trying to get away from fear but using fear.
I’ve never read all the books on how to write a screenplay because I
didn’t want my stuff to become too mechanical. I feared that would hap-
pen if I knew too much about the craft. The guy who knows the most about
writing screenplays is Shakespeare. If you read his comedies and his dra-
mas not as literature but as how-to books, I’m telling you, he knew it all.
He knew everything you need to know in terms of the craft. It’s all there.
As an American writer I’m probably more affected by Mark Twain. He had
the heart and soul of all of us as Americans right at the tip of his pen. And
not just for his generation. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer are still as relevant
today as they were when he wrote them. Of the more modern writers, the
one that I’m most in awe of is Cormac McCarthy.
When I first started writing screenplays, I’d never seen a screenplay and
knew nothing about it. I started going to movies and watching the movies
for what had been written to create that movie. I would go two times. The
first time, I’d just watch the movie. The second time, I would shift in my

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 seat and watch the audience. Watching the audience taught me more than
anything. You can tell everything by body language. You can tell when that
film has them—they’re sitting forward, they’re not talking, they’re hardly
breathing. But when that story lets them go, they’re slouching, looking
around, coughing, whispering. If that story lets them go for 30 seconds,
it’ll take two to three minutes to get them back.

If that story lets them go for 30 seconds, it’ll take two to three minutes to
get them back.

What young people should do if they’re interested in film, they should look
at every film they can get their eyes on, but not just good films. Look at bad
films. “Why didn’t this turkey work?” Usually you can see. Generally, the
writer or director didn’t have a point of view and confused the audience.
Certainly, I would recommend reading voraciously—every subject, non-
fiction, fiction, short stories. Films are more like poetry and short stories
than novels. There are movies that I wouldn’t say that about, like the sec-
ond Godfather, which is just a work of genius.

It’s about instinct. It’s not about intellectually designing something. If you
start to become too conscious, I think it can inhibit you. You start thinking
there’s this model, and you have to have all these pieces. It’s just a very
odd process. What I was told was to read some great scripts and then sit
down and write one. You learn to write by writing. ★ sacha gervasi
(director of Hitchcock, writer of The Terminal)

More important than all that, really pay attention every moment to the
world you’re moving through as a person. Listen to the way your friends
talk. Listen to what is hurting them, what their hearts say. Be a participant
in your own life. And as a filmmaker maybe you can reveal some aspect of it
to those of your generation who don’t have the bent to do that. I think that’s
a great gift of writers, writers in whatever form. It’s a high calling. If we do
it right, we put models out into the world. We say, “This is a way you might
consider living. This is a way you might not want to go. That way lies doom.”
People pay attention. They pay attention because writers are tricksters. We
tell a lot of fibs to get at a truth. We’re not preaching at them, we’re telling a
story. The underlying lesson of any good story is, “This is a way to live; this
is a way not to live.” That’s a high calling and a great responsibility.

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 Steven Zaillian on Where
the Story Originates

For me, the story usually originates with the world and a character. I need
both. With Bobby Fischer, I wasn’t interested in the chess world before, but
when I started reading about it, it was kind of like a secret society. It was
something I didn’t know anything about. I was learning about it, and it
was something that could be shown and something that could be explored.
That’s basically what the book was. It was a description, a series of articles
that described the chess world. The Josh character did figure into some of
those chapters, but not all of them. So I needed both. I needed the charac-
ter and the world. For me, that’s really important.
People always say to write about what you know. I usually write about
stuff I don’t know, because I like the process of learning about it. When
Europeans come here, they’ll come to Austin, and they’ll take pictures. The
pictures they take are going to be different from the pictures people from
Austin take. They’re going to see it in a different way. I want to discover
something. Awakenings was about medicine, and I didn’t know anything
about medicine. The chess world, gangsters in the 1970s in New York, I
didn’t know anything about those things. The process of discovering is fun
for me.

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 Peter Hedges on
Crafting Story

I think of a story like a great friendship: you meet somebody, you think
you know them, you don’t really know them, you’ve gone through a lot of
battles with them and a lot of life, you’ve metaphorically made love—if it’s
that kind of movie—and there’s been a death. You’ve been through a lot.
You come to understand it. It’s in your bones.
There are two types of stories for me. There’s the “can’t wait to tell”
story, which is what Dan in Real Life was for me. I’m more of the school
of “have to tell,” which Pieces of April was and Gilbert Grape was. I couldn’t
wait to tell it, but there was a point where it tipped over to “I have to tell
it.” Only you can know what that story is that you can write.
The projects where I’ve had the most success are the ones where I
thought, “I just want to write a story.” Gilbert Grape was a story that my
brothers might read, and that my grandmother could understand, a story
that was easy to understand but hard to handle. I wanted it to be acces-
sible. Instead of trying to figure out what they want and what they’re going
to buy, you should devote more of your time to the story that you might
not fully understand yet. The story that you can comprehend quickly is
probably not as interesting as the story that’s going to unfold over a long
period of time.

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 Lawrence Kasdan on
Story and Theme

When I started out, there would be ideas that I wanted to write about, and
then I’d find a vessel to put them in. Sometimes they were genre vessels,
and sometimes they were more free form. As time goes by, I’ve become less
interested . . . There’s a fabulous quote that I can’t give you, but I think it’s
Yeats. He says the only thing that has a chance of being wonderful is some-
thing that doesn’t try to teach, doesn’t tell, doesn’t demonstrate. It took
me until today, I think, to understand that. I rigorously avoid thinking
about theme now because your life has its themes, and if you do singular
work, if you do auteur work, you are going to come through. Your themes
are going to come through perfectly clear without you ever explicitly saying
anything.
I was talking to Alvin Sargent, who is a great, great screenwriter. We
were talking about how we always get stuck. We want the screenplay to be
about narrative, because that’s what American movies are about—narra-
tive and story. But invariably our movies start with character. It’s a curse.
It’s a terrible curse. But it’s really the only way I can get started. I have a
character I want to write about and that character bumps up against an-
other character, and things start to happen. Alvin said to me, “It’s horrible
being like this. It’s horrible not being a story person. When I die, I just
want my tombstone to say, ‘Finally a plot.’”

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 I think everything has gotten harder. When you start out, you have a lot of
energy to apply to these things, and things work, and you’re very prolific.
As you go on, it can slow down, and you feel like, “Oh, I’ve done this,”
or, “I’ve used that idea already,” and you start editing yourself in a way
that’s not particularly useful. You say, “Oh, wow, this is just like a scene I
wrote five years ago,” and then you stop. You will take any excuse you have
for stopping because stopping is a natural state of writing. ★ lawrence
kasdan (Body Heat, Raiders of the Lost Ark)

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 A Conversation with
John Lee Hancock

A Perfect World

I wanted my script to be something that people read. I knew I’d probably

never get paid, but I wanted it to be read. The first script that gets noticed
is usually not made, but it hopefully gets you in the door. This one actu-
ally got me in the door and got made, which was the exception to the rule.
That movie was called A Perfect World. I had never been to film school or
anything, and so Clint Eastwood became my film school. He allowed me
to be on the set, and to my knowledge, it’s the first time he had done that.
Not that he was against writers being on set, he’s just very pragmatic and
didn’t see any use in it—“Why bring a writer out? I’m just going to shoot
the movie, and he’s not going to have anything to do.” But I somehow con-
vinced him that I wouldn’t be in the way, and I wouldn’t obstruct anything,
and that I had a lot to learn, and I wanted to learn, and I wouldn’t ask too
many questions.
When I got there, Kevin Costner, who I had met when we worked on the
script a little together, told me, “You write like a director.”
I thought, “Gosh, that’s a funny thing to say. I’m not sure if that’s a
compliment.”
He said, “When I read your scripts, I see the visual imagery.” He wasn’t
talking about “angle on” or “extra close-up” or anything like that. He was
just talking about the imagery, what it evoked, and how provocative it was.
I said, “Well, that’s great.”
He goes, “Why don’t you direct this movie?”
I said, “You’ve already got a director. His name’s Clint Eastwood. He just
won an Oscar for Unforgiven.” Then I said, “And you won the one before
that for Dances with Wolves.”

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 Then he said, “You should prepare to direct this movie. You prepare
every day with a shot list. You know the work. You’ve got the call sheet.”
So I thought, “Wow, that’s kind of a good exercise.” And I did it. Every
morning, I would come in while he was in makeup, and we would go
through my shot list, and we’d go through it bit by bit. It was fantastic
because I had to think about the day’s work and prepare based on what
I’d written on the page. And then I’d see it shot, talk to Kevin about it, get
his two cents—and he always had very strong opinions—and then watch
it. Sometimes you’d look at it and say, “Gosh, I think my way was better.”
Sometimes you’d imagine, “That’s kind of what I had in mind.” But the
kicker to that was I was able to watch dailies, and I would see what Clint
had shot, so it was an amazing film school for me.
We shot it in Austin and all around, and it was kind of a magical time.
The movie came out, and thankfully I’ve been working nonstop ever since.
It’s going on twenty years now, which makes me somewhat of a dinosaur
in Hollywood, so I’m hoping they don’t kick me out soon.

Breaking In

As an independent contractor, it’s always the next gig, the next gig, the
next gig. I’m a house painter. Hopefully I paint someone’s house, and the
neighbor looks at it and says, “Who painted your house?”
If the owner says, “That Hancock guy! He does a good job.” Boom. That’s
how it works.
It’s a small town. It’s a company town. It’s a hard one to break into.
There’s no doubt about it. I think writing is the fastest track if you want
to be in the creative side of it, if you want to write, or create, or direct, or
all those kinds of things, because a script can open doors. You can have a
script in hand. The way it was described to me by Kevin Reynolds, who is
from Texas as well and a really talented filmmaker, “Remember when you
were a kid? Did you ever move?”
I said, “Yeah, we moved once.”
He said, “When you move to a new town, you try to make friends.
You’re a little boy, and you walk outside, and your mom says, ‘Go play with
the neighbor kids,’ and you get out to the vacant lot, and you look, and
they’re playing football. You stay on the sidelines, watching, hoping that
one of them will say, ‘Hey, come on and play with us!’ but they don’t ever
say that. Finally, you get enough confidence to say, ‘Can I play?’ and they

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 kind of ignore you. Then it’s your birthday, and your dad gives you a brand
new football for your present. You take the football in arm and go down to
the vacant lot. They see you with a new football, and they say, ‘Hey, throw
me the ball, kid!’ and you start to throw it, you hesitate, and you go, ‘I get
to play.’ That’s what a script is. That football.”
When you get that kind of notice, doors open unbelievably quickly for a
script that people respond to. It’s not a magic potion. There are still many
steps to getting your movie made. It’s next to impossible. It’s a minor mir-
acle when a movie is made. Congratulations to anyone who achieves that
task. It almost has fairy dust sprinkled on it if it is successful, because, yes,
it is an artistic endeavor, but it is such a community artistic endeavor. You
have so many people working so hard on the movie. And sometimes the
people that are trying the hardest to help make your movie great are the
ones ruining it for you every day. It’s a conspiracy. When you’re directing a
movie, everybody is there to foul up your movie every day, usually with the
best of intentions. You have to keep on guard for that.
The doors opened for me with a script I didn’t think would be market-
able. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what the market was going to
be. I could no more predict that than what prêt-à-porter in France is going
to be in next year’s fashion. I’m always going to be a little behind and just
kind of . . . I’m not saying anyone should be stupid about the expectations
of what’s out there. You may say you have to write a certain movie, and I
may say, “There’s no market out there for that. That’s gonna be next to im-
possible unless you completely do it yourself, and then it’s gonna be hard
to market.”
I think it is important to write what moves you, and there’s a way to
tell . . . There’s a great movie in every story. Somebody will come up and
pitch you something, and you’ll go, “You know, I don’t see it, but that could
be fantastic.” Half the stuff I write, if I were to tell you in a line or two what
it is, you’d go, “Doesn’t sound interesting.”

On Mentors

I went to Baylor. Kevin Reynolds’s dad, Herb Reynolds, was the president of
Baylor. Kevin had a baby sister named Rhonda Reynolds, who was closer to
my age. Kevin was older. Kevin had gone to Baylor Law School, and he had
come down to UT and taken film classes and went on to USC. He was a star
there at the film program and had his first movie, Fandango, made there.

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 It’s a terrific movie that really exposed Kevin Costner to the world, not so
much that it did great business or anything, but people went, “Who’s that
guy?”
I was writing scripts in Houston, and I went, “Wait a minute. I went
to Baylor. I went to Baylor Law School. I’m writing scripts. I’ve got a men-
tor. He just doesn’t know it yet.” So I set about to let him know I existed.
Rhonda, unfortunately for Kevin, gave me his number, and I called and left
a message with his agent at William Morris. I had a script, my first com-
pleted script. I didn’t think at the time that it was very autobiographical,
which is a tendency writers have with their first scripts. You write about
something, and you go, “That’s not me,” but it’s always you. They’re never
very good, unless your life is really fascinating.
Anyway, I decided I was going to move. I gave six months’ notice to the
law firm so I could clear my desk and moved to Los Angeles. I slept on my
brother’s couch. He was an engineer at Mobil and was going to be there
for a very short time before moving back to Dallas. So I slept there and
set about getting Kevin Reynolds to understand that he was my mentor. I
kept calling and bugging him. I never got a call back. I sent the script to his
agent and to his house thinking, “Here’s my script. Once he reads this he’s
going to understand what a talent I am. He’s going to want to mentor me.”
Eventually, after bugging him . . . I don’t think I was that much of a pest,
but I would call him once a month. After six months or so, he calls one
morning and says, “This is Kevin Reynolds. Is this John?”
“Yes, it’s John.”
“Can I buy you lunch?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, Art’s Deli, Studio City, one o’clock, Friday. That okay?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Okay, see you there.” There was no “Hi, how are you doing?” or any-
thing like that.
I thought, “Well, he’s a busy man. He recognizes my talent. We’re going
to have lunch, and it’s all good. This is the way business is done. I get it
now.”
I get to Art’s Deli. He’s nice enough, and we’re chatting about this and
that and the other, and he says, “How can I help you?”
I said, “Well, I want to write. I want to direct movies. Did you get my
script?” He said he had gotten it, so I said, “So what do you think? Did you
read it?”

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 He said, “I read about ten pages. That’s all I needed to read. I can tell
that you’re not without talent, and you need to write a whole lot more.
Your dialogue’s pretty good, but the scenes are misshapen. It’s not the first
pages of a movie that’ll ever get made, but you’re not without talent. I don’t
know what you’re going to do if you don’t write, but you should do that.”
I thought, “Wow, this really isn’t going like I thought it was going to.
He’s not recognizing me.” So anyway, I finished my soup, and he’s ready to
go, and I explained, “I was kind of hoping for a mentor.”
He said, “You get a mentor when you have something to bring to the
table. If I have something to gain from mentoring you, that’s when I’ll be a
mentor. Somebody may read a script for you or whatever, but all of us are
shaking in our boots for our next job. It’s not like a law firm, where you get
old and gray, and they put you in a corner office, and you still get a piece of
the profit. It’s not that gig. The older you get, the more they are trying like
hell to shove you out the door, because you don’t represent what sixteen-
year-old boys want to see in the theater.”
So I said, “Okay, the mentor thing’s out. What do I have left? I got him
for lunch. It’s probably going to take six more months to get another lunch
with him, so I said, “I guess I would like your advice.”
He said, “Will you take it if I give it?” and I said I would. So he said, “Go
back to Houston and practice law.” I was stunned. This really was not going
well for me. He said, “If you take my advice, then you’re not a writer. Just
because some schmo tells you that you can’t do it, if that’s enough to send
you back, you’re not a writer. If you’re pissed at me, and you leave here, and
you go back home, and you write ten pages just to show me, then fine, my
work is done. You’re either a writer or you’re not. You’re either going to put
in the work or not. I can’t help you. Maybe you’ll make it. Maybe you won’t.”
I fully expected when A Perfect World came out—because he and Cost-
ner were buddies—and I ran into him again, he would say, “You made it.
Congratulations!” Instead, he was like, “Hey, good on you.” That was it.
It was still the best advice I ever got in Hollywood, because if that’s the
advice you’re going to take, you’re never going to make it. During that time
in Los Angeles there were lots and lots of talented, struggling writers. I
look at the people who have succeeded and the people who haven’t, and
one of the pitfalls was that the people who didn’t succeed ended up spend-
ing a lot of time bemoaning the fact that, “Oh, they’re making this movie.
This is crap. They cast him? Are you kidding me? This town is crap.” That
kind of pity party is what I hate.

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 The ones who were successful were overjoyed in determining their own
future, declaring themselves, and defining their craft. They said, “I don’t
know about the market. I’m just really excited about writing this script,”
or, “I’m an actor, and I love being an actor. This is what I have to do.” Those
are the ones that have been successful. And that’s kind of a good lesson.
It’d be horrible if I said that the ones who succeeded were all the ones who
thought only about the business and how to market themselves and those
kinds of things. All of those things are important. Having a game plan is
important, but not nearly as important as the fire in your soul. If you’re
a writer, you’ll write. That’s just it. It’s always hard, but it’s occasionally
gratifying, and you live for the moments where it is.

The Beauty of Youth

It’s in our DNA, or the genetic code or something, that we’re filled with
angst when we’re in our late teens or twenties. That’s how you’re supposed
to be. The world is hard, and you’re fighting, and no one understands, and
that’s the beauty of youth. The older you get, you lose some of that, and
maybe you give in a bit, and you have a little more wisdom or a different
kind of wisdom. I think that’s why societies work, because there’s a mix-
ture of young and old and all of these different ideas.
I didn’t think my first script was autobiographical, but you tell me. It
was about a young lawyer in Houston, Texas, and what he wanted to create
with his life. How pathetic is that? I’m not saying there’s not a movie there.
It just wasn’t one I could write. I’m trying to remember what my second
script was. It was better.
People say to me all the time, “Well, you can get movies made now.” And
to a degree, I can, but even with the success of something like The Blind
Side, I do adult drama. That’s dead in Hollywood. It’s really, really hard.
I’m not saying not to do it. It’s never dead forever, you know. Nobody’s
making Westerns, and then Clint gets to make Unforgiven. No one’s doing
adult drama, and then The Town does well. I’m always pulling hard for these
movies because they mean I might have a job in the future, which is kind of
important to my kids and me.
My first agent told me that it usually takes five scripts before you really
make the medium work for you. I remember the first one, battling the me-
dium a bit, because I was writing short fiction and plays, and saying, “How

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 do I make this look on the page?” and “Now this looks right.” You get to a
place where format comes naturally. I think it’s akin to someone learning
to play chords on the guitar. Eventually you can play a song. Are you ready
for Carnegie Hall? Probably not. It’s how you pull the strings. And I think
that just takes time and work. I think you feel yourself getting better and
more adept, and then you find the medium working for you instead of bat-
tling it.
It took me a long time. There are some people that get it right out of
the gate. God bless them. I’m not that talented. I had to work at it really,
really hard. I think that I had a certain gift for dialogue, and I understood
the rhythms and musicality of people’s voices, as well as the energy of the
scene and how it moves. I think that ended up being a strength I kept grav-
itating toward.

Struggling with Elements of the Craft

In the Blink of an Eye, by Walter Murch, is one of the best film books ever
and talks about the experience of watching a movie, how we blink, and
how we have internal cuts in our head when we watch something happen-
ing. We’re constantly blinking, and cutting, and choosing to focus here or
there. We experience films at 24 frames per second, which is probably not
exactly how we blink, but it somehow seems the most real to us, when it’s
really just flickering still images in front of a light bulb cast on a wall or a
screen or a sheet.
I think that when you read a script, it’s a template for a movie. It’s a
blueprint. It’s an artistic product too. Don’t get me wrong. At the same
time, you should try as much as you’re able to make the experience of read-
ing the script like watching a movie. I think it’s very important. I’ve gotten
much better at presenting on a page something to keep the reader’s eyes
dancing on the page, and then settling in, and then dancing. It’s that kind
of interplay that you’re looking for. When it comes to action sequences
especially, it’s just trying to make the page as spare as possible, to set up
the surprises, and things like that. And that’s the thing I’ve hated. It’s like,
“Here we go. I’ve got to do this. I’ll just buckle down and do it, and then
revise, revise, revise, revise.” But, you know, I still have difficulty with that.

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 How Do You Know When It’s Good?

I’ll go through the ups and downs of, “This is really good,” to “Wow, this is
bad.” There’s always one more problem. There’s always one more thing. I’ve
gotten much better at finishing first drafts that are closer to being ready
because I’ve written so many, but it takes me longer to do a first draft than
it used to because I know all the pitfalls and culs-de-sac I’ve been down
before. I’ll have a great idea and go, “I know where that’s heading. In a week
I’m going to toss this.” You understand what’s happening under the hood a
lot more, but it makes you more cautious about doing things. You’re throw-
ing out about nine good ideas because, ultimately, you know they probably
won’t work.
It takes me longer to do an efficient draft. I’m usually pretty pleased to
have finished, and then I’ll do the thing where I’ll go, “What’s missing?”
It’s almost always a question that I can’t answer before I start writing it
because I find out through writing it what it’s really about and what it’s
trying to say thematically. Almost always, the thought process then goes
to rereading it, thinking hard about what it really is, what it means to me,
and why it is important for me to have people read this or possibly make it.
That kind of enlightens the piece in some ways.
This thing I just finished, it’s a true story that’s somewhat episodic. It’s
five days post-Katrina, one guy’s story, just a single Katrina story, and all
the stuff that happened is beyond belief, terrifying, exciting, funny, and
wild. I finished the draft, and it moves like a freight train. I think it’s great,
but I think, “What’s wrong with this? What’s missing?” I kept thinking,
“What is this really about?” It’s a relationship between a man and a lover
he shouldn’t be with. This is a love story about this guy and his hometown.
She keeps looking back, and he’s better off without her, and he knows that,
but he can’t leave her in this time of distress. That kind of informed it for
me in a way. I thought that these few days, traveling around the neigh-
borhood, everything now underwater, the memories and flashbacks, and
things like that are about this romance with a hometown, so it became
about hometowns. Then that helped push me through another draft that
became far more complete.
Once that happens, I have two or three people that I will give a script
to—if they’re not working on their own at the time or they’re not too
busy—that, one, are really bright and can figure things out or tell you what

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 they think is right or wrong with it, and two, more importantly, have your
best interest at heart. That’s the hard part to find. I have friends that are
screenwriters that are really talented, but I’m not 100% sure they have my
best interest at heart. They’re great people. Don’t get me wrong. But there
are a handful of people that, in the past I’ve given a script to them, and
they’ve given me the good notes—“Yeah, that’s great, but let’s not talk
about that. Here’s the stuff that doesn’t work. Yeah, you’re a good writer,
but who cares, let’s get to the stuff that doesn’t work.” It’s invaluable.

I find that I’m writing a sequence, and it takes forever, and I don’t know
why it takes me longer than it used to. It just takes forever, and I’m writing
and writing and writing, and I’m thinking, “God, this is so boring.” Then I
go back the next day and read it, and it takes 32 seconds to read it. It takes
hours to write it and 32 seconds to read it, and you start to see for the first
time, “Oh, in the movie this could be really fast, just like I had intended.”
Your experience of doing the thing is completely disjunctive with what it’s
going to be on screen. I’ve been writing for so long, but I don’t know any-
thing, and that is the key. That is the key to writing. You just don’t seem to
learn anything. ★ lawrence kasdan (Body Heat, Raiders of the Lost Ark)

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 Sacha Gervasi on
Getting Started

As a writer working in Hollywood, I am very lucky I came out of film school

and was able to start working. The development process, at times, can be
a little frustrating. I found myself in notes meetings just going, “Oh, my
gosh.” Sometimes you’re fortunate, and you have someone who is brilliant
who is helping you out and really has the same vision. Other times, people
are not necessarily so helpful. I was finding myself stuck in the notes pro-
cess, so I decided to just pick up a camera and make a film. I was a screen-
writer who became a director just because, “Why not?”
I picked up a camera and for two years followed some childhood friends
of mine called Lips and Robb who formed a very famous band called Anvil.
If you’re into heavy metal, Anvil actually started the speed metal move-
ment. When I was fifteen I went on the road with them, and I’d lost touch
for twenty years and caught back up with them four years ago, and these
guys who had influenced all these mega bands like Metallica were still
going. The only difference was, they’d never made it. They’d been doing
it for 35 years, and they were working in an industrial kitchen in Toronto
still believing their moment would come. It struck me that this was kind of
like Rocky, and I grabbed my camera and went and made this movie on the
fly while I was doing assignments and stuff. It was just a magical thing. I
didn’t care what happened. I just knew I had to make the film, and it was a
very powerful experience.
As a writer, you’re very lucky that if one script doesn’t work out you
can write another one. If you really want to make a film, particularly these
days, you can just pick up a camera and go make one. That was a hugely
liberating thing. I don’t have to wait for people to give me permission to

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 do it. I can just go do it. You open the door, and you hope that something
good will happen. You have to trust your gut feeling. We shot for two and a
half years, and Anvil came out reasonably good, but it was really crazy and
risky.

I don’t think I’ve ever written on the first page, “This is based on a true
story.” I can remember having the conversation with people, “I don’t want
to put that at the beginning,” not because it’s not true, but because I think
it puts your audience in a certain mindset that they don’t need to have. If
the film is not dramatic and doesn’t work on its own, whether you say it’s
based on a true story or not isn’t going to help. Frankly, when I see it on a
film, I sometimes think, “Oh, God.” It’s an excuse to kind of not do it right
and try to get away with it by just saying, “That’s the way it happened, so if
you don’t like how it’s going . . .” Even though it’s true, the structure and
the way I approach it is the same as it would be with a fictional story, in
terms of the dramatic underpinnings of it. ★ steven zaillian (Gangs
of New York, Schindler’s List)

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 The Basics with
Nicholas Kazan

On Planning

You have to plan. You have to have some idea of what you’re going to write.
Or at least I do. I think when my work is good, it’s because I’m closing my
eyes and seeing things. I’m typing dialogue so fast that I can barely keep up
with myself. Of course later I have to come back and pare it down so that
it’s economical. But that’s how I work. I see pictures; I hear voices. It sounds
like madness—maybe it is—but so far I haven’t been institutionalized.

On Constructive Criticism

I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as constructive criticism. All criti-
cism is destructive. Nonetheless you have to absorb the destruction and
use it to improve your screenplay, and that means you have to read be-
tween the lines of what people are saying. Your friends who are nice to you
may tell you it’s interesting that your female protagonist is a certain way,
but you really have to look and see whether they’re saying something more
critical.
But you have to be really careful because what other people give you . . .
Let’s say people say there’s a problem with the female protagonist. If you’re
a guy, they’ll say you don’t know how to write women. I like feisty people,
so sometimes I’m told my female character is a bitch. I don’t understand
how people get that, but I realize if you have someone behaving in a feisty
fashion and it’s played by an actress who your heart goes out to, immedi-
ately it doesn’t matter how feisty she is. You’re going to love her. I picture

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 that kind of person playing the role, so I know the feistiness isn’t an issue,
but I realize I haven’t described the character sufficiently because it’s so
obvious to me.
You have to be careful of your own precepts, what’s obvious to you. In a
certain sense, writing is a form of psychoanalysis. You look at yourself, you
write a scene, it cracks you up, you think it’s hysterically funny, and nobody
else gets it. Your job is not only to write but also to sell it. You have to sell
it to the reader.

