Insights 2 - 2009/2010

150 mm

11 mm

150 mm

Script & pitch

Insights // 2

development course for scriptwriters and story editors from all over the world.

www.scriptpitchworkshops.com

210 mm

Enjoy!

Insights // 2

One of our aims is to share our passion for stories and the craft of writing, developing and produ足 cing them. One way to share this is through this book: a collection of lessons, essays, conversati足 ons and insights from both tutors, alumni and guests.

Script & pitch

Script&Pitch Workshops is an advanced script

SCRIPT & PITCH INSIGHTS //2

Script&Pitch Insights //2 2009/2010 Edited by Valeria Richter, Denmark Published by Script&Pitch Workshops, Italy, Savina Neirotti Cover design by Lene Nørgaard, Propel Design, Denmark Book set in Klavika by Fabrizio Demichelis, Italy All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the authors and/or Script&Pitch Workshops; except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or as a reference. © The lectures remain copyright of their individual authors. © The e-mail conversation remains copyright of its authors and Script&Pitch Workshops.

Printed and bound in Italy by Moglia s.r.l. - Via Sansovino 243/65/E - Torino www.scriptpitchworkshops.com

Index

Foreword

7

About Script&Pitch Workshops

9

Biographies

11

Inspirational Lectures / by Tutors

15

A Question of the Audience / by Franz Rodenkirchen

17

Idea, Concept, Soggetto / by Gino Ventriglia

27

On the Imperative for Action in Screenwriting: An Attempt at Moving from Aristotle to Sartre / by Antoine Le Bos

37

Now You See It, Now You Don’t / by Franz Rodenkirchen

45

Paris-Texas - an Ideal Development Scheme?

The Importance of Finding a Driving Force… / by Antoine Le Bos

59

An Email Conversation on Adaptation

67

About Script Editing / by Tutors and Alumni

87

Life-Like: The Schizophrenia of the Limitless Possibilities /

by Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten

89

Working with a Script Editor - from Killers to Fairy Godmothers /

by Jenni Toivoniemi

97

Impostors? / by Antoine Bataille

109

How Do You Know if the Customer is Happy? / by Atso Pärnänen

117

Answering Questions on Script Editing - from 3 Script&Pitch Alumni /

by Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten

123

Contributions / by Guests

133

What do Scripts Sound Like? / by Michel Schöpping

135

The Dawn of the Independent Producer? / by Thomas Mai

143

Contact Information

149

A Question of the Audience

Foreword Script&Pitch is moving into its fifth cycle and for every year something or someone new is added to our programme. We simply can’t resist the joy of being in constant development and flow. Since the story editor trainees have gotten their own curriculum, we’d like to reflect on this in the section focusing on story editing, and are happy to introduce three essays by our Alumni here.

Thanks to our new and close collaboration with the TorinoFilmLab we have invited two Guests to contribute to the book, one with a special passion for integrating sound in the script and one with many years of experience in connecting films with audiences through sales and distribution. It has always been a goal for Script&Pitch to link the different stages and people involved in a script’s journey towards its audience. We aim to be more than a course for professional scriptwriters and story editors by creating a space where everyone who makes this possible also enjoys to be, a place where stories - the ones we write and the ones we live - are shared by keeping a mutually giving and open spirit, all the way from the intimate group work and workshops, to our direct encounters with the producing and financing worlds at our yearly pitch event and the Alumni-meetings.

We wish to extend a thank you to all our Tutors and Authors for the generous sharing of their experience, insights and views on film and the craft of writing and developing them; also a thank you to Olga and Fabrizio for their work on the book.

A final big thank you to all who believe in our unique spirit of development, first of all our partners, and MEDIA. This book is especially for the participants; we hope it captures some of the Script&Pitch-atmosphere by bringing us all together, also in writing.

We look forward to more of your contributions in the future. Enjoy!

Savina Neirotti Director & Founder of Script&Pitch Valeria Richter Editor 7

A Question of the Audience

About Script&Pitch Workshops Focus Script&Pitch Workshops is an advanced scriptwriting and development course for European writers and story editors that unfolds over the course of 11 months. Starting from 2010 it will also be possible for non-European citizens to apply to Script&Pitch Workshops International.

