Beyond the Frame

Many filmmakers shelter and hold on to their screenplays as if they were imbued with a wholly unique life-force.  This only suffocates them.  Pitch you stories.  Share your unmade films.  Keep talking and don’t worry about someone stealing it.  There will be more.  

Do not covet your ideas.

~ü

(Source: jaymug)

Paul Schrader’s heavily marked-up outline for “Raging Bull” for which he shared writing credit with Mardik Martin.

“It’s part of the oral tradition,” Mr. Schrader said of his process. “Rather than writing my way through an outline, I tell my way through, and then each time I tell it, I re-outline it.”

As the “Raging Bull” outline shows, Mr. Schrader had the thrust of each scene, as well as key lines of dialogue (“If you win, you win. If you lose, you still win.”) already worked out before he sat down to write. (Alas, we couldn’t tell from this image how much of Jake La Motta’s helpful description of how to cook a steak had been composed at this stage.)

Mr. Schrader also gave an estimated page length for each scene as well as a final count and a running tally of total pages, which he said was crucial for pacing.

“It’s very important to calibrate these events and when they’re happening,” he said. “Somebody says, ‘I don’t know why this scene doesn’t work,’ and you say to them: ‘It’s very simple. It should have happened 10 pages earlier. Then it would have worked.’”

The final shooting script for “Raging Bull” was “more or less” what was submitted, Mr. Schrader said, though Mr. De Niro and the director Martin Scorsese made further changes during filming. “The only way you could get a final draft of that screenplay,” Mr. Schrader said, “would be to transcribe it from the screen. As opposed to ‘Taxi Driver,’ which is actually quite close to the script.”

(Source: lettersofnote.com)

Capture the Mundane as Fascinating

When making a film, a true film, an honest film, it is important to consider the mundane details.  How can you make the mundane, the things that make your character who they are day in and day out, the most interesting?

Designer Bob Gill shares the filmmaker’s problem.  He often designed interesting logos for uninteresting subjects:

Don’t look for inspiration in design books. Don’t sit at your computer, waiting for lightening to strike. 

If the job is for a dry cleaner, go to a dry cleaner. And stay there until you have something that you honestly think is interesting to say about dry cleaning. I don’t know exactly how to do this. However, I do know that the more you research the subject, the more likely you are to discover something really interesting, or better yet, something original, something that no one has ever noticed before. 

By the way, this is exactly why people say film what you know.

~ü

[Image: Bob Gill] 

One of the most prolific authors of our time, Joyce Carol Oates has written upwards of 100 novels, dramas, novellas, children’s books, poetry collections, and more, and yet she never starts with a story in mind. Instead, she begins with her characters and their setting, which she conceptualizes as a character as well. Only after a writer gets to know her characters can they tell her what will happen next. How do you get to know those characters? Oates gives her students an assignment we recommend you try out as well: Start, simply, with a conversation between two people. Within the first five minutes, you may not know much about them, but after two hours, their personalities will begin to take form.

As a bonus, here’s one more rule of thumb she imparted to a group of students at a Stanford University colloquium: “The first sentence cannot be written until the last sentence has.”

~ Writing Advice From History’s Fastest, Most Prolific Authors in the Atlantic

My new article from Script to Screen is up The Script Lab!  Examining Bob Rafelson’s direction on Five Easy Pieces.

~ü