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 Advice from
Bill Wittliff

I will tell you, before you start your first draft, don’t do anything. Don’t
outline. I’m not one who thinks my way through. I don’t outline. I don’t
want to know what’s going to happen. I just trust that some part of me
does know. If I know, I lose interest in writing. I want a journey of discov-
ery. How do I know what I think until I see what I say? I just trust that
some part of me knows, but it may not know it as well as I’d like. Most
people write that way, and I know it’s probably a better way to write so you
know all the beats, acts one, two, three . . . All that stuff. I couldn’t do that
and don’t do that.

Don’t do proposals. If somebody doesn’t respond, chances are you’ll

never write that screenplay. It may be the story that will cut you loose. You
do three pages, and nobody buys. Don’t do it. Do it so they can see the
movie, but if they reject a proposal, I found . . . I don’t know anybody who
has done a proposal, been rejected on that proposal, and then gone on
and wrote the screenplay. I don’t know anybody who’s ever done that. I
think you’re cheating yourself as a writer.

I find for me the best thing to do is to get away from it and do something
completely different, and all of a sudden it’ll pop. The other thing I do as I
go to bed is to make a little movie in my head. I see myself the next morn-
ing opening the door, sitting down at my desk, grabbing a pencil, grabbing
my paper, and starting to write. I’m making this little movie in my head.
All of a sudden I’m writing, and I’m smiling. Basically what I’m doing is,
I’m trying to project myself, and then the next morning step into it where

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 I have solved it. I also tell myself, or my muses, “Guys, I have worked my
heinie off all day, and I’m tired. You all work this out and give me the stuff
tomorrow morning.” I know this sounds silly, but listen, it’s anything that
works for you.

Researching Your Story

I don’t do research before. I write it and just trust. I believe everybody

already knows everything. That’s why great art works. It’s not what it’s tell-
ing you, it’s what it’s reminding you that you knew but didn’t remember
you knew. It’s why great art, great music, great poetry, great movies always
elicit exactly the same response from the viewer the first time he or she
views it. If it’s really great stuff, it’s one word—“yes.” It’s because whatever
that work is, it elicited a familiarity from the viewer. It’s an agreement—
“yes.” Then later they think about it or talk about it and say, “Why is that
great? Why is that good?”
You can always come back with research, which is external stuff. It’s not
heart stuff. It’s not. It’s a different thing. But it takes a lot of trust to do it.

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 Anne Rapp’s
Writing Routine

Writing is so lonely. When you are writing and in the story, you have this
whole world around you, and it’s great because you manipulate it. It is only
lonely before and after.

Every writer needs a routine. Routines are crucial. A routine is your best
friend. A writer without a routine is like a traveler without a compass, a
lamp without a light bulb, a master without a dog. I’m proud to say I have a
dead-solid perfect routine and I am happy to share it with you.
I wake up very early every morning, with or without an alarm. (I’m a
farm girl, and if the sun’s up and I’m not, the day’s going to waste!) I pour
myself a large cup of coffee and get back into bed, trying not to spill it. I
turn on the TV and flip around the early local news shows, masterfully
avoiding all mattress commercials. I check out the weather, traffic, and
sports scores. These things are important even though I have no inten-
tion of going outside all day. (Because I’m going to stay home and write!)
Of course I already watched most of the ball games the night before, but
highlights are essential. You always catch something you missed.)
At 7 a.m., on my second cup of coffee, I peruse the big-dog news
shows—Good Morning America, Today Show, etc. I try to find the least of-
fensive anchor presenting the least banal segment. The dolphin who saved
an entire cruise ship full of people? The department store busted for selling
“used” underwear? Carrie Underwood on the Plaza? I settle on the Cajun
chef whipping up crawfish etouffee. Now there’s something I can sink my
teeth into.

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 At 9 a.m. Regis, Kelly, and Ellen remind me that I need to get to work,
so I turn off the TV and crawl out of bed. I pass by my full-length mirror
and am immediately reminded of the three bowls of chips and salsa I pow-
ered back the night before at Manuel’s. Ack. Regret rolls over me like the
tidal wave of tequila I consumed along with it, so I put on my workout gear.
Sometimes I actually go work out. This takes another couple of hours, but
it makes me feel good about myself. When I finish I’m totally ready and
fired up to go attack that keyboard and create!
I return home, shower, and get dressed—often into the clothes lying on
the chair that I took off the night before. This makes me wonder if I’m part
Swedish. I’ve heard that about the Swedes. I go into my office, sit down at
the computer and Google “Swedish Dressing Habits.” Then I Google “Ge-
nealogy.” I’ve always wanted to do a complete family tree and figure out if
I’m related to anyone famous. (The only person of distinction I can actually
claim kinship to is Rip Torn, but I tend to brush that under the carpet these
days.) It’s usually about this time that I feel my first hunger pang of the
day. I look at my computer clock, which seems to be stuck on Greenwich
Mean Time. I Google “Greenwich Mean Time” and read all about Green-
wich, England. Then I remind myself I have to deduct six hours to know the
real time. The confusion somehow makes me even hungrier, so I get up and
go downstairs.
I look at the kitchen clock and realize it’s noon for Christ’s sake, and I
should’ve eaten something already. You know what they say about people
who skip breakfast—total underachievers. So I make a sandwich. While
spreading the mayonnaise on the sourdough I remind myself that it’s not
mentally healthy to work while you eat. You’re supposed to be nice to your-
self and sit down at a table and actually eat your meal in peace instead of
taking it to your computer and working. Also it’s better to not drop crumbs
into your keyboard. So I do the right thing—I plop down at my kitchen
table.
Sometimes I turn on the TV in the corner to see what’s on ESPN. (I think
watching TV while you’re having a meal is okay.) If SportsCenter is on, my
meal lasts for a good hour. Sometimes I don’t turn on the TV, though, but
instead pick up the newspaper. After reading every section and finishing the
jumble, I get up, clean the dishes, and wander back upstairs to my computer.
By now it’s 1 or 2 p.m. It’s usually about this time when I notice the
three notes on my desk that I made the day before: A. Pick up cleaning.

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 B. Need paper towels, soy sauce, nail polish remover. C. Call Lisa. I look at
the computer clock. It’s 8:30 p.m.! No, wait—8:30 minus six hours equals
2:30. Whew. I look at the notes and realize if I run out to the cleaners and
Target right now, right this minute, I can get back before the traffic gets
bad. And I can call Lisa from the car. Brilliant. I run a brush through my
matted hair, swig some mouthwash, whip out the door, and complete all
these tasks with lightning speed. I give myself an A for efficiency because I
also manage to fill up with gas, stop by the ATM, make a grocery store run,
and swing through Bed Bath & Beyond because my 20%-off coupon expires
tomorrow. I find myself back at the keyboard by 4 p.m. A record!
I lean back in my chair, proud of myself, and click open the Final Draft
file. My latest screenplay comes up on the screen, and the last page I
worked on is conveniently displayed in front of me. I look at the last line
of dialogue I typed the day before. Or was it the day before that? Can’t
remember. Anyway, it’s about this time I usually feel my second hunger
pang of the day. I look at the computer clock, and this time 10 p.m. doesn’t
throw me at all. I’m getting used to this GMT thing. But I can’t bear listen-
ing to my stomach growl so I get up and go downstairs.
I open the fridge and stare at all my food. Since this will be a “snack”
and not a “meal,” I’m allowed to take it upstairs and munch while I work.
I consider apple butter on Triscuits, but I remember I had that yesterday.
So I decide on my other favorite—low-calorie meringue. I invented this
one myself, although I’m sure others have tried it because it’s SO obvious.
I crack three eggs, discard the yolks, and put the whites in a bowl. I beat
until frothy, add salt, and continue to beat to desired stiffness. Then I add a
50/50 combo of sugar and Splenda. I tried it with all Splenda but it doesn’t
work. Too not-sweet. When the meringue is the perfect texture I take the
bowl upstairs with a spoon. (Yes, raw. I once tried cooking the meringue—
like you would on top of a pie but just by itself in a clump. It was like eating
caulk.)
I settle back into my chair in front of the computer and eat the me-
ringue while scrolling back a few pages and reading the last work I did on
my screenplay. Usually I finish the meringue at about the same time I get
to the end—or rather the starting point for today. I put the spoon down
and use my finger to lick the bowl clean, really concentrating by now. I’m in
the zone, as they say. I put the bowl next to my keyboard and start to really
dive in when I realize how sticky my fingers are. And besides, I hate having

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 an empty bowl of anything next to my computer. It distracts me terribly.
So I get up and take the bowl downstairs. I wash my hands, look up at the
kitchen clock, and notice it’s getting close to 5 p.m. My goodness, almost
cocktail hour! Where did the day go?
Believe it or not, I actually go back upstairs and sit down at the com-
puter again. But at this point things can go any direction. I guess you could
say this is where the routine might start to waver a little bit.
Sometimes I actually do start writing. Although sometimes I write for
a short time, then look up and notice it’s 5:30 p.m., and I realize I need to
watch the national news to make sure nothing important has happened
today. And after that I remind myself of the evening schedule on ESPN.
Don’t want to miss Villanova/Seton Hall. (Note: If it’s late March, or Xmas
bowl season, none of this applies.)
After lingering on the local 6:30 news to see what the weather is going
to do, I shut off the TV, pick up the “sissy” vodka tonic I made a few min-
utes ago, and turn back toward my computer room. I am stopped in my
tracks by the glow of light coming from beneath the door.
I turn to the window, pull the curtain back, and peer outside. And this
is when the inevitable occurs. Yes, the inevitable—even if that happens to
all the farm girls in all the joints in all the towns in all the world who ever
chose to be a writer—the sun goes down! And when the sun goes down
you know what that means. Quittin’ time! So the computer goes off, and
the rest of the night is delegated to rewarding myself for the hard day I’ve
put in.
Lucky for me I have a lot in my life to help with the reward process:
Good friends who will join me at the sushi bar. My sports package on Dish.
A mountain of New Yorkers and fashion magazines mixed together like a
shuffled deck of cards on my coffee table. That and a good bottle of red,
and there’s no way I won’t end this day on a high note. I finish off the night
with a healthy dose of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, then the clothes
come off and go on the chair, and it’s lights out. And I drift off to sleep with
the comfort of knowing that the rooster will crow early tomorrow morn-
ing and I will wake up and thrive again as a writer. Because who is my best
friend forever? My dead-solid perfect routine! Every writer should be so
fortunate.

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 Caroline Thompson’s
Writing Process

I know over the years one develops one’s own system. My system is, I go to
my office and write a certain number of pages, five pages to be exact, and
then I get to leave. My office is a separate building, not so much a room of
my own as a hut of my own, no more glamorous than the neighbor’s tool
shed I first wrote in when I realized I needed to leave the house to work,
otherwise I would find tons of stuff to do all day, tons of distractions that
would keep me from writing.
So I go there, and the dog comes with me sometimes so I am not always
by myself. I write my five pages. That gets me through the first draft in a
month. If I get a blaze of energy and write ten pages, I get exhausted for four
days, and I lose my pace. I know I have to pace myself at five pages a day.
I march through the first pass, it usually sucks, but I have gotten there.
When I go to work in the morning, I never read what is behind me. I just
keep going forward. Afterwards, after I have a pass, I start the process of
refining and revising, and usually, for whatever reason, I go through that
five times before I show it to anybody. Steve, my husband, is usually the
first person I show it to, but not always. Sometimes I just feel like, “Okay, I
am ready to give it to them,” whoever “them” is.

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 Lawrence Kasdan on the
Challenges of Writing

I have friends who are much more prolific than I am, and I’m very jealous
of them. They don’t seem to edit as rigorously as I do, and that’s not a bad
thing. It means they’re able to produce more work than me. A lot of times
when I’m editing I’ll say, “I’ve seen it before.” You could say that about
anything because there are only a few stories. “I’ve done this before my-
self.” That’s probably true, because we tend to tell the same story again and
again. “I don’t like this enough.” Those are just three reasons you can use
to stop, and once you stop, you’ve released yourself from the hard work.
That’s really what you’re looking for every minute when you’re sitting at
the computer—you’re looking for an excuse not to be doing it.
I find writing to be hard work, and my reaction to all hard things is to
turn away. Hard work is easy to turn away from, especially if you have an
excuse. The unreliable narrator in your head will say, “This isn’t any good. I
should quit this. I have this other idea that seems really good right now.” In
fact, some people are able to channel that attraction to the other idea into
real work. One of the guys I was reading said he always has more than one
thing going for that very reason. It’s always more attractive to turn away,
but sometimes if you turn away, you’ll want to come back to it. So you may
say, “This is my escape hatch, and I’m just going to use it to get out of doing
this,” or you may actually be on to something, and the story is not good
enough.
It may not be good enough because there’s no inherent conflict in it. It
may not be good enough because it’s so familiar that you’ve only moved
it five degrees away from stories you’ve seen a hundred times, and five
degrees is not good enough. It may not be good enough because it bores

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 you after 25 pages. So there are actually some stories you’re shying away
from not just to get out of the work, but because they’re not good enough.
That’s the job, unfortunately, sorting out which ones are worth investing
your time in and which ones aren’t. It takes a lot of blood and sweat, and
if you aren’t being paid for it, which covers 99.9% of screenwriting in the
world, then finding the motivation is hard.

The truth is, you’re writing all the time. If your purpose is to tell stories,
there’s some part of you that’s working on stories all the time. One of the
great things about writing, you’re writing alone, and you kind of disap-
pear into it. I would assume, but for sure would hope, that all of you have
gotten to the point where you absolutely disappear into your own writing.
The best possible thing in the world is to look down at what you wrote in
the last hour or so and say, “My God, I didn’t know I knew that.” What a
miraculous thing. We all have that. Have faith in that. We’re all little gods.
★ bill wittliff (The Black Stallion, Lonesome Dove)

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 Tootsie was a script that I turned down at least six times. Because I thought
it was a terrible script, and initially it was. Although there were a lot of
jokes, it was the same joke. The problem with Tootsie, in its initial stages, it
was a one-joke movie.
What can this movie be about that can give us some sort of spine,
some sort of rudder that shapes the movie, so that it . . . people change in
it. What happens to the people? What is the closure? What is illuminated?
What is it about? There was a line that Larry [Gelbart] wrote, where the char-
acter of the agent says, “Being a woman has made you weird, Michael.”
And it suddenly occurred to me that if that line was, “Being a woman has
made a man out of you,” that we would have something to make the movie
about. ★ sydney pollack (director, Tootsie, Out of Africa)

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 Structure and Format

A Conversation with Frank Pierson, Whit Stillman,

Robin Swicord, and Nicholas Kazan

On Structure

frank pierson: I’ve been writing for many years and discovered that it’s
no easier now than when I started. Structure is everything.
whit stillman: I don’t think structure is everything.
robin swicord: I’ve been writing screenplays and selling them since
about 1979. It took me a very long time to begin to understand structure,
and it did not, for me, come from the outside. It came from the inside. I
learned to understand it from the inside. So I would say that books are
not everything, but I also agree with Frank that structure is everything, as
long as it comes out of character. It’s actually character that’s everything.
nicholas kazan: I’ll just say mystery is everything. What I mean by
that is, in a movie or in any narrative or dramatic form, the audience wants
to know that the writer has a secret, and the audience wants to know what
that is. Sometimes there are many secrets. What propels a story forward is
the audience’s desire to know.
When you write, you have to structure narrative information so that
the audience gets it in little pieces and finds out a little bit more about what
they want to know but doesn’t find out everything. At the point where the
audience knows everything they want to know, whether you know it or
not, your movie is over.
You don’t have to structure as Syd Field does or as any of us do. You can
structure in your own way as long as you are sustaining a mystery and the
audience is compelled to continue to watch. You have some form of narra-
tive structure, and that’s all you need.
pierson: I think there is certainly confusion about what structure actu-
ally is. The idea that there is an intellectual organization of the material . . .

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 Everything in the movie is planned. There’s not a line of dialogue, nothing
an actor does, nothing that a director does that is not planned for an effect
or is not put in there for a very specific reason. If you take it out or you
change it, you’ve got to look at everything else in the screenplay for what is
altered because everything else changes, and what it means changes when
you take anything significant out.

On Screenwriting Books and Courses

stillman: I think when we set out to become screenwriters we go through

an educational process. I arrived at it much later than everyone here. Syd
Field’s book was already out, and as someone with no confidence, you ap-
proach these books or these courses, and I think some courses are sort
of basically good. Some seem much less good. There’s a lot of potentially
destructive stuff in the courses too.
I think it’d be interesting to know if you all have an opinion about
each teacher or each sort of spokesperson, how much good and bad is
there. I was talking to a guy who produced a screenplay, and he said the
McKee course is good, but after he took it, he wrote terrible stuff for eight
months. I think a lot of the stuff exemplifies the huge difference between
the conscious process of talking or thinking about screenwriting and actu-
ally creating.
When you are creating a screenplay, you’re diving into a place that is
not very conscious. It’s dipping into some sort of morass, and you have to
come up with stuff. Once you’ve come up with a lot of stuff, you can start
structuring, moving around, and keeping up the tension and mystery. If
you just think in terms of what these teachers say, you get no living story.
I don’t know how many of us have taken the McKee course, but it’s a
lot of money. It’s a big thing if you lose eight months of writing time after
taking it, because that’s part of your life.
swicord: I haven’t taken the McKee course. When I was a beginning
screenwriter, I went to a Syd Field weekend . . . I think it was a three-day
thing. I went for one day. I didn’t go to the next two days.
stillman: Did you get a refund?
swicord: I wasn’t aggressive enough to get my refund, but I had his
book, and as I looked at it, I felt that what was wrong with the book and
with a lot of structure courses is that someone stands up there and says,
“Now, this is the way! You’ve got to know this plot point by Thursday! And

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 this plot point happens here!” There’s very little discovery that’s allowed.
I mentored a beginning screenwriter, a woman who had written novels,
poetry, and short stories. She had done her graduate work in literature.
She was a really erudite woman with a lot of gifts toward writing prose. She
was interested in screenwriting, and my suggestion to her was, “Why don’t
you adapt something, because then the story is there and you’re not quite
so afloat.” So she found a book to adapt. I helped her to analyze it: This
movement makes that movement, and that movement makes this. Once
we had talked through her ideas, she went away to write.
Her first draft was really interesting, but it kind of sprawled. As she
continued to refine it, I saw it getting better and more like a movie, less like
a novel. Then she took McKee’s course, and the piece of work she gave me
after taking McKee’s course was unreadable. Not only was it not dramatic,
but also the things that had been beautiful in her writing, eccentric char-
acters and choices we didn’t understand in the moment but would under-
stand later, had been ironed out. It was flat. There was nothing in it, no life
in it.
That’s why I said it has to come out of character. You’re hearing voices.
You’re thinking about subjects. Thematic concerns begin to come up. You
think about how you’re organizing it into a story, but it comes from a per-
son who is in the situation. Because of that, then this, and because of that,
then that, and the story emerges.
When you come at it with a grid and say that by page 30 you’ve got to
have a turning point and by page 5 you’ve got to have an inciting incident,
you’re getting locked into a kind of thing. It is not an algebraic equation.
You have to find your story, and it’s a kind of mystery, unfolding in a cer-
tain way, and subplots have to connect and push other things, but beyond
that, the idea that one person can stand up there and tell you exactly how
your personal screenplay is supposed to go is absurd.
For me it’s useful to have my own private schematic, my own private
way of kind of making a picture of it on the page in words, so that I’m or-
ganizing my own thoughts.
kazan: With an outline?
swicord: It’s sort of like an outline. It helps me know how long the
story is, because when I first started writing, I knew so little about struc-
ture that I can’t even imagine what got into my head that made me think
I could write a movie. I don’t think I even understood what a movie was
when I wrote my first screenplay, which by some incredible miracle was

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 actually sold. It was as if I had gone up on a high wire and was expected to
walk it. I didn’t have a clue about how to do it. People were listening to me
in meetings as if I knew what I was talking about. I was in a state of terror.
So I had to develop my own way of thinking about it on a page so I could
go in and talk to them. Try to understand what a story is, and then you get
inside, and then you can be your own Robert McKee.
kazan: The problem with these courses is, they analyze and dissect.
They say all good movies have certain characteristics, and they can show
you exactly, but if you try to create from that place, you can’t do it. You can
look at it as you’re outlining and use these things as constructs, but when
you’re writing, you have to throw it away. I don’t use any of these structural
templates. As far as I’m concerned, they are of no value. You have movies
inside you. If you’re writing movies, it’s because you love movies. If you
love movies, you carry the rhythm of movies inside you.
At the beginning of the movie you want something to happen. Oth-
erwise, why are you sitting there watching? You’re bored. If nothing hap-
pens in fifteen minutes, you’re going to walk out. You don’t need to be told
there’s got to be an inciting incident. You start a movie, something should
happen. The sooner it happens, the better, although you have a grace pe-
riod with the audience while they’re getting into the world of the movie,
and if what they’re seeing is entertaining, you can get away without having
the incident.
My advice is, if you want to use these books, fine. Use them before or
after you do a draft if there’s something wrong with it, but if you try to
fit . . . Are you really going to stop in the middle and say, “No, wait a sec-
ond. I want to check this with Syd Field”? It’s creation. Writing or creating
something is the same as making love. It’s an act of God if it goes well. If it
goes badly . . . The one thing that can ensure you’re not really making love
is if you’re checking the book in the middle to see how you’re doing.

Character Arcs

swicord: In terms of the studio executives, it is one of the more horrify-

ing things to sit in a meeting and have somebody who’s never written a
screenplay tell you that something isn’t working because you need . . . And
then they supply a buzzword. Everybody gets infected with it. It isn’t just
studio executives.
One of the things they talk about a lot in a story is the character arc.

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 Your character’s got to change—unless what’s unique about this charac-
ter is that she doesn’t change. There’s always something that you’re doing
that’s not by the book. In Little Women, the character Marmee is the uni-
verse upon which this entire family stands, and the whole thing about
Marmee is that she is immutable. She does not change. She is this mother
who is their world, their platform, and from her these young women can
now be ambitious and go out and have their lives.
There was a moment when Susan Sarandon said, “My character doesn’t
change. What’s my character arc?” We were able to fudge our way out of
that, but the whole thinking that there’s something wrong unless it fol-
lows somebody else’s construct is dangerous to the work. That is one of the
reasons we see cookie-cutter scripts.
pierson: What you just said is interesting to me because you have
somebody, in this case an actress, not a studio executive, and she’s saying,
“What am I doing? What is my job here? Usually when I play a part, don’t
I have a place where I start, and then something happens, and I arrive at a
different place than I would’ve expected?” And you’re telling her that the
interesting thing about the character is that she doesn’t change.
But that gives you a clue as to how you go about structuring the writing
of that character. You’re trying to constantly confront her with situations
that demand that she change and adjust. Other characters bring pressure
to bear on her to make her change, and she doesn’t. The drama grows out
of the fact that they’re frustrated with her because she doesn’t . . .
swicord: If that’s what it’s about.
pierson: If that’s what it’s about. So often we’re confronted with a
scene that doesn’t work. In the earlier years of my career I depended upon
a book by a Hungarian named Lajos Egri called The Art of Dramatic Writing,
which I think still is the best book in this field because it’s not so page-by-
page structurally organized. It has much more to do with how you conceive
of a character, what a scene is about, and so on.
Conflict was the major thing. I used to have this huge sign over my type-
writer that said, “Conflict, Stupid.” Nine times out of ten if you’ve got a
scene that’s not working for some reason, the characters are not in con-
flict. They’re just giving out information. They’re wandering around and
not going anywhere.
As we were talking it reminded me of Flannery O’Connor’s famous re-
mark that, “Yes, we believe in a beginning, a middle, and an end in story-
telling, but not necessarily in that order.”

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 kazan: I was reminded of something else. I wrote a film called Reversal
of Fortune, and we realized partway through the production that none of
the central characters changed. And yet we hear that all characters must
change, and certainly your main character must change. None of the char-
acters changed, and yet the movie was satisfying because there were a lot
of mysteries that were resolved during the film. We used to joke during the
production that American movies are sustained by the illusion that human
beings are capable of change. Usually we’re not. In a story it’s better if your
characters do change. It makes the drama a little more satisfying, but it’s
not necessary.
pierson: One of the great dramas of Western dramaturgy is a play in
which nobody changes and nothing happens—Waiting for Godot.
kazan: That’s right. Absolutely. A masterpiece.