20 participants are selected from all over the world (15 scriptwriters and 5 story editors) to take part in an integrated scriptwriting process, offering training through the development and pitching of projects: from exploring the ideas to structuring the material through a first and second draft, up to a final pitch-event at the Torino Film Festival with 100 invited producers, sales agents and partners from around the world. The training and script development process therefore culminates with a focus on networking, which enables participants to find potential international production and co-production opportunities.

In 2009 Script&Pitch entered a close collaboration with TorinoFilmLab, an international training, development and production fund that offers projects by 1st or 2nd time directors a chance to win a Development Award and thereby gain access to the possibility of winning a Production Award.

By participating in Script&Pitch participants not only gain this extra possibility if their project is eligible, but are also encouraged to network with TorinoFilmLab participants at the workshops in March and November, broadening the scope of our active network. In order to be eligible for the TorinoFilmLab Development Award writer-directors/directors must work on their 1st or 2nd feature film; this limitation is not applicable for writers.

Aim Our primary aim is to advance and sharpen writers’ and story editors’ professional skills. The passion and knowledge of our tutors is therefore an important energy. Another aim is to create a vibrant network and we therefore connect Script&Pitch with festivals and industry-events, seek9

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ing producers and partners who wish to invest their time in writers and the development process, not only seeking single projects. Our vision is to develop people with projects, rather than projects with people attached, always supporting the independent talent.

Insights Our tutors, Antoine Le Bos, Franz Rodenkirchen, Gino Ventriglia, Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten and Anita Voorham are experienced and well connected professionals, both in their countries and on an international level. We work from the assumption that every story needs its own individual approach, and that form is determined by content. Inspirational lessons from the course are shared through a periodic publication: Script&Pitch Insights, supporting our passion and goal to shed light and dignity on the scriptwriting and story editing professions.

Workshops & Alumni meeting Participants work in groups of three writers and a story editor trainee, with a tutor heading the process. This intensive work is combined with lectures on for example dramaturgy and script - and film analysis. Master classes and one-to-one meetings with industry professionals are also an integral part of the course. Three weeklong workshops and two on-line sessions give the project development a constructive flow. Story editors have their own coach and group-sessions that focus on their role in the development.

Who can apply?

This is a post-graduate course open to professional scriptwriters and story editors, film school graduates, writer-directors and writer-producers from all over the world. For the story editor training we encourage development executives and other professionals working in development or in script decision-making positions to apply. Fiction writers and playwrights can also participate, for example with an adaptation project. Many of our participants already have a production company attached to their project and look for script - and development training to strengthen the universality and personal voice of the project, yet it is no requirement to have a producer attached.

Read more on our website: www.scriptpitchworkshops.com 10

A Question of the Audience

Biographies

Tutors // Antoine Le Bos Antoine Le Bos is a French Screenwriter and Script Consultant, with more than 25 feature scripts delivered under contract as a writer and more than 100 feature projects as a consultant. He won the Gan Foundation Prize in 2005, and works with among others the Afghani director and Prix Goncourt winner Atiq Rahimi. He is also Artistic Director of Le Groupe Ouest, a European Centre for film creation in Britanny, France.Â

Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten is a Swedish Screenwriter and Script Consultant. She works mainly as a consultant for feature film projects from around the world and Scandinavia. She is also head of a small art film production company (Automat/MotherofSons M.O.S.) Her background is in production, publishing, art and music video projects, as well as TV-drama, where she did script editing, commissioning, development and writing.

Franz Rodenkirchen Franz Rodenkirchen (*1963) is an international Story Editor and Tutor. Franz has been working as a story editor on mostly international film projects for over 10 years, predominantly with writer-directors. He also gives workshops on alternative approaches to script editing and is a tutor in various development programs.

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Gino Ventriglia Gino Ventriglia is a Script Consultant at the Development Office of Istituto Luce. He has worked for both the major Italian networks (Rai, Mediaset) and cinema/TV production companies. He co-wrote 3 feature films and worked on the development of a large number of TV series and co-created a daily serial drama. He teaches drama theories at Rai-Script, Mediaset-RTI Courses, Scuola Holden and the National Film School in Rome (CSC).

Alumni // Antoine Bataille Antoine Bataille is a freelance Story Editor since 2007. He’s also writing a Master’s thesis on the affective charge of moving pictures at the Paris Denis Diderot University, where he works as a tutor. His main aim is to explore the limits and new possibilities of narrative forms in current storytelling.

