This process ends up creating connections and story lines that might not have been discovered otherwise. Ideas for scenes go on a card and initially aren’t required to work in concert with other scenes. My answer is to use notecards that I spread out on the floor. Trying to sit down and begin by listing the scenes in order seems overwhelming.
When working out a story, I try to stay away from traditional outlines. Stories, even ones with jumbled timelines and time periods, are linear. What’s the trick to writing a gripping story? Find a way to get around linear thinking. I, of course, revisited “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but a professor in school introduced me to an older Robert Duvall film called “Tomorrow.” The simplicity of Foote’s storytelling combined with the power wrought from it is incredibly unique and something I aspire to. I discovered “Tender Mercies” in college, and it sent me down the Horton Foote path. What screenplay inspired you to become a screenwriter? I’d answer this by talking about a writer, Horton Foote. Notable writing credits: “Mud” (2013) “Take Shelter” (2011) My gold standard is “Truly Madly Deeply” - but all I can really glean from that is that it probably doesn’t hurt if one of the lovers is a ghost. How about a great love story? Oh, gosh, I’ve been trying to figure that out myself recently, and it’s brutally difficult. Then read it and find the parts where the characters are saying exactly what you want/need them to say for the sake of narrative clarity (e.g., “I’ve secretly loved you all along, but I’ve been too afraid to tell you”). What’s the trick to writing believable dialogue? Write out the scene the way you hear it in your head. Every little piece of information in that thing has a payoff down the line, and someone had to have mapped that out.
I can say that I do recall having the epiphany in the summer of ’85 that much of what I loved so dearly in “Back to the Future” must have been born on the page.
What movie inspired you to become a screenwriter? My obsession with movies goes back at least as far as my conscious memory - so I’m at a loss to identify one particular movie here. Notable writing credits: “Computer Chess” (2013) “Funny Ha Ha” (2002) “Hannah Takes the Stairs” (2007) Spike Jonze wrote a classic love story, a tale of boy meets operating system. Greta Gerwig (along with the director Noah Baumbach) wrote lines, then gave them voice, as the title character in “Frances Ha.” Andrew Bujalski somehow made a computer chess tournament exciting. Sarah Polley brought her storytelling powers to bear on a quasi documentary, “Stories We Tell,” while Nicole Holofcener, with “Enough Said,” continued her streak as the patron saint of literate neurotics (both on-screen and off). Chandor, a screenplay that includes fewer lines of dialogue than there are sentences in this introduction. At the other end of the loquaciousness spectrum, there’s “All Is Lost,” written by J. “Before Midnight,” written by its stars (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) and its director (Richard Linklater), is basically the third installment in a captivating conversation that has been going on for 18 years. Screenwriters are still screenwriters, i.e., the people who write the scripts that the directors and actors will eventually rewrite, mangle or ignore.īut, oh, what scripts: 2013 was an excellent year for the written word as spoken on-screen.
TV writers are now routinely lauded as auteurs. With their riches and big-screen credits, people who wrote for the movies used to be able to at least lord over lowly TV writers, but even that dynamic has reversed in recent years. So in the starry constellation of literary pursuits, screenwriters have always existed, reputationally if not financially, somewhere due south of novelists and maybe southeast of poets and playwrights.
Mankiewicz, in an often-cited telegram sent from Hollywood to his fellow writer Ben Hecht, promised: “Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots. It probably doesn’t help that one of the most famous quotes about the trade boils down to money, competition and idiots.