Waiting for Godot and Lack of Structure

pierson: Waiting for Godot is a play that defies all those Syd Field and Lajos
Egri rules.
swicord: But it’s not a screenplay.
pierson: It’s not a screenplay, but the two disciplines are related, ex-
cept one is telling stories in terms of action and the other primarily with
words. Their structures are very strongly related. Waiting for Godot appears
to have no structure at all, but it has a steely discipline that is absolutely
arresting. You know that it took a mind that was enormously disciplined
and focused to write that. That’s what you’re perceiving on stage, and it’s a
lot of where the drama comes from.
stillman: I think that essentially what Nick was saying is right, that
starting out you have to go somewhere very deep and get characters who
begin to speak with a tone of voice and start creating the reality of a fic-
tional world. You’ve got to go into that fictional world and hope there’s
forward momentum and a story happening that’s interesting. When you
come back to look at what you’ve done, or get stuck not liking your draft,
then I think some of this advice is helpful. It helps one analyze and think
about one’s predicament.
Some have described Metropolitan as meandering. That’s good, I think;
the good part of Metropolitan is the meandering. Before we cut a lot out, it
was not so much meandering as static. Material that seemed interesting or
funny on the printed page, long speeches by the actor Taylor Nichols, the

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 preppy Spengler, the philosopher of doom. Everyone seemed to like these
at the script stage but Taylor had a nose for what wouldn’t quite work. I
couldn’t believe he wasn’t thrilled with everything in the part. It all seemed
so “interesting” to us. Why wasn’t he as thrilled?
He kept focusing on the second half of the movie when his character,
Charlie, gets to be friends with the protagonist and they become an odd
pairing going off in search of the heroine to “rescue” her. I wish I had lis-
tened to Taylor before I shot the film because when we were in the edit-
ing room, the long speeches about sociology that were funny theoretically
were just deadly. The film just stopped. Whenever it was building up—in a
meandering way, of course—toward relationships of the characters, lead-
ing to something that later could pay off, it worked far better.
With Barcelona, I had a scene, a sort of recapitulation scene toward the
end of the movie after a hospital sequence, after a lot of things happened,
and Taylor asked, “Do we really need to do this scene?”
I said, “Definitely. We have to do this. They won’t understand what’s
happening.” We cut it out at the end. Taylor, had I listened to his advice,
would have saved us lots of money. Time and again when I see the films
with audiences and I see restlessness or a lull, I do think that some of the
things Syd Field or Robert McKee say could’ve been useful. I think you
have to have a lot of integrity about your own work and what you’re creat-
ing and reject all the stuff they’re saying that’s formulaic or unhelpful. Be
really selective about what you pick and choose to use. But it can be a sort
of medical test to check what’s not working in your story.
Even the kind of films that someone’s going to make that are less overt-
ly mainstream, they have to be going somewhere. There can be a mean-
dering approach if it’s finally arriving somewhere, because the audience is
surprised—“Gosh, this film actually arrived somewhere. I thought we were
going nowhere with this.”
pierson: I think the word “meander” is an interesting word because it
implies a search for something. You’re in motion. Your characters are seek-
ing some truth. That’s the mystery.
stillman: The audience likes to be surprised, and if they think they’re
just meandering and suddenly they come to a fountain, that’s a positive
thing for them.
kazan: Character can also come from plot. That is, if you want to write
a story about a man who kills his mother, you have to create a character
who could realistically do that. You can’t say, “I’m going to write a story

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 about a man who kills his mother, and I just love my Uncle George, so I’m
going to base it on my Uncle George because that’s a fantastic character.”
Uncle George might be someone who would never murder his mother, so
it’s not believable. You have to create someone who will serve your func-
tions. They’re hand in hand. You can’t have one ever without the other.
swicord: Yes, you can. I had a feeling you were getting at a certain kind
of genre picture in which character is less important than plot. One that
comes to mind is Speed. All we need to know about Keanu Reeves is that
he doesn’t want people to die. It’s true that Sandra Bullock’s likability and
realness help the audience in an unreal situation, but the movie didn’t
come out of her. In fact, by act three she’s an object. They’ve got bombs
strapped to her, and she’s just a thing that needs to be rescued. That bus
was driving her. She was not driving that bus.
What I gathered from Nick is that you can’t have people doing things
that they’re not psychologically prepared for. In some films we come to
understand the hero—in this case Officer Jack Traven—doesn’t say much,
which in this film is kind of a blessing. All we had to know was that he
was heroic, as opposed to something like Lethal Weapon, where you had
a man who was crazy and would do and say anything—Mel Gibson—so
you’re waiting for that next surprise. He’s played off a family man who’s
much more stodgy. And so even though there was a very tightly imposed
action-genre structure—this has got to happen, that has got to happen,
the bad guys are here—you had these people playing off each other. We
felt in some way that the insanity that was happening was also coming out
of Mel Gibson, whereas basically Keanu and the woman driving the bus
were reacting to the situation that they were in, and the stakes were always
being raised by somebody else.
pierson: The Hollywood king of the unstructured movie supposedly is
Bob Altman. I happen to disagree with that. I think that Nashville is one of
the most tightly structured movies ever made, brilliantly choreographed
by an ex-choreographer who became a writer, Joan Tewkesbury. In fact,
she drew diagrams of the action and the interrelating of how we get from
this to that and so on. The movements appear to be random, but they are
tied together by some sort of autosuggestion on her part. To what extent
were those characters driving that story?
swicord: They were. There’s always the exception that proves the rule.
In that case, I feel those characters were so loopy, and they all contrib-
uted to the story. Writing for an ensemble is a separate thing in terms of

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 structure. I’ve written a lot of ensemble movies. In fact, I’ve never had a
movie made that was not an ensemble picture. When you’re working with
an ensemble, a lot of smaller questions make up the larger narrative. It’s
like you’re drawing a line from each one of those characters, and together
they are creating this beautiful world. It’s like a dance, a tapestry, where
you see these things come together into one.
pierson: I think the real problem is that there is no single structural
model or paradigm that fits every possible movie you might want to go see.
I think that movies are all very structured. I think that in all the movies
that are of any value you can go in and tease out the structure. Sometimes
it’s not quite as obvious as it is in the case of a thriller or something like
that. I think that the difficulty in trying to think about structure in the
McKee/Syd Field kind of way is you tend to take one simple formula and
try to apply it to everything, and it doesn’t work.

Lawrence of Arabia

pierson: A major problem with the movie is that he goes through these
agonies out in the desert and all the rest, and then he reaches a point
where he’s been raped by what’s-his-name who played the Turk, José Fer-
rer. I guess some people might like to be raped by José Ferrer, but he didn’t
like it.
stillman: He said he didn’t like it.
pierson: In any case, the very premise of the movie is, here is a man
who has fallen in love with the primitivism and the noble savages, and he
thinks he can find his salvation in the desert, but he discovers that they’re
all being betrayed by the government he’s working for, and there’s nothing
left for him in the desert, so he goes home to England. We dissolve, and
he’s right back there in Allenby’s office saying, “I’m ready to go back to war
again.” You never see what happens in England.
swicord: Yeah.
pierson: They left that out. The movie works okay without it, but I
think it was a failure of their imagination that they could not think of what
it was that happened in England that would be interesting enough to keep
in the picture.
kazan: I agree completely. I’m not a big fan of that movie. I felt that
absence, and it really hurt the movie for me. One of the things that’s criti-
cal to movie construction is that you leave things out. Usually, you don’t

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 leave out something so big, but in a sense, there’s a mystery lurking in that
movie, which is what happened in that section, and it kind of pervades
the movie. You feel it as you’re coming to it, and you feel it afterward, and
there’s kind of a sense of never really completely knowing another human
being, never really knowing the hero. That’s very central to the conception
of that movie, so the movie actually gets some energy out of its flaw.
pierson: You think that’s what Bolt said to Lean to explain why they
were leaving that scene out? Did you ever see Papillon, the picture with
Dustin Hoffman and . . .?
swicord: Steve McQueen.
pierson: They’re escaping from the world’s worst hell, and they’re
going through jungle or one thing or the other, and finally around the mid-
dle of the movie, they reach this absolute paradise of a native village. For
the first time in the movie you have kind of a rift, and they’re being fed and
massaged, and their wounds are being healed. These people are peaceful,
wonderful people and all the rest of it. Then when they leave that and go
on through the jungle and so on, they have a lot of horrible further adven-
tures, and they know that even if they get back, their friends are probably
just going to be captured and put back in jail again and so on.
So in the course of writing the picture, somebody asked a very intel-
ligent question—“Why would they ever leave this village? Why on earth?”
Suddenly, everything stopped, and for literally a week or so, they did noth-
ing but try to invent what would happen in this village that would lead
them to leave.
Finally, Frank Schaffner, the director, said nothing should happen
there. What happens is, just at the moment they’re saying, “My God, this
is wonderful,” and so on, they wake up one morning, and all the villag-
ers have gone, just disappeared. They are terrified because they think, “My
God, they must know something terrible is going to happen,” and that’s
why they leave and continue into the jungle.
swicord: So it’s mysterious again.
pierson: Yes. It’s a mystery, a brilliant conception.
swicord: It was brilliant.

Character Milestones

kazan: There are a couple of things I look for as kind of milestones. There
is a critical thing that happens early on. When you first begin a story—

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 sometimes it happens right away, right in the very first frame—there is
a point at which a character is being confronted with other characters in
conflict with him or a situation he can’t resolve or what have you. There is a
point at which, if he just simply stops and decides whatever it is he wanted
in the picture is not worth it, he can always get back to the life he led be-
fore. So I look for that moment when something happens, and mostly I
want it to happen because the character—it grows out of the character’s
qualities and the nature of the man or the woman—does something that
pushes him past the point of no return. From that point on, he can never
get his old life back. He has to go forward into unknown territory.
For the middle part of the movie, it’s exploring in various ways, “I’m
now confronted with this situation. I can’t go back to my old life. I can’t
get whatever it is I want, and maybe I don’t even know what it is that I’m
trying to find or achieve.” He’s making all these choices, and the other char-
acters in the piece are reacting to those choices. His direction begins to
slowly emerge.
The second major turning point for me is the point at which it becomes
clear what the final choice is. That’s the “third act.” But the movie never
stops. It just goes continually on through, so I don’t like to think in terms
of act structure.
swicord: But it is like three movements. It does happen in three
movements.
kazan: But it’s more like music than it is like . . .
swicord: It is. It’s much more like music than what we think of as play
structure.

Notes from the Studio

pierson: When you’re talking to studio executives, they may say, “Page
thirteen, can’t we have something here? Why doesn’t she do this? I don’t
like him because he says that.” I don’t take anything they say at face value.
I don’t want to hear it. If it gets too hot and heavy, I try to say as politely as
I feel at the moment, “Look, you’re paying me a lot of money to do this, so
don’t tell me how to do it, because if you know how then just get a stenog-
rapher in here if you want to dictate it.” But what I’m listening for is that
something is bothering them. They’re bored at that moment. They don’t
understand it, and if they don’t, that’s what I need to address. I need to try
to determine for myself why it is they feel that way.

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 kazan: Sometimes they’ll tell you that the second act is slow whereas
actually the first act is slow, and they start to feel it too late. If you tighten
up the first act, the second act plays fine. You have to diagnose. You have
to be like a doctor diagnosing what they tell you. What they tell you are
symptoms.
stillman: I remember that in book publishing we were much more in-
clined to buy a proposal on three chapters and an outline than a finished
book because with three chapters and an outline you can imagine this won-
derful thing. If it’s already finished, it’s such a downer. It’s not what you
imagined. I think that within 20 to 30 pages there should be enough mys-
tery created that . . . What I don’t like really is an outline that reveals the
entire story—your bad and unoriginal early ideas become an albatross it’s
nearly impossible for you to escape from. Why not send 30 pages and say,
“If you want to see what comes later, ask me, and I’ll send you the rest”?
pierson: In terms of working in Hollywood—I don’t know about the
film festival scene and that kind of thing particularly—certainly the first
draft that I turn in to the studio has a lot more in it than it’s going to have
when we actually get down to the production rewrite. That’s because a lot
of the people at the studio who are going to read it are only going to read it
one time, but they’re the ones who make the decision as to whether they’re
going to push it ahead. They’re not very good at reading screenplays, and
they’re not particularly imaginative.
A lot of directors are not very good at reading. Some of them are barely
literate, even major directors. I’m quite serious about this, by the way. They
just don’t know how to read. The words on the page don’t compute. So
you have to give them a considerable amount more information than you
want to. By the time I’ve gotten a screenplay—if I’m writing for myself to
direct—ready to work with the actors on it, I’ll have cut out a lot of dia-
logue that I put in originally to be sure that everybody at the studio got the
point. Also, of course, you have to take . . . If you’re working for another
director, when he comes on board you have to take out all the shot direc-
tions, because they hate that.
swicord: The very first screenplay I sold, people came to me as I was
doing it and said, “We can’t give this to directors until you take a lot of stuff
out, because the directors will be insulted if you say, ‘She’s wearing a blue
dress.’ You have to just say, ‘She walks into a room.’” So my second draft of
the screenplay was really flat. I tried not to describe anything or reveal too
much so that the director would have some room to come in and do what

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 they needed to do. It was a really big mistake, and I really felt that I was
writing in a straitjacket.
We are storytellers. Page one: This is what the room looks like. This is
what the weather is. This person comes in, and something happens here.
We don’t know who that person is yet, but you’re going to find out by the
end of page two exactly who that person is, because they’re either going to
show you or tell you. You have to make it really immediate. It is written in
the present tense. You have to communicate what you are seeing in your
head, and you can’t do that by writing big blocks. You have to find a way
to tell it really concisely and quickly so they don’t forget, and so it makes a
really strong impression on them.
People like the Sundance workshops. We were just at the Sundance
Screenwriters Lab, where I saw scripts in which I couldn’t believe the work-
shop people would let this person in, purely on the basis of their writing.
What the Sundance staff was responding to in some of these cases was that
the artist had already made a film or something, and the workshop people
could see that this person had a lot of talent, but wasn’t a writer yet. So
they were bringing him to this lab to show him . . . maybe somebody who
had really interesting characters and no sense of structure at all, but what
they were writing was very lively on the page. There was a life happening
there. And I guess that was what hooked the Sundance people.
I don’t think in these workshops they’re looking for someone who is a
mint-perfect writer—“Boy, this person really knows how to write, so we’re
going to invite him.” There’s something else that jumps off the page at
them, and I think the thing that jumps off the page is you.

Taboo Topics

pierson: Religion. Forget it. Nobody in Hollywood believes in God. They

also don’t understand the religious experience or the religious impulse.
swicord: In film that’s a signifier for crazy, in fact, right?
pierson: Yeah.
kazan: Radio Flyer was a spec script that sold for a lot of money. I guess
it made a bad movie. I didn’t see it. It was about child abuse. That would
normally be considered a taboo subject. If you write about that, you would
have to handle it in exactly the right way, and at least as a writer he handled
it in a fairly effective way apparently. I never read the script. It all depends
on how you do it.

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 pierson: Slavery is another unmarketable subject in Hollywood. They
do not want to do pictures about slavery. There are very fine screenplays
out there that have been floating around for years that major directors
have wanted to do on various slave revolts or the slave experience and so
on. They don’t want to do them.

Workshopping a Script

swicord: I get as much as I can stand. I like for Nick to read my scripts
because Nick and I are married, so that’s easy—someone who lives in your
house who can read your script. But I find there are things I’m insecure
about when I’ve finished that Nick doesn’t necessarily focus on, so it’s
helpful for me when I can give it to somebody else that I work with. If I get
too much input I find it to be destructive. In fact, I look at these writers
who go through the Sundance thing, or any other similar workshop, they
may have a meeting on their one poor little script with twelve different
people in four days. Personally, if I were that writer, I would want to kill
myself—because you can’t possibly know at the end of that time what you
want to change in the work. What you would be left with is, “What I’ve
written is nothing. It’s just something these people have thrown their egos
up against.” How you reclaim your script and make it your own again must
be quite a process.
pierson: Robin is so right about Sundance. You have twelve instruc-
tors and the writers, and once a day the teachers, or whatever we call our-
selves, all meet and discuss the problems we perceive in each one of these
screenplays. The unanimity is wonderful. Everybody agrees about what the
problems are, which is very reassuring. It indicates there is some science
and method in the whole thing. But then you talk to the twelve people—all
experienced and all the rest of it—about how to solve the problems, and
they all go off in wildly different directions, which is also very reassuring
because it indicates there is an art to screenwriting.
You can’t assume that just because somebody has an idea about your
screenplay that they’re smarter than you are. You know your screenplay.
What you need to do is say, “Well, why did they have that idea?” Maybe
that triggers something else that comes from inside you.
kazan: I show my scripts to one person, and then I get a response, and
I do some work. Then I show it to another person. Sometimes I’ll spend a
day reacting to comments, or I’ll spend a week or two reacting, and I keep
going. Sometimes I will disregard a comment and say, “I don’t agree with

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 that.” If I don’t agree with it, I will dismiss it out of hand. But if the second
and third readers say the same thing, you know you’ve got a genuine prob-
lem that you’ve got to pay attention to.
I find it invaluable to do that. You can’t take anyone’s opinion to heart.
Only respond to things that have resonance inside you. But once you hear
something for the third time, it starts to have resonance inside you. You
have to deal with it. But do it your own way. Don’t pay attention to any-
body else.

On the Format of a Script

swicord: It has to look professional and be easy to read. What’s hard to

read is, “He is running,” and then, “She is doing that,” and after a while
you’re wondering why they can’t just say, “He runs,” and “She runs,” in the
present tense without being too crazy about it. Just try to make it easy for
the eye to run down the page and understand what the story is.
pierson: The big mistake is writing inner dialogue, the thoughts of the
character, the stage direction that says, “He comes out of the building look-
ing like he wants to make a telephone call.”
stillman: I think that’s superb. I like that. There isn’t an “I want to
make a call” look.
swicord: When a character has a really big realization and it’s sup-
posed to be conveyed merely with an expression on their face, it is difficult
to know how to convey it simply, without dialogue. Apropos to what you
were saying about putting more on the page than will be there in the end—
you can’t believe what readers don’t get when they’re reading your screen-
play. So I have started putting the character’s inner thoughts in the screen
directions, here and there. I put it in, underlined, so the direction reads,
“He looks at her,” and then I write what this man is thinking, his specific
thought, because that thought gives us an expression you can read on the
actor’s face. There are a lot of, “He looks at her incredulously,” or whatever.
Is it disbelief at the absurdity of the situation? Is it disbelieving joy? If
you can give the reader the specific and it works to clarify the moment,
it doesn’t look like you’re padding your screenplay. It’s a signpost for the
reader, because they may not know that when he looks at her incredulously
he’s on the verge of making a decision. That subtlety may go past them.
pierson: Well, you can do that with the little parentheses under the
character’s name.
stillman: That’s what Nick does.

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 pierson: I call them “wrylys” because, more often than not, that’s
what’s under the character’s name—“wryly.”
stillman: Right.
pierson: I always know where I’m trying to get, but I often don’t know
where I’m going to start. I have to go back and start, and then I go sequen-
tially and try to make an outline, which is just sort of a general idea of how
I’m going to get to that ending place. Then every three days or so I take
another look at that outline, and I have to throw it out because it’s been
completely changed. So I know what the next few scenes I’m going to write
are, but I have to go sequentially all the way through, one foot in front of
the other, then two steps backward, and falling down stairs, and climbing
back and forth, and all that.
stillman: A lot of times we go through the whole process, and only
when you get to the end of filmmaking do you do something that’s very
creative and very exciting that maybe you could’ve done a lot earlier. When
you’re in production and in the editing room you tend to start throwing
away stuff—“We don’t have time for this.” You’re just so delighted to get
rid of some stuff that’s not playing well in the screenings.
I think that now that I’m thinking about this in the script stage it would
be an interesting exercise to take stuff out of your script that you think is
essential and go through it without that and see if you’re not adding a new
dimension to it, adding on to it. One thing that I think is very bad about
a lot of the advice books and courses is the way they try to denigrate dia-
logue. I know what they’re responding to, because a lot of people just think
dialogue will cover all of this, and their scripts are just dialogue, and it’s not
heading anywhere. But even in action films sometimes there’s absolutely
great dialogue that makes them incredibly popular and fun to watch, and
it’s very funny and very true to character. Dialogue is so much the person-
ality of the character of the movie, and this sort of rogue thing of saying
dialogue is unimportant is just nonsense.
pierson: “Go ahead. Make my day.”
stillman: Another thing that’s negative about the courses and the
books is, you get this idea, “I have to have the motivation for the char-
acter,” and the motivation becomes kind of this awful stone, a motif that
goes through the whole movie that no one cares about. I remember in the
film A Few Good Men, the character point for Tom Cruise’s character is that
his father was some great lawyer or judge, and the story keeps coming back
to his insecurity, because his father was such a great lawyer. We’ve gotten

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 so familiar with this sort of Motivation 101 and inured to it. We know all
about that kind of stuff, and that’s the most boring part of that film.
At another film screening I couldn’t help noticing that the two people
who most liked the film were those who had arrived twenty minutes late.
They missed the scene where the inciting crime was committed. And the
rest of the film became much more interesting for them than for everyone
else as they had to use their imagination to figure out what might have
happened. So maybe it would be a good idea to consider removing the first
thirty pages of your script. Let them guess what happened.

Recommended Reading

stillman: I’d like to give my reading list because there were some things
that seemed terribly helpful. One is a book of interviews with screenwrit-
ers called The Craft of the Screenwriter by John Brady. He does a really won-
derful interview, and there are five terrific screenwriters he interviewed on
the craft of screenwriting.
I thought the screenplay for The Big Chill, which they printed in a fac-
simile version, was very helpful. I didn’t know screenplay format and this
was a case of good form and brilliant content. Also The Big Chill is a beauti-
fully told ensemble story dealing with the issues that really do face us and
our peers.
Another really interesting book—though I’m not sure how directly use-
ful it is—is Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges. I’m not certain if Preston
Sturges’s screenplays are that relevant to the kind of screenplays someone
would write now, but the book is terribly good. It has a long piece about the
genesis of each screenplay, and how many years it took, and the different
drafts, and what was left in and left out.
In reading Preston Sturges’s biography, he taught himself with a book
that was popular in those days on dramatic structure in playwriting by
Brander Matthews. He keeps saying how he’s reading each chapter of
Brander Matthews and writing his plays, which later became the genesis
for some of the great movies he made in the ’40s. I think there’s a lot of
value almost indirectly from these books. They suggest things to you.
When you get a good book the stimulation effect is terrific. You have
your coffee breaks, you’re working on something, you read half of it, and
you get so many great ideas from reading about other people and their
problems. I think that’s totally useful.

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 There’s another book with a series of interviews, and it’s incredible how
useful some of the interviews are. There’s one with Nunnally Johnson, one
with Buck Henry, and one with I. A. L. Diamond. They’re really great inter-
views. Nunnally Johnson says the whole thing in a screenplay is withhold-
ing information. A boring person tells you much more than you want to
know at a party. Someone who just tells you everything is a bore, and you
don’t want to do that in a screenplay.
pierson: I think the mere fact that there are so many books out there
and that we do think about things like three-act structure indicates that
there’s something there that needs to be thought about. Each one of us
goes about dealing with structure in a different kind of way. It’s like being
an artist, a muralist. You’re up there, and you’re painting right here, but
every so often you have to step back and see what you’ve just done to the
total composition. Then you’re in a position to come back and see what’s
gone wrong there. You can get back there, and that’s when you become
emotional. Now I step back and look at it with the other side of my brain.
kazan: The problem with these books is the tendency to want to spend
a lot of time in the back of the room and not so much time up at the canvas.
You have to be able to get lost in the canvas, and then when you wake up
from getting lost, then you step back and see what you’ve done.
swicord: That’s right. It’s as if you are painting a mural, but you’re
standing in the back of the room and you’re just looking at an unpainted
wall. That’s what they’re saying in terms of putting the structure first. You
have to have perspective, but there are two ideal times. One is before you
start, when you’re thinking about it. Don’t spend too much time doing
that, and then you write it. Afterwards you stand back, and that’s the other
time that you get perspective. You see what you’ve made, and you say,
“Now I’m going to change it.” Rewriting is the key for me—to not think I
have to get it right the first time I write the scene.
pierson: Oh, God forbid. One of the terrible things about writing a
screenplay is that for the first few weeks and months it’s just awful. It’s
terrible to have to haul your ass to the computer every single day and con-
front this clear demonstration of your moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
Each day you do something out of desperation with this shame and cold
sweat pouring down your face so you won’t have to step out into the world
some day with something as bad as this. Then finally it begins to get good,
and it’s the rewriting that makes it good.

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 Caroline Thompson
on Structure

I am a writer. I love to write. I love words. Words are really important to

me. Poetry of language is where I live. I think that a script is a reading
experience first, and so our job is to make that reading experience vibrant
and alive and challenging. Ironically, though, the greatest compliment you
can get as a screenwriter is, “God, that was a quick and easy read,” because
it means you kept them riveted, you planted their ass in the chair, reading.
I don’t write screen direction on a script because I think it throws the
reader out of the story. I am very cunning, I hope, with how I construct the
page, because I need the reader to focus on what I want them to focus on,
and I need the director to follow my brain. Anything like an image that I re-
ally need them to pay attention to, I put them in capital letters on a single
line, then I move along. I do not write big blocks of prose. My prose is not
that long. I do not write dialogue that goes on and on . . . I understand
that I am writing a sonnet, basically, and I discovered that I flourish inside
those boundaries. To me, it is like writing a poem.
Getting lost in the detail is something I guess people do, but it is really
important to be cogent and salient and relevant. The words are important.
If you open a script and the opening line is, “It is a typical day on a typical
street,” nobody wants to read that, including yourself.

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 Lawrence Kasdan on the Rules
of Script Formatting

People used to say a movie script should be 120 pages. That’s bullshit. They
should be 100 pages long. No one will ever read it, and no one has ever
given the note, “This script is too short.” Never happened. It’s a struggle to
read a screenplay. I hate reading screenplays. I despise it, and I’m not alone.
These agents, who are the first line of defense, and the producers, who are
the second line, they hate reading scripts too, and they have piles of them.
Part of your job as an aspiring screenwriter—and that covers every
screenwriter, because every screenwriter is trying to get over those fences
whether he’s established or not—is to get them through that script. If the
first thing they do when they get the script is look at the last page and see
what number’s on it, then that’s the most important thing. I’m the same
way. If I get a script and I see 108, I say, “All right.” If it says 120, I say,
“Fuck.” If you think it’s really looking good at 140, you’re kidding yourself.
I play a game where I just shorten the script by taking out sentences—
“If I do this, I can lose two lines.” That’s a ridiculous game to play because
what you’re avoiding are the more important things. “Do I need this scene?
Why am I taking so long to get through it? The first act is so long.” That’s
always going to be the complaint. Every time someone reads your script,
he’s going to say, “You know, it took me a while to get into it,” or, “It started
a little slow.” That’s the nature of drama. In the first act, you don’t know
the people, you don’t care that much, and you’re setting everything up. If
you’ve written a good screenplay, the second and third acts are going to be
more interesting obviously and naturally.
It is true, however, that we all take too long setting things up. We put
in way too much, and where it all comes out is when you make a movie,

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 go into the editing room, and constantly ask yourself, “Why did I do that?
I didn’t need that. This actor looked at this actor, and I knew everything
about the whole scene.” At that point you kick yourself because you wasted
a day or half a day, which you did not have and could not afford, doing
something that was just as quickly conveyed by one look. You have to do
that in the writing if you can. You may say, “I just finished another scene.
It was a bitch, but I’m glad I wrote it. I’m going to tell my wife I wrote three
pages today.” What you really should do is take another breath and say,
“Wait a minute. I didn’t need these three pages, so really I wrote nothing
today. But I learned from this. I didn’t need that scene, and that’s what I
learned.”
That is an enormously uplifting moment, actually. It fills you with en-
ergy, and you say, “It’s working without that. I can get rid of that and still
have the thing work.” That’s what happens in film editing, and that should
be happening in the writing, assuming you don’t mind writing the extra
pages. Go ahead and write a 140-page script, but don’t show it to anybody,
because once you show it to them, you start to get defensive about it.
They’ll say they thought it was a little long or that you didn’t need certain
scenes, and you’ll say, “Don’t you see? You’ve got to have that scene. Oth-
erwise, you won’t understand.” It’s best to put it away for a week, and then
come back and say, “140 pages? I wouldn’t read this script. How can I get
this down to 112 pages?”
I’ll tell you a true story about Raiders of the Lost Ark. George, Steven,
and I went off to a house, and we hashed out the story of Raiders. They said,
“Go to it,” and I didn’t see them again for six months. I wrote the thing,
and I think it was 130 pages. It seemed reasonable to me, and it was really
good. So I took it to George, and he gave it to Steven. We all got together,
and they said, “Larry, you’ve knocked it out of the park. It’s great. We’re
going to make a deal based on this script.”
Everything’s cool, I’m very excited, and they said, “Now go back and
take out 30 pages.”
I said, “What? Thirty pages? This is really taut. It really moves like crazy.”
They said, “We just want it to be about 100 pages, so take out 30 pages.
You can take out this sequence or that sequence, but it’s just too long.”
I came back with 103 pages. I took out a lot of stuff I liked, and George’s
team looked at it and said, “This is great.” The movie didn’t get made for
three more years, and during that time I did seven more drafts. George
would add little things back, and Steven would add little things back. The

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 script got a little bigger, then a little bigger, then a little bigger. I don’t
know what it wound up at, 120 pages or something, but it was at that 103-
page length that it was the most muscular. It was the best version of it in a
way. It was absolutely irresistible. You read it in like an hour. It taught me
a big lesson, because I thought I was pretty self-disciplined, but I wasn’t.
To this day, it’s a battle. Every time I do it, it’s a battle to take out, take out,
and take out. That should be another one of the many things you have on
the wall in front of you—“Take out, take out.”