Atso Pärnänen Atso Pärnänen likes to define himself “a beginner, in more ways than one”. He is a Writer, Director, Producer who took part in Script&Pitch in 2008 as a story editor trainee. Atso is currently story editing and developing various projects in/from different countries.

Jenni Toivoniemi Jenni Toivoniemi is a Finnish Scriptwriter and Journalist. She and her cowriter Kirsikka Saari are just finishing their first feature script Korso (developed at Script&Pitch) - a film produced by Blind Spot Pictures and directed

by Aleksi Salmenperä.

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A Question of the Audience

Guests // Thomas Mai Thomas Mai is an international, very experienced Film Sales Agent, who specializes in the new digital distribution possibilities. His new company, Festival Darlings, functions as a so-called traditional sales agent, yet with a strong focus on digital rights and sales/distribution strategies (like for example VoD, DoD & CoD).

Jeff Rush After serving as the Founding Chair of Temple University’s Department of Film and Media Arts and then the Senior Associate Dean for the School of Communications and Theatre, Jeff Rush has returned to the faculty as Associate Professor to teach and work on his own projects. He is currently writing on contemporary screenwriting, and developing projects in interactive media. He is the co-author of Alternative Scriptwriting.

Michel SchĂśpping Michel started his career as a Film Music Composer. He studied musicology and soon got involved in sound design and film mixing. During the last 20 years he designed, edited and mixed dozens of documentaries, art films and features; he has also produced several CD recordings and directed two music-documentaries. Currently he is still working as a sound designer, dubbing mixer, composer, music-supervisor, film-, music- and post-production consultant; and he is a teacher at the Dutch Film Academy.

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INSPIRATIONAL LECTURES

by Tutors

A Question of the Audience

A Question of the Audience

by Franz Rodenkirchen “I never think of the spectator” Robert Bresson

Telling a story means to tell it to someone. Be it a single person or a great mass of people - one might safely surmise that, whoever attempts to tell a story, also wants this story to be heard. Without a listener, without an audience, without an addressee, the act of narration appears to be a form of masturbation. But even when telling a story only to oneself, we create a narrating and a listening self.

So it can be asked whether a story without an audience exists at all.

Film being a (mass-)medium, we find it self-evident that there shall be not a single addressee, but that we intend to address a potentially great mass of people: the often quoted audience or spectator. It is useful to not just accept this term as a given and then speculate upon it, but rather to take a closer look as to how it is being used. Eventually quite a few misunderstandings in developing scripts can be traced back to an unclear usage of the term audience, while all parties concerned would vouch that they’ve been speaking of exactly the same thing.

Many film authors reject the notion of audience, and this rejection often stems from the idea, that any mention of audience is referring to an implicit judgement of taste, as in “the audience doesn’t like this” or “this kind of character is not sympathetic for an audience” etc. Here, audience is used as a label to refer to an amorphous mass, whose assumed likes and dislikes the film author should (or maybe even wishes to) follow, in a kind of anticipatory obedience. More often than not, this is fuelled by a fear of rejection, but maybe also by a subtle uneasiness, if one isn’t yet completely sure what it is that is (being) written. Naturally, serving the assumed taste of an imaginary audience won’t help in the least to relinquish that uneasiness.

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Fearing the audience’s taste judgement is but only one aspect of a faulty reasoning with the audience. Unfortunately one often finds with commissioning editors and producers the conviction that one needs to tell the story to the audience in such a way that even the dimmest of spectators will be able to understand. Usually this is the kiss of death to any subject, as we should rather work from the assumption that the audience of a film is as clever as the people behind its making. If we think ourselves to be cleverer than our audience, we are already seriously disadvantaged. Overestimating one’s own cleverness, while underestimating an audience’s intelligence can never lead to a successful act of communication. For this reason, one should not make changes in a script that are motivated by assuming that the audience lacks intelligence, subtlety or whatever. Some writers are for example, masters of subtext, but that is by no means their privilege. We rather find subtext in a lot of everyday situations and it is usually well understood. If not, irony would become impossible.