There was an old, very good writer of pulp novels who said, “In the first
act, you get your guy up a tree. In the second act, you throw stones at him.
In the third act, you get him out of the tree.” That’s the kind of thing I have
to write down and look at every day. It’s very helpful in constructing stories
and can be applied to anything. ★ lawrence kasdan (Body Heat, Raid-
ers of the Lost Ark)

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 Visual Storytelling

A Conversation with John August, John Lee Hancock,

and Randall Wallace

m o d er at e d b y b a r b a r a m o r g a n

barbar a morgan: Let’s start off by having each of you, starting with
John Lee, talk about the concept of writing without dialogue and how im-
portant that is in the process of your scripts.
john lee hancock: I think usually when you come upon a story you’re
going to write, there are certain visual images you have in your head, and
I think those are important to kind of have in your back pocket. There’s
something Clint Eastwood told me a long time ago that has been really
helpful, not only in writing, but directing. He said when you shoot a scene,
you ought to be able to pick one frame from that scene that tells the story
of that scene. A picture. A photograph. And so when you think of that, it
not only affects your blocking and things like that, but you think about
the energy in a room or a conversation and the conflict and these kind
of things. So I try to picture that when I’m writing a scene—What is the
photograph of this scene that kind of tells a story? And that’s from a pho-
tographic standpoint. That’s it, just having images.
With A Perfect World, I started doing that bass-ackwards. Starting off, it
was two different scripts I was kind of working on, and one of them started
with the image of a little boy running around in a field in a Casper the
Friendly Ghost outfit.
So I wanted to write a movie about that. Ideas come from the weirdest
places. Obviously that’s not enough for 120 pages, but it was thematically
important for me.
john august: Usually, in the process of writing, when it comes down
to a scene level, I’m sort of looping it in my head. Basically I have an idea
of what needs to happen in the scene, and I just sort of start running it in

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 a loop, and it gradually starts to fill out, and you start to hear the people
talking to each other, and they keep talking and saying what they’re going
to say. And then you start to realize where they are and the space between
them. Then you start to realize what’s around them. And it sort of grows
out of that.
I think the challenge for a screenwriter is always to put yourself in the
audience. You as the writer have all this knowledge of who the characters
are and what they are thinking and what they are doing. You probably
know what that room smells like. But an audience member doesn’t. All the
audience gets is what you’re putting in front of them and what they can
hear. And if that isn’t going to be enough to communicate what you need
to communicate, you need to rethink how you’re approaching the scene or
whether this is really the right kind of story to be telling on a big screen. So
it grows out of what the audience member would be experiencing sitting
and watching that moment.
randall wallace: It’s such a great topic to consider, to think of visual
storytelling as a unique category of storytelling. All storytelling has visu-
als as a part of it, but there are times when a picture could be something
entirely different based on what you know about it or have just discovered
about it. I had a mentor one time who said that the perfect screenplay
would be one in which there was no dialogue at all. I don’t really believe
that, but it certainly is a challenge to figure out what—as John was saying
about the Clint Eastwood bit of wisdom—would be the focus of a given
moment.
There’s a beautiful mural in the back of this room, and it reminds me of
some of the great John Ford Westerns. David Lean would have a frame, and
there would be just a tiny bit of character in it, a little bit of human life in it.
And then a whole frame of people, the world around them. And that image
itself evoked a sense of loneliness in size. But I started out just thinking
strictly in terms of how you would tell a story to someone sitting around a
campfire. I’ve come to this whole sense about what visuals are late, so I’m
probably the least competent to answer the question, so I’ll shut up.
august: I think there’s an instinct that visual storytelling is about writ-
ing “angle on . . .” or the cut-tos or the helicopter shot of things. Very rarely
in screenplays do you find yourself really needing to do that. As you’re com-
ing into a scene, it’s painting just a few strokes, showing what the space is
like and what the focus is going to be in those moments. It’s grounding
people enough so that they can have a sense of what this moment is and

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 where this thing is, and it’s building in those moments that are just going
to be happening visually. Filmmaking is mostly about transitions, and so
it’s how you’re going to get into that moment and how you’re going to get
out of that moment. And the first words you’re throwing into a scene are
what people are going to latch on to for the visual.
morgan: There’s a film coming to mind that I think is a very high ex-
ample of visual storytelling, and that’s Bill Wittliff ’s The Black Stallion. It
has a scene that, in my mind, goes on for twenty minutes, and there are
no words spoken. It’s between the horse and the little boy once they’re
stranded on the island. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a great film.
How do you go about creating something like that? What you get out of
that scene is the boy and horse bonding so they become inseparable. How
do you go about writing a scene like that, without the traditional method
of dialogue, essentially painting a picture?
hancock: I’ve got a situation on something I’m working on right now,
and there are fifteen pages of a guy by himself, doing lots of different stuff,
but with minimal dialogue. Maybe three pieces of dialogue in fifteen pages
or so, and they’re just like, “Hey,” or whatever, things like that. So for me,
it comes down to what John was saying about trying to give, in the fewest
possible words, a very vivid idea or picture of what you’re seeing.
I think we have to think of a screenplay not only as a finished product, a
piece of art, and a blueprint for a film to come, but also as a sales tool. Part
of your job in selling is to make sure that on the page your eyes are danc-
ing not unlike they dance at 24 frames per second when we watch a movie.
I think that’s really important for the reader or the viewer to understand
and get your point. You want eyes to dance on the page. The last thing you
want is block text—blah, blah, blah. No one reads it. Think of it that way.
Start from the standpoint of, “No one reads it,” and then say, “Okay, how
little can I get by with? How provocative can I make it? How can I give that
example or metaphor or whatever lets people understand for themselves
how potent this is visually and how packed it is from a dramatic stand-
point?” I think when you do that, you go through and just clean it out. Rely
on three- and four-word sentences, leave spaces, let people rest with the
idea of provocative images and what you’re trying to say.
august: I think that’s one of the things that’s changed about screen-
writing over the last 50 years, 30 years—screenplays used to be a lot lean-
er. They used to be just, this is what happens, very much like a blueprint,
like stick figures. As more and more people come into the process, and as

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 the screenplay has this tremendous amount of responsibility on its shoul-
ders before it becomes a movie, it’s not just, “Hey, director, here’s how to
make this movie,” it’s, “Hey, Sony marketing team, this is what the movie’s
going to be.” You have to create the experience of watching the movie just
with the words on the page. Screenwriting’s already an art of economy, but
it’s about being able to evoke a lot more with just a few small words.
I agree with what John Lee’s saying in terms of precision and not giving
people giant globs of text that are going to intimidate them. That’s why
you try to keep the scene description blocks less than three lines long if
you can. You don’t use full sentences if you don’t have to. You try to give a
sense of the visual pace of things with your sentences. It’s not glamorous,
and everyone thinks that screenwriting is the dialogue and the funny stuff,
and so rarely is it that.
wallace: I have a couple of practical experiences with this that might be
relevant. When we were doing Secretariat, there was a montage, and gener-
ally speaking, montages are like punting. It’s like a default. We couldn’t get
a first down, so let’s just kick it away. We can’t find a way to tell this, so we’ll
just play a lot of music. We had a montage, and the montage was to tell
the story of this magnificent racehorse who was winning all these races.
Practically, this was going to be extremely time-consuming to shoot. Even
though it might only be a third of a page, it was going to take hours and
hours and setup after setup of horses running by just to shoot this thing.
My cinematographer is great, and he was talking about a piece of equip-
ment called a phantom camera that shoots a thousand frames per second.
I had no idea where we might use it, but he was just saying it’s a really cool
piece of equipment. So we had this montage, and I thought, “Instead of
seven different examples of Secretariat crossing a finish line, let’s just set
up the camera and have one shot of the horse at a thousand frames per
second running up and crossing the finish line.” It became one of the most
fascinating shots of the film for me. A single setup—we shot it in twenty
minutes—but you see every articulation of the muscles of the horse, a gal-
loping racehorse, and it becomes fascinating.
I think, on a certain level, surprise is the central currency of storytell-
ing. What keeps the audience’s eyes dancing? What keeps their minds
sparkling as they’re watching? It’s revealing something new so that they
don’t want to turn away because they are being captured each time with
that surprise.

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 If you have your audience—meaning your reader in the screenplay
stage—gripped, then you can show them something that is strictly a visual
image and might even take a sentence or two to describe and you won’t
lose them. I’ll give you an example. In Braveheart, a moment that shocked
pretty much everybody was when William Wallace is in the battle and pulls
the helmet off of one of the guys attacking him and discovers the man is
actually Robert the Bruce, the one he was trying so hard to get to be his
ally. It is a wrenching moment for the audience. It’s a surprise when people
read it.
Shortly after that scene, there was another part of the screenplay, and
the way it read was, “Robert the Bruce walked across the battlefield, red
with the blood of his countrymen.” And that’s all it said.
But in that sentence was an image that was really haunting. A single
image. I didn’t describe what it would look like, but the emotional content
of that bit in that place in the story implied to the cinematographer and
the director and the actors and the set designer and everybody else what
that had to be. I could see it in my own head, but I didn’t know how to de-
scribe it in words other than emotional words.
In one of my first experiences in formal instruction in writing, the
teacher showed us a short story. I think it was by Chekhov. In any case, I’m
going to say it was because it makes me—with my accent—sound so much
more sophisticated if I refer to Russian writers. He said the amateur will
try, in order to describe a scene . . . The amateur will try to describe every-
thing, but the professional will pick the single image that tells everything
that needs to be said. Come to think of it, that echoes everything we’re
saying up here.
I think that even applies to dialogue. I bet a friend that the voiceover
in Braveheart would remain in the final cut because he thought voiceover
never stays. The opening voiceover in Braveheart is, “I will tell you of Wil-
liam Wallace. Historians from England will say I am a liar. But history is
written by those who have hanged the heroes.”
John is right, readers don’t . . . When they see a block of dialogue, their
eyes glaze over. I don’t read blocks like that in my own screenplays. But dia-
logue is assertive. It’s insistent, especially at the beginning. And if you can
provoke the audience in any way . . . I think the Coen brothers had a movie,
Blood Simple, that starts out with the character saying, “I understand over
in Russia they got ’em a system where everybody looks out for everybody

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 else. Well this here is Texas. And down here, you’re on your own.” When
you hear that, I mean . . . I am with them. I am not going to miss another
word of that story.
morgan: Each of you has written for other directors and also written
and directed your own projects. Can you talk about how you protect your
visual material? How you convey to another director what you intended?
How does he or she get the point?
hancock: I’m not sure you should do anything other than what you
think is the best portrayal on the page. If they get it, you’re in luck, and
you have a good partnership. If they don’t, I’m not sure there’s anything
you can add that’s going to help them get it. Being a director has made me a
much better writer. Since I’ve directed, my scripts are far sparer. It’s a con-
stant game of name that tune—I can name it in three notes—and cutting
stuff out that’s not necessary and coming up with something that’s spare
and waiting to be filled. I think that’s the kind of stuff I react to when I
read scripts to direct as well. They are not overwritten. I think that’s almost
a sin.
To be clear, I wasn’t really talking about dialogue, in terms of block dia-
logue, although if you see a monologue that goes on and on without breaks
forever, that’s a sure sign of an amateur writer. Even if you do have a long,
long monologue, you need to break it up. I was referring to text more than
anything because I don’t read it. I’ll go, “Okay, he’s describing the room. I
get it. It’s a pub. I’ve got one in my head. We’ll find it on location scout.” The
more precise you can be and provocative . . . One line, and you’re moving on.
august: I think early on, as you start to figure out the form of screen-
writing and just how weird it is, there is this instinct to use descriptions
like, “The room is 70 feet by 20 feet.” You tend to be very literal about, “This
is what you’re going to see.” And that doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t give
you what you need. Randall was saying, “What is the feeling of the place?
What is the emotion of this?” Also, I’ve observed through my screenplays
and other ones I’ve read, in those initial ten to fifteen pages, you’re going
to be doing a lot more setting up of the place and the world and the feel and
the tone. And then you don’t need as much of it as you go on because you
get it.
Just like the setup of Braveheart is setting your expectations for what
kind of movie this is, once those expectations are set, unless there’s a rea-
son why you have to reset those expectations, people are going to approach
those things the same way. You don’t need to keep talking about . . . If

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 you’re making Marie Antoinette, you don’t have to keep talking about the
dresses. We get that there are going to be pretty dresses. That’s a big deal,
but you don’t have to keep hammering us on it. You can start focusing on
other things.
In terms of directors, you’re trying to give them . . . I write a lot of
things for Tim Burton, and I’m just trying to find things I know are going
to be interesting for him and that he’s going to hit out of the park. I’ll cer-
tainly think of images that would be suitable and appropriate for Tim to
do, but I’m not . . . I hope it never feels like I’m telling him how to direct his
movie. Directing from the page is when you start to feel like you’re signal-
ing every little dolly movement, and nobody wants that.
wallace: It certainly matters who the director is. You can only do so
much about who you are, and you can only do so much about who they are.
Mel Gibson directing Braveheart . . . Had it not been him, I think the movie
would have been utterly different. With his own personal background and
his own spiritual point of view, however that manifests, he understood,
when he was reading the screenplay, that when William Wallace is pray-
ing the night before his execution, that was the Garden of Gethsemane. I
wasn’t thinking that when I wrote it, and he wasn’t thinking that when he
filmed it, but it was that thing of, “I know I am about to die, and now I am
coming to terms with that.” He had the same references that I had.
My next experience was with Michael Bay. It’s really funny . . . It’s been
well publicized that Michael and I butted heads a lot. I found him really
likable and charming. I really did. There were things about him that . . . I’m
sure we wanted to throw each other through a wall. We had one discussion
in which he came in and said, “Randall, what is all this Jane Austen fag shit?”
And I said, “Maybe you ought to be more specific.”
He said, “This guy, he can’t talk to a girl.”
And I said, “All right, let’s review the scene we’re talking about. This
pilot says to a nurse that he’s just met, ‘We’re all being called away to bat-
tle. And every other pilot tonight is saying the same thing to every other
nurse, “This may be the last night we’re alive, so we better make it memo-
rable.” But I can’t tell you that because I think I might be falling in love with
you. And I know that to try to sleep with you would be wrong.’” This is all
subtext, not text.
“‘But I am going to survive. And when I come back, I’m going to find
you, and we’re going to have a chance to know if we’re in love.’ And he goes
to the English Channel, and he’s shot down, and he’s in the freezing water

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 for five hours. And then he’s picked up, and he survives in the French Re-
sistance. And he survives because he dreams that this woman loves him
and he might know something he’s never known in his life. And he comes
back, and he has survived, and he wants to find her. And he goes all the
way to Pearl Harbor, where she is a nurse. And he finds where she’s work-
ing, and he sees her alone in the hospital during her last shift. And before
he walks in, he thinks, ‘What if what has kept me alive all this time is not
real? How will I live then?’ And he takes a moment to deal with it. Is that
the ‘Jane Austen fag shit’ you’re talking about?”
And Michael goes, “Yeah!”
And I said, “Well, that’s because your idea of foreplay is ‘See my Ferrari?
Want to fuck?’”
And Michael said, “Yeah!”
So what happened was, he filmed some scenes that were verbatim what
I had written and had exactly the opposite effect they were supposed to
have. I cashed all the checks for Pearl Harbor. I sent my boys to college
with it. But you always think, “What could it have been if it had been what
I would have done?” What you end up with is, like in life, everything is a
living dialogue. A good director brings—and Michael Bay is a great direc-
tor—his own perspective. The interesting thing for a writer who directs
is, we have that thing within our own heads. It’s like that old song, “I may
be schizophrenic, but I’ve always got each other.” The director part of us
is talking to the writer part of us, and when we’re stuck in a scene, we can
turn to our writer instantly and go, “Figure this out for me. Is it the words?
Is it the scene?” And we try not to let the director beat up the writer too
much in that process.
august: No script is director proof. You can’t write a script that’s so
amazing that a director can’t come in and make it do what you didn’t want
it to do. Even if you’re directing yourself, you’re going to change things. The
writer-you is going to say, “What the fuck are you doing? That wasn’t the
point of this.” But the director-you did the best he could and had different
things happen on the day he was shooting the movie, and that’s the reality
and the challenge.
wallace: I once heard somebody who worked with Blake Edwards—
Blake Edwards wrote, directed, and edited his own movies—he said that
when Edwards was directing, he would cuss a blue streak about the idiot
who wrote it like it was some other person. And when he was editing, he
would cuss the director. Maybe that’s a healthy approach.

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 morgan: How often do you, after your first or second draft, start
going back through and removing much of what you’ve written to create
more . . .?
hancock: I’m constantly doing that. When I reread stuff, it’s with a
red pen taking things out. I don’t know about these guys, but some of the
most fun for me is, after you’ve got a draft that’s working, to sit there and
start scrolling and reading and fixing. Then you start to look at it the way
it appears on the page. You go, “This isn’t aesthetically pleasing to me. I’m
going to take this word out because I want this to be two lines instead of
carrying over to a third. I’m going to change this adjective to a shorter one
to get to two lines instead of three.” Stupid stuff, but it’s insanely fun.
august: It’s a lot easier than actual writing.
wallace: Well, I had a funny experience. I come down here, and I think
of John Lee because we—the way our lives are screwed up—both live in
L.A. but see each other more here in Austin than we see each other in L.A.
I once went to see John at his office at Warner Brothers, and he had a chart
on the wall called “The Journey of the Hero.” And I was looking at it, and I
was thinking, “John has to use charts to write scripts.” I’m looking at this
chart, and I’m going, “Damn, that’s exactly the way Braveheart unfolds.
That’s exactly right, that chart.” I was just getting to know John then, and
I was like, “So, how do you write your first drafts?”
And he goes, “Well, I usually like to write them in longhand first, and
then I type them.”
And I’m going, “Yeah, right. So behind the times.” And now I’m writing
that way. It’s so much more organic. I don’t feel that I have to lock myself
in to what I’m doing. I’m playing first. I write it down, and then I go back
and forth. I go between the computer and printing that out, but I always
love having the pencil in my hand. I do believe that even if the process is
stimulated by a block of dialogue that’s too big or a desire to reduce the
number of words, pressure oftentimes causes or prompts a much sharper
exchange of dialogue. The less people say, the more you remember. The less
the character says, the smarter he or she seems.
august: I think a good challenge for all aspiring writers is, practice by
writing something that forces you to communicate a situation with more
than one person in it, but that doesn’t have people talking to each other.
One of the things I’m writing right now is this movie called Monster Apoca-
lypse, which is about giant monsters that smash buildings. It’s really fun,
but one of the challenges I set for myself is that there’s not just one King

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 Kong, there are many, many King Kongs. You have a whole troop of apes
who are lead characters in this story and should be able to carry . . . They
have storytelling ability. As a screenwriter, it’s a challenge to figure out the
pack dynamic and what stories I can tell about the interpersonal conflicts
between these apes who can’t talk. And that’s rewarding. It’s a different
kind of thing than we usually get to do, and it’s like making a silent film,
but with giant gorillas. That’s why you sign up for this business.
morgan: Are you saying, essentially, to write a short story first by
hand, or are you saying you actually write your scripts out in longhand?
august: I write scripts in longhand.
hancock: I don’t do it as much anymore, but back when I wrote A Per-
fect World I would write on the back of the script I had just finished—the
one I was putting in the drawer because no one bought it—to save paper
and kind of take a Spartan approach. It’s funny, because at the Bob Bullock
Texas State History Museum they had something about Texas movies a
few years back, and they asked for things from movies filmed here. One
of the things I had was the original script, written on the back of another
one, with napkins stapled to it, ketchup stains from writing in the diner,
coffee rings, all that. It’s this massive bit of paper with all these different
notes stuck on it and addendums and stuff, but I like that because it’s real.
It doesn’t exist in the cyber world at all. It’s this thing I can hold.
Then you reduce it to the computer. I’m old enough that I used to have
to type the scripts. Sitting down to retype 120 pages was, for me, a two-
or three-day ordeal. It’s a huge time saver, and like I said, I love scrolling
through and fidgeting and fixing stuff, but I do like to write the whole
script longhand.
august: My basic process is, I sort of loop a scene, and when I figure
out . . . When I see it, I’ll do a scribble version, which is basically as quick as
I can get it down on paper, so I don’t forget. It doesn’t look anything like
the screenplay format. Then I’ll write a longhand version of the scene with
full dialogue and stuff like that. Longhand keeps me from editing too soon
because I can’t go back and keep rewriting the same scene. I think I write
more sparely too because I have to move my pen around, and it’s so much
slower that I end up looking for exactly the right way to say something
rather than typing three sentences when I could write one sentence. Then
eventually I do type it.
wallace: I think the computer is a brilliant invention. It’s fabulous to
have, and there are times when I’ll write my first draft just with a computer.

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 But I love the process of revising. It’s funny, I loved walking through here
on my way to breakfast this morning and seeing all these people sitting
around with their computers, writing. It is so great to be around writers.
But I think that ultimately you’re writing your story inside your head, of
course. And whatever the mechanical process is, there’s always that mo-
ment, like when characters have a defining moment in a story.
Both of my grandfathers were dead before I was born. My father’s fa-
ther was dead before my father was born. My grandmother was a widow
before she was a mother. And I desperately wanted to know who my grand-
fathers were. So I was eager to find those stories, and one day my father
told me a single story about my grandfather. That story told me everything
about who my grandfather was and who I was supposed to be. Everything.
And in a way, I think that’s what we do as storytellers.
If it takes 120 pages, and you think, “Well, if I don’t have enough to
make it a movie . . . “I mean the reason we’re film writers instead of other
kinds of writers is that we like the sense of fullness you can get out of
that size format. Even if it’s a two-hour story—and the story my father
told me about my grandfather was about two minutes—there are going
to be those moments in which characters stand up and define themselves.
Sometimes they do it at the moment when they discover what’s true about
themselves. Any great story is going to have some of that—“This is where
my line is. Cross this line, and I will fight you to the death.” We’re all look-
ing for that, but sometimes the realization of what that is doesn’t occur to
us when we’re in the formal act of writing.
I might be driving along in the car, thinking about anything but my
story, and I’m listening to a song that’s got nothing to do with the superfi-
cial text of the story I’m writing. All of a sudden I understand what has to
happen, what he has to tell her, what she has to tell him, what they have to
say to the world. And that is a process of working enough, with whatever
tools you’re using, so that the story is alive inside you.
hancock: What Randy is saying is what I’ve tried to tell my wife for-
ever and ever. I’m working even when I’m not working. Jack Nicholson
says it more succinctly in The Shining when he’s typing—“When you hear
this noise, I’m working. When you don’t hear this noise, I’m working.”
morgan: How much does the concept of mythology help to convey a
lot of these basic ideas you’re talking about when you want to get them
across without lots and lots of dialogue? Does it help?

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 hancock: I think so. I think it would be foolish not to take advantage
of mythology and stories that have held up through the ages. There’s a rea-
son why they are told and retold—it’s because they work for us. Whether
they are dramatic, romantic, or bittersweet, they tend to work, and that’s
why they are retold. I think you should be cognizant of that.
I’m never entirely rigid on, “Oh, this is the hero’s journey.” I approach
it like a Chinese menu—I’ll take a little of this and a little of this and some
of this, and this seems a little like Joseph Campbell, and this kind of seems
like, “Lord, lift this cup . . .” in the Garden of Gethsemane. They’re good
stories. Why not use that base?
august: More than mythology, I would say expectation. No matter
what kind of movie you’re making, there’s a certain set of expectations
that comes with it. If your movie is set in the Old West, people are going
to come with their expectations of Westerns, so you don’t have to explain
what a rancher is. There’s a shorthand you can use to fill in those things
and expect that your audience knows enough to keep up so you can move
ahead.
It’s only if you’re changing some things—the rules about how stuff
works—that you need to be pretty explicit. If you’re writing a vampire
movie, but there are these three conditions, you let those conditions be
known. You don’t have to explain to them that the guy needs to drink
blood because we know what a vampire movie is. And that’s hugely helpful,
but you’d be surprised how often you see these stories where, “I got that.
I don’t need to see that. I knew before I opened the script that that thing
was going to happen.”
The challenge of screenwriting is often getting rid of the curse of knowl-
edge. As the screenwriter, you know why a scene is there. You know what’s
going to happen 30 pages from now. The person sitting in the theater
doesn’t know that. They’re blank. Being a screenwriter is like continuously
blanking yourself so that you’re just the person sitting in the theater with
only that information and recognizing what they have and what their next
question is going to be. Anticipating that, honoring that, meeting their
expectations most of the time so that they feel really smart, and then occa-
sionally exceeding or defeating their expectations so they stay interested.
wallace: It’s really fascinating, the question of mythology and our
common understanding of stories from a culture. It really is true that the
story isn’t just told by the storyteller. The audience responds to the story,

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 and the story becomes a part of a people. Maybe there is no single author of
the King Arthur legends. The stories are told and retold and added to, and
oftentimes we’re drawing on mythology, but we only see it in retrospect.
I can give you an example from Secretariat, another one of those scenes
in which we had such a limited budget to shoot and a limited schedule.
There was another segment of montage about Secretariat training really
hard for his final race. His trainers have chosen, instead of resting the
horse before the longest of the Triple Crown races, to train him because
the horse really loves to run. It’s a dangerous and dramatic choice they
make. So I was trying to think how to convey that. And again, I thought of
a single scene. I hate to say it, but it was second unit. I wasn’t even there.
It’s one of my favorite shots in the whole movie. The audience sees nothing
but gray, and then slowly begins to understand there are waves in it. It’s ar-
ticulated. It’s fog. And then there’s a flash of lightning in the background,
and Secretariat emerges from the fog with this primordial power. It’s just a
single shot, but it was like Pegasus running out of Mount Olympus.
You don’t have to know about Pegasus and Greek mythology to appre-
ciate that it’s a powerful shot. Knowing that it’s Pegasus may help or not
help. What our myths are about are our deepest truths. They arise from
our longings and our experience. And the closer we can get to those—that
bedrock or that volcano—the sharper and more focused the single image
can be, so that it sits us back in our chairs and makes us feel it.
Talking about images that resonate, I think another important thing is
to leave some mystery. Mystery is powerful. An easy example would be a
character who, at some point in the story, takes off his shirt, and you see
on his back an endless array of scars. It’s never explained, but you under-
stand. It’s like, “Oh, my father was in Vietnam,” or something. He’s never
talked about it, and one day he sees him with his shirt off, and you go,
“Oh, my God! What was that? Sometimes the mystery—just a slight visual
image that alludes to it—will create a much bigger impression inside the
audience than a whole bunch of . . . than knowing the actual story behind
all those scars.
morgan: Is there a particular visual image that has resonated with you?
hancock: Something I steal over and over again is Ethan outside the
door in The Searchers, not really coming inside. Everything about that is
just so . . . You get it. So I love images framed through doorways.
august: A much more recent example is the pilot of Lost, and there are
many great images in it. We don’t see the monster in Lost. We just see the

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 tops of the trees moving. It seems like such a simple gag, but I was terrified
of trees, far in the distance, moving. It just freaked me out. Good job, J. J.
Abrams.
wallace: I really love Doctor Zhivago, and it was years and years later
that I realized that, in part, I’d been living out, for twenty years, fantasies
that had been planted in my head by watching that movie. There’s a scene
in which he’s riding back home, and he’s been to see his mistress. He loves
her, but he loves his wife, and he’s got to push on with his life. His horse
comes to a stop, and then these partisans come and kidnap him or capture
him. They ride across the road into the trees, and it all plays out right in
front of us. And then the camera cranes up, and you see the endlessness
of Siberia. And I thought, “What a perfectly powerful way . . .” I thought
about that shot a number of times.
More than that is the scene in Cool Hand Luke when they’re on the chain
gang and this woman’s washing a car. Her dress is wet, and she presses her
knockers against the window of the car. I thought about that for years!
Never could forget it.

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 5 Character &
Dialogue

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 Building Characters and Mapping
Their Journeys

A Conversation with Lawrence Kasdan

and Anne Rapp

Making a Character Stand Out Immediately

anne rapp: I don’t consciously think that I want a character to burst out
on a page. My characters, quite honestly—I don’t think they do. I’ve been
accused of writing movies that start out too slow, and it takes a long time
to get . . . That’s how life works. The writing process is almost like the view-
ing process in that when you get to know a character slowly and you’re not
so aware of so many things that have been thrown at you, they kind of . . .
Then something happens—boom!
Thirty minutes into my first movie, an old lady shoots herself. All the
stuff that happened in the first 30 minutes is crucial because of how every-
body reacts. You understand the relationship of the loss, what people have
lost by losing her. I think if you come out and hit that on the head in the
beginning . . . I just kind of let them evolve in their own way. I don’t know
if that’s the right way.
lawrence kasdan: I’m drawn to the same thing. All my movies start
off very slowly, and I like that kind of movie. I like movies that start fast
too, but I tend to prefer movies that start slowly. Invariably when people
talk about one of my movies, they say, “It didn’t really take off for half an
hour until such and such happened.” My reaction is always the same—it’s
defensive. I tell them I’m sick of how American movies have to move so
quickly. It’s the TV culture, where by the time you get to your first com-
mercial, you have to have hooked the audience. The audience has to know
who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. They have to understand
the problem of the episode.

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 Carol Littleton is this wonderful editor who cut six or seven of my mov-
ies. She is a major influence on me. When she cut Body Heat, she was a
little older than me but had done only a few movies. She left me after Body
Heat and did E.T., but then she came back to do The Big Chill. She’s had an
amazing career. When she says something, you have to take it seriously. So
after I’ve held off all the philistines who want my work to play like a televi-
sion episode, Carol Littleton weighs in, and invariably she says the same
thing—the movie starts too slowly.
Movies really are different than novels or short stories or theater. In
theater you can take your time. At the end of the first act, you can be an
hour into the play, and it may be only then that you understand what the
issues really are and what’s really going on. You can define drama as taking
a static situation and introducing an upsetting force. Literally, very often
plays are like that. You can take as long as you want to establish the static
situation. Perhaps it’s a family, with its delicate balance of love and hate
and jealousy and resentment. Then the prodigal son returns after traveling
for ten years. Perhaps instead you have a small town that’s held together
by a balance of power, and then here comes a stranger, a music man with
an instrument. It can be anything. Maybe you have guy who’s been on the
road selling things his whole life and suddenly loses his job. As his job is
threatened, his whole sense of identity is threatened, and that affects his
whole family. Movies don’t work that way. The basic element of drama is
the same, which is a static situation upset by something.
rapp: I think it was Bill Wittliff who said, “Someone leaves home, and a
stranger comes to town.”
kasdan: You can tell any story that way. In Body Heat, somebody comes
to town. Matty Walker comes to Ned Racine’s town. Sometimes somebody
goes on a trip and arrives in a town.
rapp: That’s the stranger’s story.
kasdan: But movies do require a quicker start, and Carol Littleton’s
right. She always says, “You’re doing too much padding. You’re setting it
up too much.” But I do it because I’m drawn to all the quirky detail.
I say, “Don’t you see how, when she’s alone in her bedroom, she always
puts her brush on her right-hand side? That’s so great, isn’t it?” But the
audience is way ahead of you. Actresses like Glenn Close or Ellen Burstyn,
they’re geniuses at what they do. They’ve been to wardrobe, they’ve
changed the way they walk and talk, and by the time they get to the make-
up table, the audience already knows everything there is to know about the

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 character. I don’t care where the brush goes. It doesn’t add any informa-
tion, and that’s really what movies are about. They’re about using the most
economical, muscular, and forward-moving approach possible.
rapp: I read an interview with Horton Foote, who wrote character-driv-
en movies and plays. He said he only started with a person and an event,
and then just let that carry him. The important thing that I have to keep
remembering is the event. I don’t have any trouble starting with a person,
but an event right off the bat really lets you off the hook, and that’s the
trouble I have. I can’t get to that event quick enough. That’s why I have to
work hard. The other part, the characters, that’s easy. They just evolve so
much more naturally the way I write.
kasdan: I think every one of us has strengths and weaknesses. Our
weaknesses loom large for us. We’ve been struggling with them our whole
lives. Our strengths we tend to discount and devalue. Characters are very
easy for Anne. That is her natural bent. I think it’s my natural bent. Plot
scares the hell out of me. Story scares the hell out of me. Sometimes I’ve
done good plotting and good story, but I never think so. I can always see
the structure, the girders that are holding it up, and I think, “Can’t ev-
erybody see that?” Whatever you worry about, that becomes very large.
Whatever you’re good at, that’s very small.
rapp: I’m about to adapt a book, and I’ve learned a big lesson on this.
I sort of chose this book. It was given to me, but I chose to do it. The guy
who wrote the book has the same strength I do. He also has the same weak-
nesses. I sort of naively said, “Oh, yeah, that’s my territory. That’s my kind
of book. I can do that. It’s a piece of cake.” What the book needs, however, is
somebody that can go in with much more drive and plot. I just add my atmo-
sphere on top of his, and it just becomes this big mountain of atmosphere.
I think I was under the impression before this experience that strong
plot really doesn’t matter, that you can still compel the audience in the
same way for two hours with your atmosphere, but that doesn’t work. You
need a combination of all of it. I purposely came into a panel right before
this one with guys who were talking about heroes and villains. It was Shane
Black and Scott Rosenberg, I believe. They like the totally opposite kind of
movies that I like, and I thought, “I need to go listen to those guys because
I have a hard time writing villains. Maybe they can talk about that.”
kasdan: What did they say?
rapp: There’s somebody who had a really interesting question, which I
think was great. They kept talking about evil, but then someone just said,

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 “What is evil?” and all three of them just froze. They all write evil charac-
ters, so they started talking a little bit. What came out that I thought was
really interesting was that we don’t necessarily understand evil and don’t
have to understand it to write evil characters. If I had to say what the defi-
nition of evil is for me, it is the lack of compassion or lack of love. That’s
what evil is in the moment. That’s just the kind of thing I think I need to
explore, and it was really interesting to listen to those guys.
In a lot of movies, there’s a tendency to have . . . There’s no star. There’s
an ensemble of eight people of equal importance. That happens naturally
with me. I don’t mind that. I don’t want to change the way I write. I don’t
want to change the kind of stories I tell. I like what I’ve written, and I like
that Cookie’s Fortune starts off really slowly. I like Cookie’s Fortune, let me
put it that way, but I do know that I need to work really hard at balancing
my ability to write characters well with that other thing that I’m missing.
kasdan: The only criterion in any kind of writing is, “Does it work?” The
truth is, Cookie’s Fortune doesn’t start slow. It starts slow if you came to see
The Rock, but the kind of people that are drawn to Cookie’s Fortune didn’t
come for that. In fact, Cookie’s Fortune works through that whole half hour
because the characters are so interesting and funny and surprising. They
may be very familiar to you, but they’re pretty unfamiliar to me, and so I’m
fascinated. It’s like being on some new planet or something. It’s not slow
at all.
That same half hour’s time, if it’s not good or it’s not new or it’s not
original, can be very slow. It can be endless. You can see an action movie
where that’s the case, and it’ll seem like it’s eight hours long. It’s boring
because you never cared for one second. What matters is, are the viewers
engaged and interested? That’s what makes it slow or fast.
The first rule of all filmmaking is that every scene should start at the
last possible moment and end at the first possible moment. You want to
come into the scene at the last possible moment where you can still under-
stand what’s going on. You want to come in so that the audience members
have to catch up a little bit but are capable of catching up. You don’t want
them ahead of you. You don’t want them waiting around, saying, “Get on
with it. I get this.”
Body Heat was the first movie I ever made. Carol Littleton and I were
sitting there. I had done one of these writing things where you do some-
thing twice. I do it all the time. You like it so much, you do it twice. You
think, “I can’t make that jump so fast, so I’m going to do it in stages.” So I

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 had another attempt on the husband’s life that didn’t work out. There was
a screw-up. They had to call it off at the last minute. They were going to
kill him, and he had a gun. She signals him to fade away, and he does fade
away. So now he’s come so close to this that he’s lost his nerve, because he
doesn’t have that much nerve to begin with.
There’s a scene, one of the better scenes in the movie, where she comes
into his apartment and slowly, slowly takes off her clothes. She doesn’t do
it in a sexy way but in the way she would if they had been husband and
wife for ten years. She’s just getting ready for bed. What she’s really doing
is, she’s slowly reeling him back in, because she knows exactly what’s hap-
pened, which is that he’s lost his nerve. That scene was really good. By the
end of it, he’s ready to give it another shot, and then he goes out and kills
the husband.
It took Carol a long time to convince me that we didn’t need that be-
cause the audience was so far ahead of us. To do it twice was really testing
their patience. So we just lifted that out, which was really hard for me. It
was my first movie and a scene I really liked in the middle of it. In fact, we
had to use the beginning of that scene to get him out of the bed and into
the real scene. You don’t notice this, but there are really clear shots of the
bed, and the sheets change. It’s two different nights. No one notices, of
course. That was another big lesson for me, that no one is paying attention
to anything.

Individual Voices in an Ensemble Piece

rapp: If I have two characters that sound too much alike, I figure I don’t
need one of them. I’m always looking for somebody to cut out, because I
always end up with too many characters. That’s something to consider.
kasdan: The problem is recognizing when they sound too much alike.
In my head they all sound different. I’ve already sort of cast them with fake
actors in my head, and they sound completely different. Their tone and
their jokes are different. I think that’s the essence of this panel—how do
you make a personal, believable person? It doesn’t matter whether it’s an
ensemble piece or there are three people in the whole movie.
The genius of the ’40s screwball comedies—and this is what I’ve tried to
do in every movie I’ve ever written, whether it’s a comedy or a drama—is
that in two or three lines they were able to give personalities to secondary
characters. Hollywood lost any interest in doing that for 30 years because

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 they were really only interested in the movie star and his girlfriend, and
the movie star and the other movie star. Scripts are driven by studio ex-
ecutives who understand nothing but the books on screenwriting they’ve
read, and so they don’t understand that it matters what the gas station
attendant says, even if he only has two lines. Those two lines really affect
the feel of the whole movie, your sense of the richness of it, the reality of
it, and what kind of value you assign to everything that happens in it.
When you treat people as though they’re ciphers it devalues the whole
movie. The challenge of real character writing is in establishing, in the
shortest possible way, a clear sense of the individuality of a person. It’s a
rigorous, rigorous problem. You can’t just say they pulled in, got gas, and
left. The attendant said, “Can I help you?” Then he said, “Thank you, sir.” It
would be better to just cut to them pulling out of the gas station. We don’t
have to see them there unless there’s a reason, and maybe the only reason
is the attendant. What do the people in this area think of a car like that? Is
there something about the way this couple looks that’s suspicious? You can
have a perfectly normal couple from Los Angeles pull into a gas station in
Lubbock, and they’re going to look like Martians, so you better have that
gas station attendant, even if he doesn’t say anything, look at them like
they’re Martians. And he better deal with them—the way he takes their
money or credit card or anything—as though they’re Martians.
Look at any Preston Sturges movie. Preston Sturges actually writes long
raps for people who will never come back into the movie just because he
likes the sound of it. Look at any Capra movie. Look at Howard Hawks’s
comedies and John Ford’s Westerns. John Ford had wonderful writers
working for him. In My Darling Clementine, Wyatt Earp walks up to the
bartender and says, “You ever been in love?”
The bartender says, “No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.” That’s it.
That’s how long it takes, but you’ve got to be a great screenwriter.
rapp: Those things come to you when you least expect them. If you have
too much of a game plan—you know exactly who these characters are in
this movie before you ever start writing—you’ve already fooled yourself,
because in my experience, one of your main characters is not even planned
when you start writing the script. Someone pops out. Someone just forces
his or her way in.
What happened in Cookie’s Fortune was, the young girl played by Liv
Tyler was never part of the game plan. She was never something Altman
and I discussed. She was never in my short story that I had started to

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 write. Twenty pages into the first act she just appeared, and I went with
it because I kind of needed her voice. By the end of the movie, I think the
movie’s point of view is her point of view. She’s probably the second most
important character. “Important” is not a good word, but . . . She wasn’t
even planned. It’s like you don’t have to know too much when you start
these things. A lot of times that stuff will happen.
kasdan: Screenwriting is different from all other kinds of writing. You
don’t have as much freedom. A short story can be almost anything. A short
story can be eight pages about sitting down in this chair. You could never
do that in a movie. Actually, you could do it in a movie, but it would be a
short film and be shown at a festival. Regular movies are all about econo-
my, economy, economy. How do you condense, condense, condense?
Very often the character that jumps into the movie and won’t shut up
is the one that’s speaking for you. You have all these feelings about these
characters, but you don’t really have a voice, and sometimes you want a
voice. Sometimes you want to say, “You know why I think these people
are wonderful or funny?” You want something that makes it possible to
express your feelings, and this other character does that. Liv does that in
your movie.
rapp: People in Hollywood like to ask you all the time—and it’s an im-
portant question, I suppose—“What’s this movie about?” It’s hard for me
to say what my movies are about in a sentence. I wish I was one of those
writers who can say, “It’s about a six-year-old that sees dead people,” and
that describes the whole movie.
When that character jumped out—and Liv Tyler did it beautifully, I
thought—it sort of occurred to me that the movie is about family pride
and how it can be such a great thing and such a horrible thing. It’s about
family pride, and she represented that to me. I didn’t realize it when I was
writing it, but she hated everything about the town. She hated everything
about her family. She kept running off, but she kept coming home. Charles
S. Dutton’s character, that’s the best family she could have, and he is her
family. But those things sometimes aren’t planned. That’s a scary way to
write. You don’t have a game plan.
kasdan: I didn’t really finish my thought. Screenwriting is this highly
compressed, very economical form of writing, but you can’t take the air
out. You can’t take the unknown part or the part that surprises you out of
it. Maybe some character starts talking to you, and you wish he wouldn’t
because now it’s taken a page and a half, and you need that page and a half

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 for the principal, but you must leave the air in. Otherwise you will end up
with a dead screenplay, which is mostly what we see in the theaters.
The ones you want to write are never like that. They’re the ones where
every page contains a surprise. Even within this extremely disciplined,
ritualized form, you have to leave that surprise. If you didn’t know every
day there was going to be a surprise, how could you ever get to the desk? It
would be so fucking boring.
rapp: Those guys in the other panel, they say “fuck” all the time, so it’s
okay.
kasdan: Well, okay then.

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 Nicholas Kazan on
Writing Characters

One thing I always try to do is look at every character. Thank God for com-
puters, because you can just put a search in. Put in your main character,
put a search in, and just look through all the dialogue of that character. See
if the character has a verbal tic in one place. He called somebody “buddy”
once. That’s kind of nice, so maybe he should call everybody buddy. Then
you look through, and there are a few more places to put it, and suddenly
the character starts to have a little bit more texture.
You have a character who’s formal, who doesn’t use contractions. You
notice that in one place, and it feels good. You think maybe the character
shouldn’t use contractions ever. Then you go back and search for this char-
acter named Norm, and Norm always speaks in very formal speech, and
then Norm takes on more life. Go back and look at all of those.

The Protagonist

The protagonist has to drive the story. The protagonist can’t be passive. We
all have a tendency—because so many things happen to us in life that aren’t
in our control—to have things just happen to our protagonist. That doesn’t
mean you can’t have something happen to him at the beginning. Something
happening to him at the beginning is good. His father dies, his girlfriend
leaves him, his house burns down, and then he has to start over. Those are
sort of the inciting incidents that get the movie started. All those things
happen, and the question is, how does this person put his life back to-
gether? Once the person starts to put his life back together, everything he
does can’t be determined by other people. It has to be determined by him.

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 If you have a section that doesn’t seem to be working, you say, “Some-
thing’s wrong here. It doesn’t seem as interesting.” It’s quite possible that
for a little while your protagonist is being passive. He’s not driving the
story. Always take a look at it.
There are tricks to be used here. Even the illusion of activity is better
than no activity. Let’s say halfway through the story you need to have the
boss get fired and a new boss come in who’s horrible. What you want to do
is have the boss’s firing be somehow related to the actions of the protago-
nist. For instance, your protagonist could do something good. He could do
a good job, which somehow backfires and gets his boss in trouble, and then
the boss gets fired, but then this new boss is a pain in the ass as a result of
the protagonist’s actions. It doesn’t have to be a big thing either, just a little
thing that starts the ball rolling so everything builds on everything else.

The Importance of Characters’ Names

Changing their names is actually very good. There are times . . . I have
a screenplay I just turned in last fall, and I changed the main character’s
name three times because it started out based on a true story. I began with
a real person’s name, and then I realized the real person was too boring, so I
reconceived the character and changed her name. Then I realized, although
that was interesting, I had to go a different way. I changed the name again.
When you have to reconceive a character, you should always change the
name. Sometimes you keep some of the dialogue. That’s fine, because dif-
ferent people can say the same things. Everybody can say the word “no.”
Everybody can say more elaborate things too. You have to be very careful
that you’re not using an old voice.

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 Crafting Characters

A Conversation with Lawrence Kasdan

Part of the writing job is to be very perceptive about people and how odd
people are and how unpredictable they are, but you have to use what Mal-
colm Gladwell calls “thin slicing.” You get an impression of someone, and
you can get a sense of his or her whole being from that one impression,
so your very brief contact with someone may suggest a whole character.
That happens to you in real life, and sometimes you’re right and sometimes
you’re wrong about who the person really is. But in writing, that’s your
whole job, because in a movie, which is so economical, all you’re ever going
to have of a character is a thin slice. Maybe he has four minutes of screen
time, but that’s a big part in a movie.
Most American movies are centered on one protagonist, maybe two if
we’re lucky, and so they get an hour and a half on screen. But all the inter-
esting characters, the secondary characters, they have to be established in
tiny amounts of time, so you want to put them in a situation where they
can reveal who they are. What do they care about? What are they afraid
of? You want to add to those characters, and the major characters, all the
quirks and specific details you can possibly come up with so the audience
doesn’t feel, “I’ve seen that. Show me something new.”
As an example, in Body Heat you see that William Hurt’s a runner. He
cares about his body. He runs first thing in the morning. He runs along
the beach, on the boardwalk, on the pier, and then he stops, pulls out a
pack of cigarettes and starts smoking. You know a lot about him from that,
and that turns out to be important in the movie. He has a certain kind of
discipline and yet no discipline. He wants to keep fully in shape and sexu-
ally ready to go, but he’s ready to let his core turn to rot. He’s susceptible

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 to addictions, which is what the movie turns out to be about. He becomes
addicted to a woman. It’s just a tiny little thing, but you see what his char-
acter is like.
Another big moment in the movie is when someone says, “Do you mind
if I smoke?” and everyone else is relieved, and the whole room fills with
smoke. Ted Danson is just sort of watching them. He is the one pure char-
acter in the room, because everyone else is completely compromised and
corrupted in some way. Someone offers him a cigarette, and he says, “No,
that’s all right. I’ll just breathe the air.” That line really speaks to the whole
story, because he is moving in a world that is completely corrupt. He is
breathing the air all the time. You can have the highest intentions, but if
you swim in dirty water, you’re going to catch some of the dirt, and that’s
what happens to the Ted Danson character. So that’s a little bit of character
building.

On the Influence of Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa is the best teacher in the world, and not just in terms of
directing, although I think he’s the best director in the world, the best with
actors, and the best with placement of the camera. He revolutionized the
way we cover action and drama. He did every kind of film. He worked in
every genre. He was like Shakespeare, except in film. There’s no one equal
to him. He made these tiny, intimate human dramas like Ikiru. He made
the best action movie ever made with Seven Samurai. If you haven’t seen
these movies, you must see them. You have to go out and get those movies
immediately.
The most entertaining movie ever made is Yojimbo, and it’s been ripped
off several times. It was inspired by a Dashiell Hammett novel called Red
Harvest, which is worth reading. It’s about a guy who comes to a town
where everybody in the whole town is corrupt. He assesses the situation
for a while, figures out how he can set one bad guy against another, and
essentially cleans up the entire town by having them destroy each other.
That’s what happens when Sergio Leone ripped it off, and it became Fistful
of Dollars. It’s been done many, many times. Walter Hill, who’s a friend of
mine, did it again as Last Man Standing.
If you want a lesson in character building or writing, you could watch
any Kurosawa movie, but you should start with Seven Samurai. I think you
all know the story of a town under siege by bandits. They have no money,

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 Lawrence Kasdan 119

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 so they send a couple of their people to a border town to find some samurai
to protect the town against the bandits. So these guys who have no money
and nothing to offer give rice to the samurai although they’re eating millet
themselves. The samurai don’t understand that at first. The villagers have
to find samurai to protect them, and samurai who would do it for nothing.
They have to find one guy to galvanize the group, and that leader in the
American version, The Magnificent Seven, is Yul Brynner. But the Japanese
actor who plays that role is spectacular, and he’s so charismatic and full of
integrity and honor that he’s able to convince five more samurai to join
him, so that’s six. Then they have the one guy, Toshiro Mifune, the greatest
Japanese action actor of all time, who’s rebellious and wild and joins them
sort of against his will. So there are now seven samurai, and they go back
to this little town.
In gathering this group, which is also the model for The Dirty Dozen and
every movie like that where a team is put together for specific skills, you
see some wonderful character writing as the leader who’s collecting the
group scans the town to find likely samurai. He can tell just by looking at
some samurai that they’ll only do it for the money. He can see that others
have a strain of integrity and compassion in them, and they’re possibili-
ties. So then he’ll send the villagers to try to get the samurai to come in and
have an interview. The way each one of them approaches the door to come
into the shack where he’s interviewing people tells you everything about
the samurai’s character, his fighting style, how smart he is, and how cau-
tious. Some walk in, get hit on their heads, and they’re mad. Others come
to the door and stop—“No tricks, please.” They know that’s the kind of
samurai he’s looking for, someone who can sense where the danger is. He
meets old friends. He meets people who have survived battles. They talk a
lot in this extended section where he’s gathering the team about life and
death and doing things for reasons other than money.
By the time the group sets off for the little village, you’re in love with all
seven samurai. You feel you’ve touched upon every major theme in human
drama. It’s about life, death, compassion, generosity, fear, and overcoming
your fears. It’s spectacular. And talk about classic character introduction—
a bandit that got interrupted in his crime has taken a child into a barn. You
see this guy who will turn out to be the main samurai at the river shaving
off his samurai ponytail. He does it very calmly. You see the way he moves
and the kind of peace he has. He is making himself up to look like a monk.

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 He goes to the barn and speaks to the bandit. The bandit’s terrified and
therefore dangerous, and the child is in jeopardy. You never see the bandit.
You just see the older samurai talking to him. He’s offering him balls of
rice. Then there’s a moment, one of the greatest action moments in his-
tory, where the samurai hands the bandit the rice ball and then pauses for a
second. Suddenly he moves from slow to very fast. He goes in, things slow
down, and the bandit comes out. He’s been killed. He’s holding his stomach
and falls flat on his face. Then the older samurai comes out with the child.
So you’ve seen this incredible man of action pretend to be a man of
peace, a monk. There’s a kind of serenity about him and yet enormous skill,
competence, danger, and everything we find romantic and attractive about
these kinds of characters. It sets the tone for the entire movie. It’s the first
thing the villagers witness in the border town, and it shows them that this
is the guy who’s going to be able to help them. Of course he resists at first,
but his heart is too big. If you just study that movie and watch it once, your
mind will be blown. Watch it twice and you’ll say, “Oh, my God. There’s
storytelling revealed here that I’ve never understood.”

The Empire Strikes Back and the Journey of Self-Discovery

Through various circumstances I had the opportunity to write Raiders of

the Lost Ark. It was my first job, and I worked on it for six months. It was
very hard, and I was very proud of what I’d done. I flew up to where George
lived and gave it to him. I walked into his office and said, “Oh, hi.” He took
the script, threw it on his desk, and said, “Let’s go to lunch.” We went to
lunch, we sat down, and after a while he said, “How would you like to write
The Empire Strikes Back?”
I said, “What?” because I knew nothing about the project, other than
that a great old-time screenwriter, Leigh Brackett, was working on it.
He said, “Leigh Brackett turned in a draft, but it was not what I wanted.
Very sadly, she’s died, and we’re already building sets in England. I need a
script.”
I said, “Don’t you want to read Raiders of the Lost Ark before you offer
me this job?”
He said, “I’m going to read it tonight, and if I don’t like it, I’m going to
call you tomorrow and take back this offer.” But he did like it, and so the
next day I was working on Empire Strikes Back.