So if any demand for changes in a script uses the audience as its argument, it is important that all parties concerned take the audience as seriously as they take themselves. It is therefore useful to first check if the creative team can agree on what story they are working on, how a script tells this story and what that is supposed to mean. If we find that we understand it, that is, if it is really the script that supplies all necessary means for understanding (and not our contextual knowledge acquired through the development process), there is really no reason to assume the audience won’t be able to understand it, too.

Besides this rather unknowable audience, which usually brings more harm than good when drawn into the writing process, there is also the idea of audience as the addressee of an act of communication.

If we can agree that film authors are really interested to convey a message, to tell something, to successfully communicate, or to at least make such an offer to their audience, then this addressee already exists during the script development. In this understanding, every reader of the script, including the script editor, is part of the audience.

There are some film authors who even reject this idea of communication with an audience. But the sometimes strong resistance, the excited discussions about the role of the audience in the creative act often have more to do with the context in which they occur, than with the thing itself.

When Robert Bresson states (see the quote I used in my opening) that he never cares about the audience, he is referring to audience as a means to 18

A Question of the Audience

have leverage when pressuring film authors to comply with an assumed taste and need. But in one of his Notes (on the Cinematographer) he writes: “Creating expectations, to fulfil them” [my translation]. This is clearly not possible without taking the audience into consideration.

So if we do take audience as the addressee of an act of narration, one can very well argue with the audience. Stories are consciously shaped towards what is to be told and understood when and how. Narrative tools aim to elicit an effect and this effect in turn is created within the audience.

We can therefore conclude that the audience is to be considered taboo whenever we talk about matters of taste or matters of moral judgement.

Whereas audience is always to be reckoned with where we consider the reception of a work of art, a successful act of communication and the more or less active participation in activating the story while reading or watching it.

Here, audience is by no means the passive recipient of a message, but rather shapes the narration through its ways of reception.

The study and analysis of narratives has long been focused on tracing the intentions of the author and interpreting the work. Around the 1960s, the role of the reader became a topic of scholarly interest and only in the wake of this development it turned out that readers do not just extricate meaning from texts in a kind of neutral way, but instead contribute to the shaping of the text through the act of reading. And it transpired that this contribution of the reader, her/his actualisation of meaning through the act of reading, is implicitly considered by authors already in the act of writing. So the active participation of the reader has been a key subject of academic research - in narratology, and especially in reader-response criticism - for decades.

One can safely state that this academic research has been largely ignored by the film industry and its respective findings have had almost no impact on the development of film scripts. One reason here is surely the considerable scepticism of most members of the film industry towards academic theory. But maybe it is also not immediately obvious if and how such theories can be put to practical use when working on scripts and yield concrete results. After all, a script is no literature, written to be read by an audience, but simply a very exact plan of something that eventually is to be watched - the “dream of a film”, Jean-Claude Carrière calls it, thereby also pointing out that film authors need to see the film in their mind’s eye, to be able to write it down. And write it such that also others can see it with sufficient clarity.

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Yet there are possibilities to make use of the theories on the role and function of the reader / spectator when working on scripts and there are definitely very practical benefits, for example when considering the different types of an audience’s emotional engagement with a narrative.

Another obstacle in really looking at the potential usefulness of academic research can be the impression that some things are almost too obvious to bother, too simple to make a point of. Eventually it might turn out that it can be a highly complex task to analyse a simple action into its various elements and then analyse their interrelations to again end up with something seemingly simple, which we do rather intuitively than consciously.

I for myself always find it worthwhile and useful to look at the mechanisms that are at work when we create a story, a narrative (one that is always meant to be transferred into a multi-layered sequence of images and sounds) that is then to be received by an audience.

In this largely subconscious effects-mechanism of exchange between sender, message and recipient we create the stories we tell ourselves.

So what exactly is it that is understood in this act of “understanding”?

Every time we tell a story, we find it natural to rely on our silent agreement with the audience regarding their co-operation. Therefore we do not have to tell it all, but can confine ourselves to that, which is necessary for understanding this particular story we are just telling.

I might start by telling that when I left the house this morning I met the woman who lives next door. If I start like that, there is no need to mention that before that I woke up, had a shower, got dressed, etc. If waking up and getting dressed has no specific meaning for the story I am about to tell, I will skip it, for I trust that my audience knows, thanks to its general knowledge of the world at large, that for example one has to wake up before one can leave the house in the morning.