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 I went back a week later, and we sat down and started talking. Irvin
Kershner, the director, was there. He’d made a couple of adventure films,
including The Return of a Man Called Horse, but he had never done anything
like Star Wars or Empire Strikes Back. He had been a teacher of George’s at
USC, and George was very aware of his immense talent, so he hired him
for what was the greatest job available, which was to do the sequel to Star
Wars. The three of us came into George’s office, and George said to me,
“Darth Vader is Luke’s father.”
I said, “No shit!” That was the coolest thing I had ever heard, because it
was clear George was going to take what was already the biggest hit in his-
tory and make it much more interesting. He was going to follow through
on some things that were suggested in the first movie that would make the
sequel even better in some ways. He was going to get into family issues,
including the relationship between parents and children, which is basically
what all stories are about. We spend our whole lives trying to figure out
those issues, and we react both consciously and unconsciously to things
our parents did to us and the examples they gave us in their own lives. It’s
a burden we carry with us our entire lives, and it’s one of the major themes
in any kind of writing. It doesn’t have to be about your literal father. It may
be your mentor, the one who showed you the way your life should go, or
the one who stopped you and said, “No, you can’t do that.” Did you let that
person rule the day or not?
I always say there are three stories. In the first, someone comes to town.
That’s Seven Samurai. In the second, someone goes on a journey. That’s
what most movies are about. In the third, someone goes on a journey and
comes to town, but the journey can take many different forms. You can go
on a journey and never leave your hometown. You can go on a journey, and
because of something your father told you, your find out your whole life is
wrong.
The unreliable narrator is a wonderful conceit that comes up very often
in really good novels. It’s very easy to mislead the reader of a novel. You can
have a novel going for 200 pages, the main character is narrating it, and
you think, “I think I get this story.” Then something happens, and you real-
ize the entire story has been warped by the narrator’s prejudices or fears
or myopia, or perhaps he’s working out some grudge, and nothing you’ve
read so far can be taken seriously. That can happen to you in life, when
you realize that someone who is very important to you is an unreliable

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 narrator. Perhaps you’re very young when you first hear a story, and you
accept it, and then years later you have a moment of epiphany and say,
“Holy shit! They were wrong about everything.” Then you have to think
back on every decision you’ve made up until that point that was based on
that information.
Sometimes the unreliable narrator, the one giving you the bad informa-
tion, is you. That’s a pretty good story in itself, when you have to reevalu-
ate everything you’ve done. For some of us, that happens every morning.
You think, “I’m doing something wrong. I got off on the wrong foot here
somewhere. I’ve got to trace my steps backward and try to figure out why
I’m here now instead of doing the things I want to do.” I think all of us feel
that way at some point during the day, the week, the month, or the year.
You’ll say, “Is it possible to go back and rectify my mistakes?” There’s a very
good story in the unreliable narrator or the unreliable mentor.
The story “someone leaves town” or “someone goes on a journey” could
be that the character goes on a journey from all his previous beliefs. That’s
tough to do in a movie, but it can be done. He is going on a journey of self-
discovery and liberation that he didn’t expect. With Empire Strikes Back,
Lucas was going to take the story back to Oedipus. Darth Vader was the
bad father that had to be destroyed in order for the son to be released.
What’s very common is “someone comes to town.” That’s basic drama.
You’ll have a dramatic situation, whether it’s that bad guys come to town,
or a marriage has been going on for 25 years, or a high school kid is being
ostracized by a group. It’s just a situation. Then somebody comes to town,
whether it’s the new kid at school or the lover that enters a marriage, and
that character shakes up everything. In Red Harvest it’s a very complicated,
dangerous guy who comes into a corrupt situation and smashes it all into
little pieces.
I think the reason a lot of people like Empire the most and Jedi, which I
also wrote, strikes them as kind of a disappointment is that Empire is the
second act of a three-act play. The way classic drama works is that the first
act sets up the situation. You see the dilemma. In the second act, the com-
plications ensue, and by the end of the second act, if you’ve been success-
ful, it appears that the dilemma cannot be resolved. Our hero will never
get out of this, and the people we care about will never be able to solve this
dilemma. Then, in the third act, you solve it.

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 When Your Characters Surprise You

It’s always a good thing, assuming it’s going in the direction you wanted
to go when you started out, but often the direction we wanted to go when
we started out is wrong. Writing is like taking a drug or getting drunk. It’s
like any loss of control. You’re going to go places you don’t expect. You may
wake up somewhere, and you don’t remember how you got there. What
you hope is that you’ve set the ground rules for the thing in such a way that
you’re still in the ballpark. You may be way out in the bleachers when you
expected to be at first base, but you’re still in the ballpark.
Sometimes you wake up after writing for six weeks, and you look at it
and say, “I lost the ballpark. I’m not even in the right neighborhood.” That’s
disheartening, but you have to remain calm like you would if you were lost
in the city and say, “What do I recognize around here? Maybe this neigh-
borhood is just as good a neighborhood for me as the one I intended to be
in.” Be open to the possibilities. That’s not a bad plan for your whole life.
When you meet someone, be open to the possibility of that person, even
if he or she initially puts you off. Be open to the possibilities of story. Be
open to saying, “This is not what I thought I was doing, but this is what I
am doing.” Be aware of the change and try to know when it’s worth pursu-
ing and when it isn’t, or when you’re just lost and have to throw out some
of your work. Before you start throwing anything out, be open to the idea
that you’ve arrived somewhere for a purpose.
It’s like stumbling through the woods. You never know what’s coming,
what’s behind the next bush or around the next curve. My wife and I have a
place in Colorado, and the most fun is walking in the mountains and along
the trails. They take you right back. You could be in a fairy tale. You could
meet a giant, a troll, a fairy, a witch, anything on those trails. Those stories
have proved themselves for thousands of years because the woods are a
very powerful metaphor. If there isn’t a powerful metaphor working for
you in your story, you’re probably on the wrong track. Innocence or evil or
anyone stumbling through the forest is a very powerful metaphor for the
unexpectedness of life, the dangers, and the possibility of discovery at the
return. It’s very powerful.
Recently I was at this amazing concert, and one of the people there
was Werner Herzog. There was a brief interview with him in which he was
talking about a movie he made called Fitzcarraldo. The story in Fitzcarraldo
is that this mad German guy wants to build an opera house in the jungle
in South America, and in order to fund the building of the opera house,

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 he gets into the rubber business. He needs to reach this really profitable
parcel of rubber trees, so he eventually has to haul the gigantic steamship
he’s using to sail down the river over the mountains. They actually did that
when they were making the film. They didn’t use any tricks or anything,
and only an obsessed, half-crazed director like Herzog could have done it.
It’s a very powerful movie, and in some ways the making of it is more pow-
erful, but what he said that so struck me was, “I knew that hauling the
steamship over the mountains was a powerful metaphor, but I didn’t know
what it was a metaphor for.” That’s sometimes what making art is about,
stumbling ahead into the darkness and hoping that whatever got you going
will get you there.

Thoughts on Character

It’s as if you were painting a painting and said, “I don’t want just one color.
I want several colors. I know this yellow looks good next to this blue, and
this blue looks surprising next to this orange.” That’s exactly what you’re
doing when you’re writing characters. You may say, “These two characters
are subdued in a way that serves my story but does not serve the excite-
ment and drama of the movie. I need to bring in somebody who will wake
the thing up and draw out my characters so that they reveal more of them-
selves.” This other character may allow them to be revealed because he
challenges them, he threatens them, he’s reckless in a way that they aren’t,
and he’s funny in a way that they aren’t. Suddenly you’ve enhanced some
of your characters through this other character.

Balancing a Large Ensemble

It’s tough. It’s not a popular genre in Hollywood. Now, there are things
that look like ensemble movies that are these horrible movies where you
get 25 movie stars to each work for a week, and it’s about Halloween. They
look like ensemble pieces, but they’re not ensemble pieces. Real ensemble
pieces are hard to get made, and that’s pretty much the only kind of movie
I’ve made.
My first movie was Body Heat, and it had William Hurt, Kathleen Turn-
er, and two other characters, really—Ted Danson and J. A. Preston, who
played the cop. Most of the movie was just Bill Hurt and Kathleen Turner,
and so it was the three of us making this movie, and it was a very intense
and claustrophobic story. All I had ever wanted to do was make movies,

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 but when it was over, I was worn out with how small and tight it was. Even
though I loved making it, every day there were the same three personali-
ties, and I said, “I’m going to write a movie with seven or eight leads in it
because I like actors, and I don’t want to be stuck with just two actors.”
That’s how The Big Chill came about.
I wanted to tell that story, and I brought in a friend of mine to write it
with me. We managed to get seven leads, essentially, and I loved it. I abso-
lutely loved it, because I love actors, and I love the way actors are with each
other. With so many leads, there are lots of combinations going on there,
and the possibilities for scenes are endless. I was very taken with it. I’ve
directed eleven movies, and I’d say eight of them are ensemble movies.

A movie like The Big Chill, the studios all turned it down. They said, “You
can’t have seven protagonists. We don’t do that. You don’t know who to
invest in. You don’t know who the story is about.”
I said, “What? I don’t understand what you’re saying. This can work.
This is a group of people, and you’ll get invested in all of them. It’ll be fun.”
The first time we screened it, the studio head came out and said, “I
had no idea this was a comedy.” That was very satisfying. There’s nothing
more satisfying than you having an idea, they say it won’t work, and it does
work. Usually it goes the other way. They say it won’t work, and it doesn’t
work.

The one I just did is sort of an ensemble movie with Diane Keaton, Kevin
Kline, Richard Jenkins, Dianne Wiest, Elisabeth Moss, and Mark Duplass.
Each day you get to work with a lot of people who are all funny, good, and
smart. It’s just like putting together an all-star team. You get ten great ac-
tors for every part, you get to work with the best people, and you feel like
the manager of a team. I’m very drawn to it.
Still, the manager of the team has the responsibility to put the best
players in each position, and as a writer, that’s what you’re doing too.
You’re creating the most interesting person to play shortstop, third base,
and center field. If the infield is a certain kind of way, you want the outfield
to be different. You want to mix it up, match it, and have it help you tell
the story. You can make the center fielder a troublemaker, the catcher reli-
able, the first baseman vain, and the third baseman industrious and hon-
est. Suddenly you’ve got a team.

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 Dialogue and Finding the Voice

A Conversation with John August and

John Lee Hancock

john august: If you’re looking through a script and there’s a line of dia-
logue that any character in the script could say, there’s a problem—unless
you’re writing a CSI episode, where people have to talk about the evidence.
In a movie there should be only one character that can say a given line
or convey a certain message. Hearing those voices is really just thinking
through all the people you encountered in your life and how their voices
are different and closing your eyes and listening to the patterns of how
people speak and finding a way to reflect that on a page.
john lee hancock: I just did a rewrite on something and was . . . I
was hired late in the game. It’s a ’30s Texas piece, and it was set in prison,
and I knew exactly what needed to happen to it, and I jumped in to start
to do the rewrite. Almost immediately the seven women in this women-
in-prison movie in Texas conspired against me, because they all sounded
exactly alike, and I realized I was going to be essentially working for mini-
mum wage on this because there were going to be many, many, many hours
spent trying to . . . You can’t just go, “Oh, I’ll give this one this accent and
this one . . .” You have to go back to the start and to the very, very middle
of the characters and try to differentiate them.
Drawing a character is like drawing dialogue in that sometimes . . .
You know how you’ll describe a friend of yours, and you could list his re-
sume, and that’s really not emblematic in any way of who that person is,
but if you go, “I’ll tell you the kind of person Bob is. Bob’s the kind of guy
that . . .” and that one sentence kind of sums Bob up. In some way that’s
your touchstone to a character, and that also can be a touchstone to dia-
logue too sometimes.

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 august: There are two kinds of structure you can confuse. There’s the
overall structure of your movie, which is how the whole story plays out, but
there’s also the structure of the scene, and dialogue really comes down to
the scene work—where you’re entering the scene, what’s happening in the
scene, and where you are getting out of the scene. A lot of times you have
trouble with dialogue because you’re starting the conversation too early. If
you come to the scene a little later and get right to the meat of it, you can
be better off. Or maybe you’re not finding the right way out of the scene.
A lot of my process for figuring out the scene is just closing my eyes and
looping the scene over and over and over and over in my head to figure out
what happens in the scene and starting to listen to who’s talking and what
they’re saying. You figure out what the needs are, what you know, and what
needs to be said by your characters. Sometimes that takes forever. It’s re-
ally easy to write the five-page version of the scene, but you know the scene
needs to be a page, so your challenge as a writer is to figure out how to
distill that down so everyone is saying just what he needs to say, yet it still
feels natural. That’s why it can take all day to write one short scene. There
are scenes that are really easy, where it just flows really naturally, and there
are times when just getting those pieces of dialogue to fit right is your day’s
work.
When I first started writing screenplays, I was more in love with my
dialogue than I was with the script in total. I used to think of it almost
like a stage play, and the dialogue had such importance to me—“Isn’t this
clever?” and “Isn’t this great?” I’m not saying it’s not important to me now,
but I’d love to write a script that had no dialogue in it. It would be fantastic.
If it has the moments . . . Essentially that’s what writing a film or making a
film is—a series of moments.
It’s not an active process for me anymore, but I’ve always been very
observant. I’ve always been the guy that sits at the edge of the room, who
listens and watches to see how people are doing their things and what
they’re saying or what they’re doing—that sort of psychiatrist aspect of
screenwriting. Dialogue is what people would really say if they had an extra
ten or fifteen seconds between interchanges; it’s just slightly optimized.
You’re taking out the false starts, the little things that wouldn’t matter,
that aren’t really necessary. If you could listen to a transcript of yourself
talking with somebody and then make that a little bit tighter, that’s dia-
logue. It’s just a little bit better than how people actually speak.

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 It also varies by genre. There are certain genres where you do get away
with people saying outrageously complicated things they couldn’t really
say in real life the same way you have movies where things can fly and
where cars blow up when you touch them, that’s just the nature of the
world. There are levels of style to dialogue too. Sometimes knowing what
kind of movie you’re making is greatly affecting the dialogue, and your
dialogue is greatly affecting what kind of movie it feels like. “Hard-boiled
detective” has its own expectations. Lord of the Rings doesn’t have realistic
dialogue in any way, but the dialogue is appropriate for the nature of that
movie.
People should never introduce themselves. The audience needs to know
who those people are, but you can almost always get around someone hav-
ing to say who they are. And you can usually get out of the scene before
people need to say goodbye. A lot of times in a script, one character will
tell another character what just happened; you can almost always get rid of
that. There are moments that would happen in real life that don’t happen
in movies, because they’re not cinematic or they don’t provide new infor-
mation. You’re always looking for what the characters need to say to each
other, but also what the audience needs to know in order to advance their
understanding of the story and the characters.
hancock: It’s a really good point. Sometimes the solution comes from
figuring a way into the scene or asking if the scene is beginning or ending
at the wrong place, and that can be the solution for writing good dialogue.
I remember writing for the stage and writing plays, you would have to have
the person come in and introduce himself. In movies it’s great because you
start in the middle and end before the end, and that can be helpful not
only in making things more brief, but also you have to look at a script or
movie as kind of a compact with an audience, an interactive experience, so
the dialogue can’t be or shouldn’t be something that lays everything out.
There should be the interplay. I’m filling in gaps because I want you to be
thinking with me, so the role of the character in the piece is very specific in
that way.
august: There can be a lot of pressure in a scene when you know ex-
actly what needs to happen, so I’ll often just take the two characters and
have them talk about whatever. You can still hear those characters talking
and differentiate their voices. If that scene goes on for seven pages, that’s
fine. It’s just a writing exercise. That has been helpful for me figuring out

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 the difference between two characters who could otherwise be very much
the same. Sometimes there are little snippets of what I’m doing in that
exercise that will make it into the movie, but it’s really just a helpful way of
hearing the difference between the characters in my head.
hancock: It’s a great thing to do.
august: When I directed my first movie, I noticed there’s this weird
handoff that happens between the writer and the actor, which doesn’t re-
ally go through the director. As the writer, I was each of the characters in
the movie. Then, one by one, they got assigned to actual professional ac-
tors. I have my performance for all those characters in my head, and the
actors have theirs. It’s just different, and they have different voices and
different ways of doing things.
There have been times in the past where I’ve needed to rewrite lines
because an actor couldn’t say them. I always got really frustrated—“Why
are you . . .? You’re supposed to be a talented actor. You should be able to
say this line.” And you realize that if it doesn’t make sense in their heads,
if it doesn’t make sense coming out of their mouths, it’s just a worthless
line. You can’t fight to protect those things. It’s not going to make it in the
movie if you’re trying to hold on to your line versus the line they could
actually say. All this discussion about the best dialogue, it all ultimately
depends on the person who’s saying it. So recognize that down the road
in this process you may need to change lines simply because of the person
that’s going to end up saying them.
hancock: That’s an interesting point, because one of the great things
about directing something that you’ve written . . . It’s amazing how 90% of
the time on the set, when something’s not coming out of someone’s mouth
correctly or it just doesn’t hit your ear right, you’ll just jettison it. There
will be that one thing that nobody else thinks is important that you’ll go,
“No, you have to keep that word in. You keep dropping that word. It’s really
important.” And so it’s that one thing that you’ll hang on to, and the other
you’ll go, “I don’t care. You can say it the other way.”
august: I have a lot of sympathy for any actor working for a writer-
director because we definitely have specific ways of saying things. It’s like,
“You know what? That was fantastic. You know what would be even better?
If you said the line the way it was written.”
A lot of times actors are not deliberately changing things; a line just
works differently in their heads. On Go, for example, we shot it entirely at

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 night, and we were all exhausted. I always have my ComTac earphones on,
and we have these little portable TV transmitters, but I would run to the
bathroom or something when they’re shooting the grocery store, and I was
coming back, I’m listening on the ComTacs, and all of a sudden it’s, “Oh,
crap, he changed the line.”
They were so tired, shooting covers on two sides, and they didn’t realize
they changed the line over the course of eight takes, and so now the two
sides didn’t make sense. They didn’t track with each other and our script
supervisor wasn’t the kind of person who would interject herself to point
that out, so we had to go back and turn around the cameras. You couldn’t
cut the two sides together because the lines wouldn’t fit. They changed a
“his” to a “they,” or whatever. That’s why a writer is actually a helpful per-
son on set sometimes.
Big Fish has multiple conflicting voiceovers in it. In the opening set piece
there’s a bit by Will, who’s kind of my surrogate in the movie, who says, “My
father and I were like strangers who knew each other very well.” Writing
that was the key to understanding what the movie was about. That’s the dy-
namic of this relationship, and without that piece of dialogue . . . You could
probably take that piece of dialogue out of the movie and the movie would
still make sense, but without that piece of dialogue I couldn’t have written
the movie. That was the key to that dynamic. It wasn’t that they hated each
other; it’s just that they fundamentally didn’t understand each other.
There was a scene that got jettisoned from the movie, but really sprung
from that line. Sandra (Jessica Lange) is in the supermarket, and she tells
Will that it’s a wonder parents and kids can stand each other at all. She
says, “Throughout your entire life you’re going to pick who you’re going to
associate with. You pick your friends. You pick the person you’re going to
love. But with parents and kids it’s just a lottery, just like numbers drawn
out of a dark bag.” There’s all this pressure and expectation that you should
have this magical relationship, but you didn’t choose each other. That all
sprung from that one line, which was during my initial discovery process
on the movie.
hancock: I don’t know if it’s an example of good dialogue or bad dia-
logue, but it’s dialogue that I like—when I came in and did a rewrite on The
Alamo, there was a relationship in the movie between Travis and Bowie,
which is there always. These guys go at each other nonstop, and there’s a
scene toward the end of the movie or toward the end of their relationship

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 where it’s obvious that things are going to end badly. Bowie’s probably
going to die, and Travis is probably going to die as well, and there’s this one
moment where they actually kind of come to terms with one another and
their differences.
I don’t think it’s an overwritten scene at all, which is nice, and at the
end of the scene Travis is leaving, and Bowie says, “Buck, did it matter?”
Travis just looks at him and says, “I’ll fetch you some water,” or
something.
People ask what that means, and I tell them I think it means something
to me, but I think it can mean several things. Then people ask if he’s talking
about some kind of a religious thing, and I tell them I don’t know, but it
could be. Maybe he’s talking about the fact that they are fighting for Texas,
and did it matter? I don’t know. Is it too ironic? I don’t know. I always liked
the line, so when it was in the movie, I had people from Disney ask what it
means and tell me that it was confusing. I told them I just liked it. I don’t
know if it’s good dialogue, bad dialogue, or whatever, but I liked it because
there could be many interpretations, and I think it was true to the charac-
ters. It didn’t seem out of the way at all.
august: You feel so powerful when you actually start having characters
talk to each other. Your first scripts become a lot of, “Wow, I can have these
characters talk to each other, and they can make references to things, and
they can say the things I would never say!” That feeling is so giddy and
powerful, but that’s not generally a helpful way to make a movie or write a
script.
You have to really look at the story you want to tell. How does it break
down into individual moments? Don’t think about those as dialogue mo-
ments. What are the turns and twists and changes in the story? You come
down to, “Okay, I know I’m writing the scene in which this character dis-
covers that his wife is having the affair with the dog walker. This is the
moment where he does this.” It is only when you’re down to that small
moment that you are looking at, “Well, how does that come out in this
dialogue? What are those moments?”
Rather than trying to write those lines ahead of time, I want to look
at it like, “This is the moment, and inside this moment I’m just playing
through this scene. What are the things that could happen? What would
be said, and what is the best way into that?” There is this instinct to stare
at the screen and think, “Okay, he said this. Now she’s going to say that.”

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 But rather than “this character talks, and then this character talks, and
then this character needs to talk,” you’re better off figuring out everything
that’s being said in the scene, and then arranging it.
hancock: I had an early lesson in what dialogue is supposed to be and
how it serves at the pleasure of the script in some ways. I directed a movie
that was a straight-to-video movie in the early ’90s, and thankfully no one
can ever find it, but it was one of those horrible exercises where almost
every day the producer would come and say, “We lost the location today.”
We were just getting set up. Where were we going to shoot the scene? You’d
find yourself going to the day’s work and trying in your mind to figure out,
“How am I going to make this story make sense?”
The only way I was able to do it was to give additional lines to people
in other scenes, and so the scenes would become ridiculous exercises like
daytime soaps—“Remember last week when Bob left Alice?” and that kind
of stuff. I actually learned a lot about what dialogue is not supposed to be,
and sometimes that’s more important than understanding exactly what it
is supposed to be.

Conversing with Your Characters

august: It’s all interior monologue for me. I’m not saying that stuff out
loud, because if I hear my own voice then I’m not hearing their voices.
I’m not always necessarily hearing exactly the words they’re saying. I
have my scribble scene, which is basically just the flow of the conversation.
I’m going to go back through and fix those words, but I know what the
points are they’re trying to get across.
I have a full-length mirror in our dressing room, and there have been
times where I’ll just sit in front of that mirror and . . . I won’t talk through
the scene, but I’ll sort of see it through. A lot of good dialogue isn’t just
the words you’re saying, but it’s the punctuation. It’s the starts and the
stops, and where people interrupt each other. You can get a feel for it by
play-acting the scene a little bit. It’s not just what they’re saying, it’s how
they’re saying it and what they’re not saying or what got cut off before they
finished the thought.
hancock: I’m more interested in behavior than I am dialogue, and I
think sometimes if the dialogue can support behavior . . . It’s not so much
for me that I have a conversation with them as I can put them in a million

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 different circumstances outside the specific circumstances of this story
and know how they’ll behave. That’s a great feeling, because then they live
for you. They’re not just at your service for this script.
There’s a lot of really smart people that have talked about how we
watch movies, the fact that it’s 24 frames per second, how we blink, how
we watch, and how it puts us in a dreamlike trance. I think in some ways
a script should do that as well, and I think there’s a visual component to
reading a script. It’s not just a story. The worst-case example would be, you
get the script, and it’s all text, or the dialogue goes on forever. Find a way to
break up dialogue where it works on the page. I think you want your eyes to
dance on the page, and I think you want to be light on your feet where you
need to be light on your feet with the script. If you’ve got somebody that
has a long speech, I think you have to be really creative in ways to break
that up to help the audience understand that this is of import and to es-
sentially underline the things that are important.
august: In terms of the flow on the page or the feel of the page, I try
not to put more than four lines of action together in a paragraph. It be-
comes too daunting to read. When you’re reading a dialogue block, if it
goes on for more than five or six lines, it gives you the sense that it must
be a major speech. You get one or two of those in a script, where it could be
half a page; one character’s talking, and there is a giant exclamation point,
because it’s clearly an important speech.
Other times you have something breaking up that big block of text. If
it’s a character that needs to say quite a few things back to back, find some
change in the scene that gives you an excuse to break in with a line of action.
When you have two characters talking, you realize as you read that you
stop paying attention to the characters’ names. At a certain point you’re
just reading the dialogue, and even then lines of action are easy to use to
break it up. People might not actually really read those, but they’re there to
sort of give a sense of the scene’s flow.
You say people are only reading the dialogue, but your actors are only
reading their own dialogue. If you have a table reading before you go into
production, it gives the actors a chance to give you notes about lines they
have a hard time saying, but it’s really just so they can sit down and read
the entire script. They will not have read the entire script unless you’ve
actually sat them down in a room with all the other actors and made them
go through it. Then they understand that the line they’re saying actually
refers to something that happened.

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 You’re not trying to handicap your actors and directors with, “Oh, he
had to turn at this moment,” but you’re trying to get them to understand
that it’s literally a turn of the scene. Sometimes you have to do that, be-
cause otherwise you’re going to miss crucial points. If you don’t break that
line out, they’re going to steamroll though it and not get that it actually
happened.
I notice in looking through older scripts that we have changed the way
we put words on the page. Scripts now read a lot more like how movies are
actually shot. We use more scene description in movies than we used to,
and our dialogue is broken up more. I think screenwriting has morphed
into this thing where it has to really feel like the final movie—like you
watched the movie by reading the script. The key terms are part of that,
building the whole scene even if the director isn’t choosing to do it that
way. You’re giving the spiel for what the whole scene is.
hancock: It’s less a piece of literature and more a blueprint for what it
will become. Early in my career I’d write this beautiful piece of description
about someone’s apartment or something, and you’d say it belongs in a
book, not in a screenplay. There’s the famous example—I’m not sure who it
was. It may have been Joe Eszterhas—“Interior, Bob’s Apartment, Night,
Shitty.”
Then there’s the other one—“Interior, Bar, Night. This place is every
joint Joe Friday ever walked into.” Immediately I see the red booths and
the cocktail waitress who spent way too many years there. It’s an interac-
tive experience for the reader. You’re trusting the writer’s imagination. You
come to the party with your ideas.
august: But I find if that scene were early in the script, it would prob-
ably have a little more description. There’s a pacing to how you’re doing
scene description over the course of the movie. The new location you’re
introducing quite late in the movie doesn’t get that same love, not just
because you’re tired, but also because you’ve got to get done.
hancock: When you’re reading a script, you know very quickly if you’re
in the hands of someone who’s a good storyteller, or at least someone you
want to tell you a story. I think when you sit down to write either a script or
a story, sometimes you’re telling a story to someone, and then sometimes
you’re putting your arm around them and telling the story, and there are
varying degrees of distance you keep from the reader. I think one of the
best at putting his arm around you and telling you a tale is William Gold-
man. He has that ability to go outside the script and outside the movie and

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 say, “Didn’t I just tell you this? Weren’t you paying attention?” That’s the
kind of stuff that, if I were to try it, it would be really, really pretentious
and wouldn’t work, but for some reason, in the best of his stuff he had
the ability to put his arm around you and sit by the fire and tell you a tale.
When people try to emulate that, sometimes it pisses me off.
august: You will find your style. I’m a “we” person, so there’s “we” in
the script—that hand around you saying, “We see this,” or “We feel this,”
which is just a surrogate for the camera and the audience. I always try to
write a script as if you’re sitting in the seat watching and experiencing it at
the same time you’re reading the words, but that’s a style thing. I think you
don’t discover what your style is until you’re a couple of scripts in.

Introducing Characters

august: “The second prettiest girl in Topeka.” Her dialogue could be fan-
tastic, but what you gave us with, “Twenty-two, Attractive,” means we’re
not reading her lines with any sort of charge. We have no spin coming into
it, so we’re not anticipating this is going to work out great.
I always come to—you’re not writing a screenplay, you’re writing a
movie. That’s your final product. You have to be able to sacrifice some of
your literary intentions. In screenplays you’re really limited to what you
can see and what you can hear, and if you can’t get to something through
one of those two senses, you’re going to have to write a book.

Dialogue and Reality

hancock: What is dialogue? Is it real? Of course it’s not. It’s hyper-

realized real. You know that, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how
unrealistic dialogue is in another way. I think this is particularly important
during a political season. How many lies do we tell a day? I mean half-
truths really, and not in a malicious way. I’m just saying we kind of reveal
ourselves through the lies we tell. How many do I tell a day, 50, 100? I don’t
know. Somebody says, “How are you doing?” and I just say I’m doing fine.
That’s not really . . . There are little ones and big ones.
I’m not sure if that matters, but I started thinking about it in terms
of screenplays and wondering how my characters can reveal themselves
through the lies they tell. It seems like in screenplays is the only time. Peo-
ple pretty much . . . If they’re lying, you know it. They always state their

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 intentions fairly clearly. It’s just a question, is that important to do? How
hard is it to do? Is it just part and parcel of writing good dialogue? I don’t
know.
august: A lot of times when you have two characters talking—a hus-
band and wife talking—it’s not that what they’re saying isn’t important,
but really what you’re watching is the interaction between those two. They
could be talking about how the cat needs to go to the vet, but how you’re
shaping that scene is going to tell us the nature of their relationship, how
truthful they’re being, what’s really going on, and the subtext of what’s
happening. “Subtext” is one of those dangerous words because you don’t
just layer up your dialogue with more subtext. That’s generally not the goal.
The goal is to tell your scene, but your subtext is why this moment is hap-
pening, and the way it’s happening between these two characters.
Hopefully everyone has something that shoots, and you get to see ac-
tors do your lines, but I know John Lee has done TV, and the amazing
thing when you’re casting a TV show is that you bring in these actors who
are auditioning for your parts, and you might see 100 actors for a role, and
they’re only reading these two scenes that you’ve written for this process.
You realize how completely different your lines sound from certain actors
versus other actors. You want to kill yourself at certain points because you
can’t believe how bad it is, and then you find that one actor who’s saying
exactly the same things as the other ten guys, but you really believe it com-
ing from him.
If a movie gets a bad review, nine times out of ten the screenwriter
is mentioned, and if a movie gets a great review, one time out of ten the
screenwriter gets mentioned. If a movie isn’t working, they hear the dia-
logue. They hear everything, and everything grates, or it wasn’t well cast,
or it wasn’t well directed. The process of casting is realizing how crucial it
is to get the right people to say those lines.
I have a project now which starts shooting in July, and there are talent-
ed people involved in it, so I’m sure they’re going to find the right actors,
and yet I do have my little list that I sort of slip under the door, hoping that
at least some of these people are going to say some of these lines.
hancock: The reason why “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown” is a great
line is because it kind of codifies the whole theme of the movie. It’s an
example of where dialogue has to carry the water at the end of the day
so people understand what the movie’s about. That’s essentially what the
movie’s been about.

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 I think in terms of starting a movie, more now than ever, I really, really
want to please. I look at those first five pages and ask, “Am I excited to read
this?” It’s not just because I’m a seller in a marketplace. It’s because I want
to keep myself from being bored to tears. I want to be excited working on
it. A lot of times when I’m starting something from scratch, whether it’s
an original or adaptation, I’ll start too early in the rewrite. Many people
have said that all problems are first-act problems, but I’ll go back and know
I can start later, and that goes to a scene, too, in terms of the structure of
a scene. You can really goose something and make it something you want
to read.
august: I’m trying to think through my movies and figure out what
the last lines are, and most of them I couldn’t tell you. The last moment of
the movie is a visual moment. It’s a resolution of something, but it’s not
the line. “So what are we doing for New Year’s?” was a good summation of,
“You know, a bunch of shit happened, and you pick yourself up and dust
yourself off, and you just go to it again.” But most of my movies, I wasn’t
writing to a line. I was writing to a conclusion. I was writing to the last
thing that happens that closes this movie, but not what people said.
When characters are being shrouded—when characters are acting in
the movie—we need to know enough about who those people are indepen-
dent of what’s going on, and you need to give us as an audience a sense that
what this person’s saying isn’t entirely true. The next movie that’s shooting
is Dark Shadows, and one of the characters introduces herself as someone
completely different than who she is, and so I can tell the audience not to
trust her. I’m setting up scenes in a certain way so you’re always really sus-
picious of everything she says, and that’s going to be the case with you too.
Or if you have two characters who are changing roles, as long as we heard
their voices clearly at the start, it’s going to be okay. We’re going to be able
to work with you. Make sure they have very different names so we don’t
get confused. Never name two characters with the same first letter. Don’t
have a Charlie and a Chris in the same movie because you’re going to get
those people confused. Charlie and Raul, you won’t get those confused.

Creating Character Manifestos

august: I tend to write character introduction lines in a script first. The

process of distilling down who this person is to just two sentences is so
hard that it makes me think through a lot. I just did a web-video project

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 called The Remnants, and had to figure out who the six characters that carry
over the whole series were going to be and distill those down to those little
short introductions. I literally did combine a couple of different characters
and realized—rather than the white survivalist guy, what if it was a black
marketing guy? I can put these two guys together, and it’s more interesting
to merge them and distill them down to core elements.
hancock: Early in my career I did one of those manifestos, if you want
to call it that, and it ended up being really, really boring. I couldn’t read
it, because I think it ended up being more like a resume in some ways. A
person isn’t his or her resume. They’re usually far more interesting than
that, so I think how you reveal your character—whether it’s through the
lies they tell, or whether it’s by putting them in some kind of a scene or be-
havior that throws them at an audience—also can reveal to you, the writer,
who they are.
The first time you see a character, before they say a word, you should be
speaking to the audience about what kind of person this is, just the first
visual of the person. I think what John is saying is that the first description
of the character . . . Is he in the corner sitting by himself mumbling? Well,
that says something right there. We don’t even hear the words, but . . .
Yeah, no manifestos for me, but I think the idea is a good one.

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 I was told that if you get stuck, you just have to keep writing. It doesn’t
matter what you write. Just grab one of the great scripts, whether it’s The
Big Chill, Chinatown, or Schindler’s List, and start writing. Just copy it out. I
actually did this while I was at film school. I grabbed Chinatown, and about
the time when Jake decides to give Curly the cheaper bourbon, I had an
idea for my script. I don’t know why, but when you’re actually writing the
words of the great writers, somehow you can be connected to energy that
can break you out of your thing. It was really useful. ★ sacha gervasi
(director of Hitchcock, writer of The Terminal)

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 Writer’s Block

A Conversation with Bud Shrake

and Bill Wittliff

What to Do When You Get Stuck

bill wittliff: I find sometimes that if I get jammed on a scene, it’s good
to take the scene and turn it absolutely upside down. If he says, “Darling, I
love you, and I want to marry you,” I’d turn it completely over and have him
say, “You bitch, I really hate you. I don’t want to see you again.” Sometimes,
that really is the answer. I kept trying to make this work, and the answer
was, it was exactly the other side of the coin.
I’m not a thoughtful writer. I don’t try to think anything through. I’m
not recommending this, but it’s strictly feel for me. If it feels right, I go
with it. I get in trouble when I think. I don’t recommend that, because
if you think your way through a script and you get in trouble, generally
speaking you can go back through your chain of thoughts and figure out
where you went awry. If you do a script strictly on feel and you run into
trouble, generally there is not a chain that you can track. You just have to
walk around for a few weeks and pray.
bud shrake: In an earlier life I wrote literally thousands of newspa-
per columns and magazine stories, and all of them on deadline. Of course,
there were many days when I would sit down, and my mind would be a
total blank, and maybe I had an hour to go before I had to turn in this
newspaper column for the Dallas Morning News or somebody. One thing I
learned—a very practical thing to do was to write the next line. Forget the
big picture, and just write the next line and then the next line after that.
Pretty soon things would open up, and I would know where I was going.
I found that works also in writing novels or in writing screenplays. If
I’m stuck, I forget about the big picture and forget how this is going to look
to eternity and just write the very next line. What does this character say
next?

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 Figuring Out Your Characters

wittliff: Occasionally a character will just stop dead on you. They won’t
talk, and yet when they first hit the paper it seemed like you knew them
absolutely. You didn’t have to push them to say anything. Then all of a
sudden, they stop talking. They’re alive one second, and then in the next
second they won’t talk to you. And now they’re willing to talk again.
So I did this little thing where I would take them out of the script, I
would get other sheets of paper, I would stick them in a Corvette, I would
stop at a 7-Eleven, I’d have them buy a couple of six-packs of Lone Star, and
I’d cut them loose. I’d put them on a Hill Country road, and they’d be doing
60 miles an hour, 70 miles an hour, 80, 90, off the road, and dead. Then
I would take them to the pearly gate, and St. Peter’s there, and he’s got a
little checklist. He’d say, “Who are you?”
“Bob Watkins. I was killed back there on the Hill Country road. I’m com-
ing in.”
“No, you’re not. In 1962 you did so and so.”
Basically, what I’m saying is, put them in a situation where they have
to explain themselves because their alternatives are heaven or hell. It is
amazing. It’s also fun to do. It’s amazing how they will cut loose some-
times and start talking. Before long you know that character better than
you ever thought possible—other facets of them—and it just illuminates
the whole thing. And it’s enormous fun. Little tricks can get them out of
the script and into a place where you can get to know them so that when
you put them back in the script they’re not shadowy figures to you. And
now they’re willing to talk again.
Everybody’s got little games they play to keep writing. The whole deal
really is, writers write. When it’s good, they’re glad and they keep writing.
When it’s bad, they wad it up and throw it away and keep writing. We can
talk all day and all night, but that’s what it comes to—writers write. You
don’t have to know six scenes down the track. You just have to write the
next sentence. That next sentence will tell you whether it’s going right or
not, and if it isn’t, get yourself another sentence.

The Writing Process

shrake: I forget who it was that said it’s like traveling across the coun-
try at night. You turn on your headlights, and your headlights will only

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 illuminate the first hundred yards of the road, but you can get all the way
across the country that way, a hundred yards at a time.
wittliff: Let me tell you something else I believe. It is simply not pos-
sible to have an itch without the ability to scratch. If you put something on
paper that has not yet resolved itself, you nevertheless have the resolution
somewhere in you or you wouldn’t have been able to put the question on
the paper. I believe that’s a great gift we all have—you cannot itch without
the ability to scratch.
When I started, my wife and I had a small regional book publishing
company, and I really got involved in writing. I found I was taking so much
time away from my family at that time . . . We had one child. I started get-
ting up one hour earlier, and that hour . . . I’d get coffee and cigarettes, my
notebook paper, and my pencil. That hour was mine, and I was very consis-
tent. One hour every morning, every day, every week, every month. It is
astonishing how much work you can get done in one hour a day that’s not
interrupted or where you don’t feel guilty about taking it away from family
or business or whatever. It was just a deal I made with myself—I’m taking
this hour out of my sleep. This is my hour, and here’s how I’m spending it.
Writers write. You’re not going to be inspired if you’re not sitting there
with your paper.
I find that a lot of times I’m reaching for more than I can grasp. I’m sim-
ply not man enough to get hold of what I’m reaching for. It is really hard
to come to a point and say, “I’m just not mature enough for that.” Maybe
next year, maybe in a couple of years. You never lose that stuff. Nothing’s
ever lost. Scripts that fail, bodies that are all over the floor in your writ-
ing room, they spring back to life a year later or something. “God, I need
a redheaded woman, and there she is. She died in 1982, but now she lives
again.” They’re all real.
What works for you? That really is the question. What works for you?
You’re not going to have an answer for me, and I’m not going to have an
answer for you. You just say, “I’m jammed on this. What works for me?” If
you can state it just that simply, you will absolutely find a way around it.
You simply cannot have an itch without the ability to scratch. The trick is
recognizing it when it pops up in front of you. And it will.
Again, this business of wanting to look good . . . It’s the wrong question
to ask when you’re writing. It’s a perfectly legitimate question after you’ve
written, but while you’re writing it’s just simply the wrong question. At
least, it’s what jams me.

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 The best we have is who we are and what we’ve got. I’m not any good at
all at doing somebody else’s version of something. If it’s going to have any
worth to me at all, I have to make it mine. That doesn’t mean it’s going to
be good, but at least you find some other part of yourself that you didn’t
know about before by taking somebody else’s character and reinventing it
to accommodate who you are both as a person and as a writer.

Tales from the Trenches

wittliff: It’s like Mark Twain said—“When I was a boy of 14, my father
was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when
I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned. . . .”
Bud, tell that story about the guy who gave all the notes. You remember
that?
shrake: No. You tell it.
wittliff: Well, I’ll make it my story if I can remember it. Ask me to tell
that story.
shrake: Tell that story, Bill.
wittliff: There was a writer. I think it was Bud. At the time, there was
this very famous director, and Bud sent him a script. The director read the
script, he liked the script, they had a meeting, and the director said, “Get
out your notepad,” so Bud did. Then the director said, “Do this, do that
with this script.” So for a day and a half they talked notes. Bud went home,
and for six weeks he did all those things. He came back to the director, the
director read it, and he said, “This is fucking awful, and nobody would ever
make it.”
Bud said, “I did everything you said to do.”
Then the director said, “That’s the problem.”
shrake: Yeah, I remember that now.
wittliff: There was a script . . . I can’t remember which one it was. An
actor and a director got involved. This was early in my career. They liked
it, but there was a little of this, a little of that, that needed work, so I did
another draft, and they said it was pretty good, but there was still a little
of this, a little of that, and I said okay. And I’m doing these for free, which
in this business really makes you look like an amateur. The worst thing you
can do once you get a deal going somewhere is to offer to do something for
free, because they think that’s what it’s worth. It’s worth nothing.

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 So I did maybe four drafts of this script. Then these two guys came
down, and we’re going to Mexico because part of the story takes place
there, and I’m taking them down there to show them some stuff. The actor
says, “I know what. The script needs blah-blah-blah . . .”
I said, “That’s in the first draft.”
The director says, “Here’s what we do . . . blah-blah-blah . . .”
I said, “That’s in the third draft.” And they’re quiet. So we go through
maybe four suggestions, and I realize they hadn’t read all the drafts. And I
said, “You sorry bastards. You didn’t even read the three other drafts,” and
they had not. That’s hard to deal with.
These are all funny stories, but this is hard duty. It’s hard to be treated
so casually and be read so thinly. But, again, we’re in the Mafia and this is
the life we chose.
shrake: I have to tell one of my favorite stories about dealing with di-
rectors. I was working on Tom Horn. The director at the time was Elliot
Silverstein, who had just directed Cat Ballou, which had won a couple of
Academy Awards. Elliot thought he was really hot stuff. I go into his office
one day, and he says, “I’ve got a really great idea for a scene. It starts off
with Tom Horn standing at the window, and Geronimo is standing there,
and Tom says, ‘Da, da, da, da, da.’ Then Geronimo says, ‘Duh.’ And then
Tom says, ‘Da, da, da, da, da.’ Then Geronimo says, ‘Duh, duh, duh, duh,
duh.’ ” Then Elliot says, “You’re not getting this down.”
I said, “Getting what down?”
And he said, “Look, I’ve got this scene in my mind. I dreamed about it
last night. I can see the scene perfectly, and I’m giving you the rhythm of
it, the rhythm of how this scene plays.”
So I said, “But what’s the, ‘Da, da, da, da, da’?”
Elliot said, “Well, those are the words. You’re the writer. The words be-
long to you.”
Anyway, Elliot got fired that afternoon.

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 As far as writing goes, I kind of do the same thing. I keep going in, and if
I don’t write anything, I go home, and I come back the next day and do it
again. I know that’s a common problem. It’s a common problem we all
have. I’ve found no solution to it. ★ steven zaillian (Gangs of New
York, Schindler’s List)

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 Bill Wittliff on When to
Let Something Go

Don’t whip a poor horse until it’s absolutely dead. Maybe you ought to
move on if you’re tired of it. It’s not delivering what you’d hoped for. This
feels better.
For all of us, there are dead bodies all over the rooms where we write.
There are characters that didn’t work. And we finally say, “Okay. Move on.”
Maybe the purpose of a particular script is to move you a little further
along, and you learn something. Maybe you can use it in something else
later on. These are not religious objects. You can take them over here and
set them down for a while.
Also, maybe something in a script really doesn’t belong in that script
but does belong in the third one down the line. I find that true all the time.
These bodies do resurrect sometimes.

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 Steven Zaillian on
Defining Scenes

What to Keep In, What to Leave Out

Audiences can tell you that. When you preview your film, the hard truth
is revealed. You can’t hold on to that moment that turns out not to be the
special moment. I think that everything I write, I know where the impor-
tant moments are, and I know which moments are there to get me to the
next important moment. I find especially when somebody else directs the
film, and even when I do, sometimes it’s the in-between scenes that actu-
ally come alive and become the important moments. I think there are sign-
posts that we all think we need in the film and consider important because
without them we don’t have a story, but the magic moments or the things
people remember oftentimes aren’t those big scenes. Those are the founda-
tion scenes. Those are the signposts.

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 Anne Rapp on Keeping
the Writing Fresh

Most of the time the rewriting is the fun part. The hard part is getting
something on the page the first time around. Sometimes when you are
rewriting and you don’t feel you are making your story any better, it can
be agonizing.
The hardest part for me is to keep it fresh. I don’t know how many times
I’ve written scenes and then put the script away for a while, and when I go
back and read it, it feels so much better, even though there was something
missing the first time. I don’t necessarily make it better. I make it different.
That’s the ongoing problem: making something different, not necessarily
making something better. I think that’s when you really need to listen to
somebody else’s point of view. You have to have confidence in what you
have done but also to not be afraid to listen to someone else’s ideas.
I’ve heard Bill Wittliff say this several times—“Half the time you are
in these big Hollywood committee meetings, and the best idea of the day
comes from the moron in the corner.” You have to be open to listening to
the moron in the corner. Very often, the moron in the corner is me.

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 Nicholas Kazan’s
Rewriting Process

Rewriting screenplays is hell, but you have to rewrite almost every screen-
play again and again and again. It used to be that I would do a certain
amount of preparation and then write my first draft in ten days. Then I’d
take two days off and rewrite it in ten days. Then I’d take two more days
off and rewrite it again. In 34 days I had something approximating a rea-
sonable first draft. I don’t do that anymore because rewriting is such hell.
What used to happen to me was that at the end of 34 days I would have
characters that worked pretty well, scenes that worked pretty well, and a
structure that by and large worked pretty well but had some problems.
Now I delay the point of beginning my first draft as long as I possibly
can. I make sure that I’ve solved every problem that I can discern. You can’t
see them all, and you have to start writing at a certain point. I have to start
writing when my energy reaches a certain level. I just can’t prepare any-
more. The thing wants to be written. I always say that I’ve reached critical
mass and it has to go down on paper.

Don’t Ditch Your First Draft!

Always keep your first draft because your first draft expresses your pri-
mal impulse. By writing another screenplay and another, you just improve
naturally. When you rewrite, I just encourage you to look at yourself mak-
ing the changes you make. You have the first screenplay, and if you find
five drafts in that you’ve lost your way, that you don’t remember what the
screenplay’s about, go back and read the first draft, and you’ll say, “Oh, yes,
now I feel it.”

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 On Rewriting

A Conversation with Daniel Petrie Jr.,

Peter Hedges, and Sacha Gervasi

daniel petrie jr.: I find that by the time I finish the first draft, I wish I
knew when I started what I know now about the characters, so I’m itching
to go back. I thought I was kind of hearing their voices when I started out,
but now I really hear these characters’ voices. I’ll go back and really trust
that, and go through, and let the characters dictate what the thing is. I’ll
probably learn many things technically too. Now you have the chance to
go back.
peter hedges: I have a friend who’s a rewriter, but he does an interest-
ing thing. He’ll do seventy drafts in nine days. He’ll do a draft where he’ll
follow one character, the character Joe, and he’ll do a draft of Joe. He does
these mini-drafts, mini-rewrites. I think sometimes the notion of a rewrite
is enormous. I’m actually really learning to enjoy the process. I would like
my first drafts to be messier. I’ve been too careful with my first drafts. I’m
now at a point where every assumption I’ve made about how I write, I’m
kind of trying to challenge again to shake it up. Even if it doesn’t come to
anything, that process, that lone process where it’s just you . . . If we can’t
find some buoyancy, some pleasure in the struggle, in the questioning, in
the not knowing, it’s bleak. It’s hard to get things made, and all of that is
true, but if we can nurture a process that is somewhat playful . . . I mean,
we’re making up things. It’s kind of crazy, and it’s kind of neat.
sacha gervasi: I don’t really know what I’m doing until after the first
draft. I think it’s much harder to go from nothing to something than from
something to something better. When I was at film school, the first year I
was unable to finish a script. I would get to page 72 and have some sort of
emotional breakdown. I’d get drunk and then decide I didn’t want to be a

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 screenwriter. For me, it was just about, “Can I get a draft completed?” I’m
still figuring it out, but it’s a messy individual process.
The most important thing is to just keep moving forward. Sometimes
I’m on the third draft, and I realize the movie’s actually about this person.
Sometimes revelations will come in the most unexpected ways, and you’ll
completely reconfigure your perspective on things. That’s the best time,
because then you know you’re not in control of the process. When it really
is working is when I have a sensation that I’m taking notes. It takes around
twenty drafts until I’ve removed myself, and I’m hearing people talk, and I
can write it down. To get there is the goal, and it’s hard to sometimes.
petrie: Sometimes you get notes from friends. Sometimes the notes are
valid, and sometimes they’re not, but it’s always worth listening to when
somebody says, “You know what I didn’t get?” They may come away think-
ing the movie is about something you don’t think it’s about, and that’s a
real clue to take another look.

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 Lawrence Kasdan on How You
Know When You’re Done

The Coen brothers seem oblivious to all the normal concerns. Their whole
careers have been like that and I admire the hell out of them. In No Country
for Old Men—which I’ve seen about ten times and think is maybe their best
movie—you’re with Josh Brolin for the whole movie. He found the money,
he’s being chased, the killer’s after him, and Tommy Lee Jones is after
them both. You watch the movie for an hour and forty minutes—Josh Bro-
lin, Josh Brolin, Josh Brolin. Then he gets killed offscreen, and you’re not
even sure who killed him. Tommy Lee Jones pulls up to a motel, and there’s
Josh Brolin dead, and we get the idea that the Mexican gang that was trac-
ing them caught up to him and killed him. And then they move on. It does
go back to Brolin’s wife, but Brolin himself is still offscreen. I can’t think
of a screenwriting teacher in the world who would say, “Oh, that’s how you
should do that.” It didn’t bother me a bit. I love that movie.
No Country for Old Men has that kind of attitude—“This is how Cormac
McCarthy told the story, and this is how we’re going to tell the story, and
if you don’t like it, screw you.” There has to be that part of you when you
finish the thing that says, “This is my story, and I’ll stand on that at least
until tonight.” That’s your job.
You never know that you’re really done. Instead, you reach a point
where you can’t do it anymore. You don’t know what else to do, so you start
showing it to people. Invariably, they’ve got plenty of ideas. You can choose
whether you’re going to listen to any of those ideas or not. Sometimes you
get defensive about it, and you say, “You guys just don’t understand. Wait
until you see how I direct it,” but in fact, they’re right. You don’t need this,
or you don’t need that, or that doesn’t work, but it can be hard to be open

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 to it once you’ve said, “This is my best thought on the matter at the mo-
ment.” Every step of the way, right through the shooting and right through
the cutting, you don’t ever feel like, “This is the only way it can be.” You feel
like, “This is the best thought I have at the moment.”
The Magnificent Seven is the Western remake of Seven Samurai, and if
you haven’t seen Magnificent Seven, you’ve got to see that too. It has the
coolest cast ever put together—Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles
Bronson . . . It’s absolutely fabulous. There’s a scene where Eli Wallach and
his group of bandits have taken over the town, and they’re having the gun-
fighters give up their weapons. Eli Wallach says to Steve McQueen, “Why’d
you do this? There’s no money here. What were you thinking?”
McQueen says, “I asked the same question of my friend who jumped
naked into a thistle bush.”
Wallach says, “What did he say?”
McQueen says, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
That’s really what creation is about, whether it’s writing or directing.
You have to trust and go with the best idea you have at the time. If you can
stand to look at your movie five years later you may say, “That was not a
good idea,” but you may think, “That part, that was a really good idea.”

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 7 Collaboration

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 A Conversation with
Steven Zaillian

m o d er at e d b y s a c h a g er va s i

Beginnings and Inspiration

sacha gervasi: Everyone’s aware of all the incredible scripts you’ve writ-
ten and films you’ve made, but let’s start at the beginning. Was there a par-
ticular moment you decided or realized you were going to become a writer?
steven zaillian: Not really, no. I didn’t study writing. It wasn’t be-
cause I didn’t think classes worked. I just didn’t really have the opportunity
to take any. When I got out of college I kind of stumbled into a job as an
assistant film editor. While I was doing that, I met some actors who were
in the films I was working on. We decided to try to make a film together.
Somebody had to write it. I took a crack at it. I didn’t really know what I
was doing.
I think it may have been Larry Kasdan who said, “The important thing
is to keep writing.” You can’t really expect your first script to be the one
that’s going to sell. So I think I wrote three scripts before this fourth one
that I’m talking about with these actors. That was the one that did it. I
wrote it as a novel because I wasn’t too sure, even after having written a
couple of screenplays, about the form. My brain didn’t really think in terms
of screenplay form. I wrote it as a novel but with the idea of it becoming a
screenplay at some point. That was Bad Manners.

The Writing

gervasi: You’ve talked in the past about a fateful trip to Italy in the sum-
mer of 1979 or 1980 where you didn’t really know what you were doing,
but you went off and wrote this novel on the trip. That was sort of a
turning-point moment.

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 zaillian: It was. It worked out for a number of reasons. I didn’t plan
on doing it, but I took a trip to Europe, not with the intention of writing
and not with the intention of staying. I actually went with one of the actors
that I mentioned who was making a movie in Israel. We met somebody on
an airplane by chance who was going to Italy. We were stopping over in
Italy, and I kind of spontaneously decided to stay. My friend Perry went
home and I stayed for about eight weeks.
I rented an apartment, took Italian classes, got the only English-
language books I could find at the bookstore, and gradually started writing
this script. It was sort of a great way to do it because I was writing about
my home, and I wasn’t at my home. I couldn’t communicate with anybody
because my Italian was so bad, and so the writing became a way of com-
municating and a way to keep my sanity.
In your other panel, you said the best way to start writing is to read
good scripts. I agree with that. You take it one step further and actually
transcribe the script, and I think that’s actually a pretty good idea too.
gervasi: That is a really good thing. Before I met Steve I was a journal-
ist in England and was reading his scripts. I remember reading them and
going, “Oh, my God. It’s amazing.” Whenever I had writer’s block, I would
take one of Steve’s scripts and begin to type it out. At a certain point, maybe
a few pages in, I would suddenly go, “Oh, my gosh,” and I would be con-
nected with some wonderful energy. That’s something some people may
find helpful if they are feeling stuck or blocked. Keep moving. Keep writing.
zaillian: The other thing you do that I don’t but I think is good is, you
write other things. You keep a journal. What Sacha does is, he’ll get up in
the morning, and he’ll start writing. He’ll start doing the kind of writing
where there’s not a lot of pressure. You’re just writing a kind of diary, and
I think that’s really helpful too. I’ve never done it because I’m too lazy, but
I do understand how that could be a good thing.

The Falcon and the Snowman

gervasi: Similarly exciting is when you got the call from John Schlesinger—
“Please come up to the house on Sunset Drive, and let’s talk about Falcon
and the Snowman.” That must have been a fairly exceptional experience, to
be collaborating with one of the greatest directors of the twentieth century.
zaillian: Well, it just goes to show you how accidental a lot of things
are in life. After I sold this first screenplay, which, by the way, was never

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 made, I got hired by producer Edgar Scherick to write another script, an
adaptation of the book Alive, which eventually was made into a movie, but
not with my script. That was fateful for a couple of reasons—not the script
itself, or not the work I had done, but because the assistant to this pro-
ducer was a young guy named Scott Rudin. He was about 18 years old. So
I met him at the very beginning, and we’ve worked together a number of
times since then. The other reason was that John Schlesinger had tried to
make Alive a number of years before, so when someone gave him my script
as a writing sample, he was familiar with the project. He was familiar with
the book. He could tell what I had done in the adaptation in a way that
somebody else who wasn’t familiar wouldn’t be able to. So having all that
knowledge, he liked what I had done.
gervasi: And how was the experience, being in Mexico on the set with
John? Obviously he was incredibly inclusive, which is not necessarily typi-
cal. What did that feel like, when your first scene rolled, and you had in-
credible actors like Sean [Penn] running your lines? How was that experi-
ence for you?
zaillian: I didn’t realize how special John was until much later, after
I had worked with some other directors. John Schlesinger came from the
stage. He came from the English stage. His way of thinking about writers
is different from the way Hollywood directors think of them. The writer’s
a crucial part of the process to him. He likes them. He likes having them
around. He likes talking about script. He likes having them on the set. That
was very unusual.
The fact that my first script had actors like this in it was very unusual
too. Sometimes things have happened in my life that I didn’t really realize
how special they were until years later, but I knew that this was special.

Early Influences

gervasi: In terms of moral integrity, I wanted to go back a little bit into

your background. Your father was a fairly renowned radio journalist, quite
a serious journalist. I wonder, growing up in that household with your dad,
what was it like, and to what degree did growing up around that and his
values and attitudes inform the way you approach things in your work? It
seems there’s definitely a parallel between the two of you.
zaillian: He influenced me in many ways apart from what he did for a
living, just in terms of his own kind of morality. In terms of his work, I was

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 always aware that he took it seriously. He was a journalist. My clearest rec-
ollection of him working at home, which he didn’t do very often, was when
he got a job as a radio documentary maker. He would edit the stuff at home,
and when I say “edit,” I mean cutting quarter-inch tape with a razor blade.
I would hear his documentaries playing over and over as he was work-
ing on them. Did it influence me? I don’t know. It made me comfortable
with the idea of telling real-life stories. It didn’t inspire me to be a journal-
ist. I never thought . . . It’s interesting to me, and I could see myself doing
that now, but at the time I wasn’t really interested. I was more interested
in things like photography and architecture and things like that.
gervasi: But you did become an editor.
zaillian: That’s true, yeah, with razor blades.
gervasi: There is the connection, because what you just described your
father doing is what you just described yourself doing.
zaillian: That’s true. A lot of times you see things, and you don’t really
think about them until later, until somebody points them out on a panel.

The Relationship between Editing and Screenwriting

gervasi: The relationship between editing and screenwriting, I imagine

those skills might be somewhat parallel. What are some of the lessons that
might have been applicable from editing a film to writing a script?
It does seem to me, in terms of storytelling, in terms of the way you
write . . . What I’ve observed in some of your scripts is that you get into
your scenes as late as possible, and you get out as early as you can. They’re
incredibly concentrated and focused, those scenes. There’s not a lot of fat,
and I wonder if that was something that came from editing.
zaillian: I think it may have, at least a part of it. More than that was to
get into the movie as late as possible and get out as soon as possible. Not
just in the scene, but in the whole movie. I think that’s a mistake a lot of
people make. I read these scripts all the time where the writer isn’t exactly
sure who the character is. They’re experimenting with, “Okay, what does
the character . . .? Gets up in the morning . . . What does the character do?”
They’re starting at the very beginning of the day and as far back into the
character’s life as they need to go in order to understand the character.
At some point in editing I realized that, with most things I was working
on, you could take out the first reel, just throw away the first ten minutes,
and start the movie where the action starts. That way you’d get to know the

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 character over the course of the real action and not as a kind of preamble.
That’s something I’m actually very conscious of doing now, thinking about
what happens before the story really gets going but not writing it.

The Writing Process

gervasi: Since you’ve brought it up, what is your specific process? How long
does it take you to write a script? What are the stages? How do you start?
zaillian: It’s really changed over the years. When I was younger I
would write much faster. I wrote Bad Manners in about six or seven weeks
from start to finish. American Gangster took eighteen months. You can
see there’s quite a big difference there. I think the reason for that is that
I didn’t know as much when I was younger, so I didn’t know what I was
doing wrong. Now I’m aware of what’s bad, or at least I’m nervous about it,
so I’m more cautious. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing.
I think the burst of energy where you write really fast can be really good,
but my process has become much more deliberate over the years. I work a
boring 9-to-5 sort of schedule, going to an office, sitting there. I don’t have
to write a certain number of pages. I write whatever I can, whatever I can
get done.
For the first three months these days, I don’t write any script. I just
outline on a yellow legal pad. I write notes, ideas, character descriptions . . .
I really try to work out the movie all the way through because I’m terrified
of getting stuck at some point and saying, “Oh, I’m going to worry about
that when the time comes.” I would hate to invest six months in something
and get up to page 82 and not know what to do.
I can’t remember who said—it may have been Hitchcock—that books
are written from the beginning to the end, and screenplays should be writ-
ten from the end to the beginning. The ending of a movie is crucial. I have
found this out in my own work, once the movie comes out, and you see
an audience’s reaction to it. I think the ending is so important that if you
don’t know the ending when you start, you shouldn’t do it.

Schindler’s List

gervasi: I know that so many people are incredible fans of the film, and
the script is obviously one of the greatest of all time. Can you talk a little
bit about the genesis of that project? Originally it wasn’t going to be a

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 Steven Spielberg film. You were working with Marty Scorsese. Can you talk
about when the changeover between Scorsese and Spielberg occurred and
what that experience was like?
zaillian: I got a call from somebody that worked with Scorsese. I’m not
even sure how that happened. I know he works with De Niro a lot, and De
Niro was in Awakenings, so maybe a conversation between them led to me
somehow. He was the original director on it, and we worked together on a
couple of drafts. It was great. He is somebody who you just sit down with
for eight hours and kind of go over the script page by page. Ideas come up,
and it’s a wonderful kind of experience. In terms of the first draft, he also
leaves you totally on your own to do whatever you want. He starts making
suggestions after the first draft is done. By the way, Spielberg does the
same thing. I think most good directors do the same thing. They leave the
writer alone to begin with, and then really get into the process of collabora-
tion on rewrites.
Thomas Keneally had written a very good book, and then I had the good
fortune to have access to two of the survivors who are actually characters
in the story and who lived in Los Angeles. I talked to them a lot, and they
were very enthusiastic about the project. They really wanted to help. They
told me their own personal experiences, and I could then extrapolate from
that what they were doing on a day-to-day basis both in Krakow and in the
camps and kind of what everybody was doing. They were the most impor-
tant source of research. Then we made a trip to Poland, and that was it.
gervasi: But at a certain point, Steven Spielberg began working with
you. At the time, as you were working with him on the script, did you have
any sense of what was going on? I mean, what was your perception of that
moment, how did it evolve, and ultimately what was the experience being
in Poland?
zaillian: I think everybody’s opinion of it was that this was Spielberg’s
pet project, but it was never thought of as a commercial project, so there
was not a lot of pressure on us to deliver a commercial project. That turned
out to be really important. The only thing I wanted was to do it well enough
that I didn’t look bad. That was my goal. My goal didn’t extend beyond the
script. I didn’t really think in terms of the film.
gervasi: But the final film is remarkably dutiful to your script. Give
or take a couple of things, the reality is that even some of the cuts are in
the script. Steven was incredibly faithful to what you wrote, and there’s

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 a famous story that at a certain point before he was going to shoot, he
sent the script to a couple of esteemed writer friends, including Tom Stop-
pard. Steven Spielberg sent Schindler’s List to him, and Tom Stoppard said,
“Don’t change a single word.” I think it was something you were grateful to
Stoppard for.
zaillian: Forever.

I wrote it down because this event in Schindler’s life was something he

talked about quite a bit. It was kind of a turning point in his life that he
recognized. When asked to describe her, he said she was a little girl in a
red coat. So that’s how we referred to her and how I referred to her in the
script. She didn’t have a name. She was just the girl in the red coat.
When Spielberg decided to shoot the film in black and white, I said
immediately, “But what about the girl in the red coat? Now what? Do we
have to give her a name? How is she going to be distinguished?” He made
the decision to tint the film. At the time I thought it might be too much.
It might take you out of the film. But it didn’t. He recognized it as an im-
portant enough image that you can do that to it. It was always there, but
it became highlighted by his decision to shoot the film in black and white.
★ steven zaillian (Gangs of New York, Schindler’s List)

Watching Your Script Brought to Life

gervasi: What was that experience like? It was such an incredibly horrific
event. It must have been a strange sensation to see it brought to life. In one
sense, I’m sure it was exhilarating, because there it is coming to life in this
incredible story. In another sense, it must have been so real and horrific.
zaillian: I wasn’t there very much. I went to Poland when I was doing
research. I was there about a week. We looked around for other places to
shoot. I was only there for the first ten days of shooting. The reason was, I
was gearing up to do Searching for Bobby Fischer, so I had to get back to start
on that. Looking back on it, I’m really happy I did that, because when I saw
the film, I was seeing it without knowing what it was going to look like. It
was a complete surprise to me. I don’t think I saw any dailies during the ten
days either.
It’s a nice experience, and I actually prefer that these days. I very seldom
hang out on sets. I did early on, with John and with Penny on Awakenings.

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 I was there a lot. After that, I just decided my job is really done when I turn
in the script. If a director’s going to be faithful to it, or whatever they’re
going to do with it, they’re going to do that whether I’m there or not.
I think what Spielberg did was amazing. He brought a kind of visual
approach to it that was stunning. You say it’s remarkably faithful to the
script. It is, but every scene has to be interpreted visually, and he did that
with each scene in a really exciting way. The one I remember quite clearly in
my original draft is the liquidation of the ghetto, which comes at the end of
the first act. I think it was about two pages. He wanted to make it a really
big sequence, and it ended up being around fifteen pages. On screen it was
about twenty minutes. That gives you an idea of how a good collaboration
can work. A good director really brings something to the table you never
would have thought of.

Searching for Bobby Fischer and Working with Sydney Pollack

gervasi: Bobby Fischer was a huge experience for you and an incredibly
important one. How did that come about, and was the idea of directing
something that had been with you for a long time?
zaillian: It hadn’t been with me. Like I said, I didn’t call myself a writer
for five scripts. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. I would say, “I
write, but I’m not a writer. That’s what I do for a living.” I think most people
think writers are writing in order to become directors, and many of them
are. It’s like a stepping stone to directing. The idea that directing is the
epitome of what we can do in this business, I never really felt that way. I
really enjoyed writing and the life of a writer. I felt that’s what I was good
at. I didn’t aspire to be a director.
However, I had written a script, and it didn’t go well with the director. It
was the first time I was involved in something where I sort of locked horns
with the director and had to walk away from it. At that point I thought that
maybe to protect my work I was going to have to direct something. So it
was an example of a bad experience leading to a good one.
I talked to Scott Rudin, who by this time was starting to produce mov-
ies. He sent me everything he had that he was interested in, including
books, articles, and things like that. One of them was Searching for Bobby
Fischer, which was this little book with this photograph of this kid on it
staring intently at the chessboard. He was about eight years old—Josh

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 Waitzkin, the chess player—when the book was written. One of my sons
was the same age, so I really related to it. In terms of the story, I didn’t play
chess with my son, but the family story was one I could relate to.
To speak about Sydney Pollack for a moment, he was a great man, a
great director, and just a lovely guy to hang out with. I first worked with
him because he was the executive producer on Searching for Bobby Fischer.
The reason he was the executive producer on the film was that I didn’t have
final cut, but he did even as a producer. Scott didn’t have it either. So Syd-
ney came on to protect me, basically. He didn’t have a lot to do with the
film in terms of the actual day-to-day, but he graciously . . . It was really a
favor to us that he came on that film. He did read the script and had one
comment, which was a really good one. It was on one line, which I took.
I worked with him two other times. I worked with him as an actor on A
Civil Action, and again he did that as a favor. He’s a brilliant actor. And then
I worked with him writing on The Interpreter, and that was very intense
because they were about to shoot, and I came on about two weeks before
they began shooting. I went to New York and worked with him there. There
was a lot of talking. It was the only time I worked on a script where I gave
pages. I would literally email a page, and he would email it back and say,
“What about this?” and it would go back and forth. I’ve never done that
before, but with Sydney it worked out pretty good. It was fun too.
The line in Searching for Bobby Fischer that Sydney helped me with is in a
scene where Joe Mantegna is talking to Ben Kingsley, really when they first
talk to each other in the Backgammon Club, where this kind of smoky tour-
nament is going on, kind of in the beginning of the film. Ben says . . . I think
the line is something like, “I’ll tell you what I lost when Bobby Fischer dis-
appeared,” or something like that. I can’t remember exactly what the line
is. I actually had an answer for what that was, but Sydney said I shouldn’t
tell the answer but just pose the question. I thought that was really smart.
Again, if you have to come right out and say it, you’ve gone too far. Posing
the question was valid, but giving the answer to the audience wasn’t.
gervasi: Searching for Bobby Fischer also began a great collaboration
with Connie Hall, the incredible cameraman. What was that like, directing
your first film and working with Connie? Was that an experience?
zaillian: It was my first film, so I was very nervous, and I wasn’t sure
what a director was supposed to do, and I felt I should be really prepared.
I should know everything before I show up, or maybe somebody will ask

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 me a question, and I won’t know the answer. I basically storyboarded, on
my script, every shot for the movie. Connie Hall doesn’t work that way.
He’ll do it, but he doesn’t like it. So he basically retrained me to be more
spontaneous.
We would have a rehearsal in the morning, and we would sit and watch
it, and then we would discuss together how to shoot it. He said he couldn’t
even think of how to shoot it until he saw it, and the truth is he didn’t even
read the script. He read it once, and it was, “Okay.” It was a job.
It took about three weeks, and I got totally into his way of working. It’s
the way I work now. In fact, on All the King’s Men I was working with an-
other cinematographer because Connie has passed away. Pawel [Edelman]
doesn’t come from that school. He comes from the school of, “You need to
know what you’re doing when you get there,” so I had to try to retrain him.
It was fun.
gervasi: The film, as everyone knows, came out incredibly well. Short-
ly after finishing it you were nominated for the Academy Award for your
screenplay Schindler’s List and won. I remember asking you what happened
immediately after winning the Academy Award, and you said, “The next
morning I went to the office to work.” I think that’s important to talk
about, because being a writer in Hollywood, it’s very possible that when
success comes, particularly big success, one can be very easily distracted
and lose sight of things.
zaillian: I think it was really the same reaction I described before that
having written a script didn’t make me a writer. I felt I had to do it more
than once in order to become a writer, and I had the same reaction winning
an Oscar. It doesn’t mean I’m going to win Oscars all the time, so I felt I had
to go back to work. I have seen people lose sight of what they’re doing and
lose their momentum in terms of their work. I have a pretty strict work
ethic.
One thing the Oscar did do—one negative thing it did—was it made
me feel that whatever the . . . It’s like if you’re a musician and you have a
successful album, you feel like the next one . . . You know, you’ve got to live
up to it. So I turned down a lot of jobs thinking, “Oh, this isn’t as good as
Schindler’s List.” Looking back on it, I realize that I let certain things go that
I shouldn’t have, and that that should never be the reason to do something.
Schindler’s, like I mentioned, was a little pet project of Spielberg’s. It wasn’t
meant to be a big film. So you can’t plan on these things.

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 gervasi: Going to the office and sticking to your routine is really im-
portant. I’ll briefly share a story. I was at film school at UCLA, and there
was a kid in our class who sold a script for a million dollars. He got swept
up in the whole thing, and he’s now a maître d’ in a New York steakhouse.
I ran into him recently, and the whole experience of becoming a successful
screenwriter while at film school and selling a script for a lot of money,
it completely threw him off balance. Keeping your head is a huge part of
maintaining a career.
zaillian: It can go away just as quickly as it happened. That can happen
to any artist, and you’re not going to know it until it’s already happened.
You don’t see it coming. By the time you find out, it’s already happened.
Your friend is already working in the steakhouse.

The Writer/Director Relationship

gervasi: As a writer, when you’re working with these types of people—

Spielberg, Scorsese, Ridley Scott—do you feel they’re bringing out the best
in you? Do they challenge you? What’s the experience like for you?
zaillian: A lot of times, the decision I make to work on a film has to do
with who else is involved in it. The most important figure is going to be the
director. If I have to choose between two things to do and I like the stories
equally, the director’s going to be the deciding factor. It’s crucial.
The thing good directors have in common is that they don’t think of
themselves as writers, and they actually respect writers. They know how
important writers are to them. I feel the same way about them as directors.
That kind of mutual appreciation society is very beneficial to a good film. I
think that where you get into trouble is where one is not respectful of the
other. Mutual respect is crucial, and it comes out of experience from both
sides. I think a lot of writers hear horror stories about directors ruining
their scripts or taking them away. I’ve never had that experience with the
good ones.

American Gangster and Getting Stuck

gervasi: American Gangster was a painfully long process for you. I think it
would be helpful for people to hear, what happens when you get stuck as
a writer? How do you get through it when you’re sitting there for months,

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 racking your brain going, “How do I make this work?” If Steve Zaillian’s
stuck, it makes it easier for everyone else.
zaillian: I was stuck on the outline. I just couldn’t see the whole movie,
and I felt like . . . As I said before, I can’t start until I can see the end, and
I couldn’t see the end. I went into the office every day for six, seven, eight
months and didn’t write anything. That had never happened. What kept
me going was, I couldn’t admit that I couldn’t get through it. I felt if I ad-
mitted that I couldn’t get through it, it would allow me to say that on the
next one too. It’s like being a compulsive gambler or a drug addict or some-
thing. If you do it once, the second time is going to be easier.
By the same token, it was terrifying. I would say things to myself like,
“Someday this is going to make a good story. Someday I’m going to look
back on this, and it won’t be so bad.” At the time, it was torture. All I could
think of doing was just to keep going back into the room. Finally I had
enough confidence to start writing, and then it went very well.
gervasi: Are there things you know now that you would love to be able
to say to your younger self?
zaillian: In a funny way, it’s the opposite. For me, writing is not some-
thing that gets easier. For me, writing is actually getting harder, and so I
wish my younger self could tell me something to make me work faster. I
think there’s something to . . . The whole “stay hungry” philosophy is im-
portant. Once you get comfortable, it’s really hard to keep working.
gervasi: You said to me once that you didn’t want to know too much.
You don’t want to hear people talk about the themes in your work and the
stuff that you’ve done because if you know too much, you can become con-
scious, and it’s the unconsciousness that makes you free to write what you
want. Knowing the rules of screenwriting is a mistake sometimes.
zaillian: I don’t know what the rules of screenwriting are, but if I knew
them, maybe I could work faster. It’s interesting that there is a real good
side to not having done as much as I have. You have a kind of enthusiasm
for it that you can’t hang on to forever. It’s not that I don’t like what I’m
doing, but I’m so familiar with the job that I’m not surprised as often as I
used to be when something good happens.

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 Peter Hedges on
Collaborating

If you want it to be exactly the way you want it to be, write a novel. No one
may read it, but you’ll have it. The beauty of making films is that this is a
business of other people. You surround yourself with people who know
more than you who say, “By the way, that idea you have that you think is
brilliant, no one gets it,” and pretty soon everyone around you is telling
you that, and you have an actor like Johnny Depp say, “I don’t need to say
this line,” and you realize he’s right. People, life, and the process teach you.
You have to write it so that somebody will give you the money so you
can make it, unless you have a lot of money. Then there’s the version for the
people you’re making it with, with the belief that those people are going
to align in a common goal to tell a singular story in a way that an audience
would enjoy. Then you’ll have the great experience of it being shown in
front of people, and you start to notice ten minutes in, everybody is shift-
ing in their seats because you lost them. Then you try to figure out why.
Then you hope that it’s fixable.

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 Lawrence Kasdan on Writing
with a Partner

The challenge is finding the right person to sit there with and exchange
ideas with that makes you happy to be in the room. It’s less hard to do the
work. You have an appointment rather than an indistinct time when you
think you’re going to do it. Someone’s watching you and it helps in every
way—if you like the person and you’re not constantly feeling at odds with
what they want to do.
I’m very jealous of the Coen brothers, who for all these years have had
each other. They’ve done very unconventional stuff, which I admire, and I
think they’re more unconventional because they’ve had each other to say,
“Let’s just do it. What the hell?” They might not do that alone. That takes
unbelievable courage.
I’ve had collaborators all through my career, and whenever I have, it’s
been fun, and I’ve always had those writers come on the set every day. I
love them being around through the whole process. I would always prefer
to have a collaborator. If I could always do that, I would, but I can’t. I can’t
always find that person.

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 Randall Wallace on Working
with Other Writers

In Secretariat, I did not write the original screenplay. I did work on the
script, but a great writer named Mike Rich wrote the original. It was a dif-
ferent experience for me to be starting out with . . . There were some scenes
that I just completely wrote from the beginning, but still they were written
in the context of someone else’s script. They were linked to other scenes. I
think that writing a script is like raising a child. There’s a way in which you
feel absolutely responsible for every tiny thing, and there are other ways
in which you have nothing to do with who this person is. They have their
own lives.
Mike wrote me a beautiful e-mail when he saw the movie, and I wrote
him back and said, “You know, Mike, I want you to know, when you’re di-
recting, every decision seems to fall so squarely on the shoulders of the
director, that it’s easy for the director to start feeling that he or she is the
author of every good thought in the movie, and I have prayed that that not
be the case with me. And I never have, either in the choice to write a scene
or to acknowledge that I’ve done that, taken away in any sense from the
amazing contribution you made.” He wrote me back and said, “I will value
this note from you as much as I value the words you wrote.” I felt that
was just an extraordinary thing. If I was ever going to think about doing
anything else that somebody else had written, I’d sure look for a Mike Rich
screenplay to do that.
John Lee Hancock had done The Rookie from a Mike Rich script, and
John told me that when he first met Mike, he said, “The good news is, you
got a director. The bad news is, you got a director who is a writer.” But the
great thing about a great writer-director like John is that he recognizes and

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 respects the original writer. The big question the writer-director has—or
the big advantage—is to think twice before changing the scene from what
somebody else has written. I think a writer-director knows better than a
director who doesn’t write.
I find that in order to write, I have to learn all of the perils and just let it
be. It’s like playing with a child. You let them do what they’re going to do.
You watch them. You leave them alone. They’re never out of your heart. So
writing this scene and turning it over to another director is . . . In Brave-
heart, I had written that totally about Mel Gibson. I had actually picked
him as the person I wanted. But I felt like my father felt on my sister’s
wedding day when he turned to me and said, “She’s got another shoulder
to cry on now.” It was an insightful and beautiful moment for me, realizing
how much my father loved my sister and that he was turning her over to
another man to care for her. That’s the way I feel about any script someone
else is going to direct. When I was writing it, I didn’t feel in total control. I
felt I had more responsibility to watch what was happening.
When I was working on a script someone else had written, I thought—
and I had a great conversation with Mike Rich about this—it’s so easy to
start thinking that you made it up. When you’re directing, every word the
actors say, you have to believe it’s yours. I’ve seen it happen many times
when directors start to think they actually did write the thing even though
the scene is verbatim what the other guy wrote. There’s a process of owner-
ship. When it’s at its best, it’s a union between the script and the direction.
For me, the ultimate thing about being a writer is to write words that
are so economical and so focused that they are not changeable. Braveheart
wasn’t exactly verbatim, but it almost was. I know Mel felt he reinvented
or had seen within himself, so there’s that strange kind of . . . almost like a
mother and a father. Both of them look at the child and believe they are to-
tally manifested in that child, and the truth is that they needed each other
to do it.

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 8 Go Forth

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 I had one really good piece of advice, which is, don’t give yourself X num-
ber of years in which to make it. There is no timeline. Lots of people I know
said, “I will give it three years, and if it hasn’t worked out by then, I’ll go
back to doing whatever I was doing before.”
But this friend, the one with the good advice, said to me, “Just be
there. No one can kick you out. Just be there. Stand there long enough,
and your turn will come around.” And it did. It worked out. ★ caroline
thompson

I know I get better at rejection. It gets easier somehow. I get more prac-
ticed at it. I suffered from that when I first started writing. I was working for
Robert Altman, who loved everything I wrote. I thought I must be a genius.
Then I had to remember that Altman is one of those directors . . . You can
give him a grocery list, and he’ll make a movie out of it. Everything to Alt-
man is an outline and a blueprint. Then I got into the real world of movie
making. ★ anne r app

This seems so simple, but you have to keep writing. That means keep writ-
ing, keep writing, and keep writing. You may get impatient with how things
are going, and you’d be amazed how that filters out most people, because
most people don’t write even a second script. If you’re serious about it,
you will somehow be able to keep writing these screenplays when there is
very little validation coming from the world. If you can do that, then there’s
hope. ★ lawrence kasdan

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