I could be secretly in love with my neighbour, though and always set my alarm clock so that I manage to “accidentally” leave the house at the same time as her. Then it might make sense to start with my waking up – maybe I almost overslept, dressed in great hurry and eventually found myself downstairs at the door in my slippers, facing my beautiful neighbour’s derisive smile.

This extremely simple story contains a series of automatic assumptions that I have to trust my audience will make, in order for the story to be understood. Besides certain behavioural characteristics of secret infatuation, some simple things have to be automatically agreed on: if I use the same main door as my neighbour, I seem to live in an apartment block. I also rely on my audience to know that alarm clocks are used to wake up at 20

A Question of the Audience

a certain set time, and that a malfunction of this device can result in me oversleeping, etc.

Umberto Eco has published several influential works on the co-operation of the audience. As he says in his Norton Lectures: “Every narrative fiction (is) inevitably and unavoidably ‘fast’… just because, while it builds a world with its events and people, it cannot possibly say everything about its world. It makes suggestions and expects the reader to cooperate and fill a series of gaps. Every text is …a lazy machine, which asks the reader to do part of its work”. [my own translation from the German edition].

Accordingly I wouldn’t have to mention in my above example, that I was embarrassed to find myself standing before my beautiful neighbour in my slippers. Here we rely on a series of complex assumptions, for example that we want to make the best possible impression on somebody we are in love with, and would not like to feel ridiculed in their eyes. That my neighbour is beautiful can also be considered almost a given, for if we, the audience, can identify with the general situation, we can assume that we all would bestow the object of our infatuation with positive characteristics such as physical beauty. On top of that, through the context of the situation I describe it seems likely that as of yet I know my neighbour only by sight, so it is even more likely that I was predominantly taken by her appearance.

Of course I could also be a sleepwalker, then we’d have to take a different set of conditions into account - but again, I could assume that my audience will know several of them without me having to mention them explicitly.

As an author, one cannot only rely on the active co-operation of the reader (of a text) and the audience (of a film); rather I am quite convinced that this co-operation is key to an audience’s sustained interest (while we have to keep in mind that films inevitably have much more definiteness than a written text, because of their images). Indeed, one might say that too much information weakens the audience’s interest, because it only has limited or no opportunity to co-operate and actively engage with the story.

Where everything is spelled out, the audience has no choice but to passively accept.

The tortuous explanatory dramaturgy that is so often demanded in TVfiction creates a high redundancy of the narrative and has a paralysing effect on any audience that is willing to actively engage.

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If a text, as Umberto Eco writes, is that “lazy machine”, which relies on the co-operation of the audience, the selection of which elements to include (and exclude) gains vital importance.

For then all events, persons and objects actively mentioned in a text (script/film) are, by silent agreement, been put there deliberately. This is especially true in something as clearly defined as a screenplay, which, as we already mentioned, is not an end in itself, but a tool to achieve something else. So the film author must be aware that everything she/he writes in a screenplay or shows in a film will be seen by the audience (whether consciously or unconsciously) as the result of a choice by the author, whereby they can assume that every selected element is meant to be meaningful within the context of the work presented.

It can be meaningful with regards to a clearly defined goal of the character or a resolution of an action that is joined through chronological causality. Sometimes an element of the narrative describes an observation, a state of being or a situation, where the selected elements presented in this description combine to suggest a specific interpretation. It can also be part of an author’s strategy to create a specific atmosphere. Whatever the intention, we cannot but connect the elements, just because they are presented within the same framework (a screenplay, a film).

Aristotle already pointed out in his Poetics that the elements of an action/an event should be meaningful through the context of the selected elements. Seymour Chatman puts it like this: “...events in narratives are radically correlative, enchaining, entailing. Their sequence... is not simply linear but causative. The causation may be overt, that is, explicit, or covert, implicit.“ Chatman refers to the much-cited example by novelist E.M. Forster, who says: the sentence “the king died and then the queen died” is only a story, a mere chronicle. Whereas “the king died and then the queen died of grief” is a causally structured narrative, a plot. But, Chapman continues, even in the first example, we intuitively create a connection between the elements. The linear sequence of elements and the relation of the elements to each other (the death of the king/husband is followed by the death of the queen/wife) is already enough to suggest a causality, and intuitively we create that causal connection.

As we can clearly see in this example, every element acquires meaning (becomes meaningful) by its sheer presence in a particular context, where it must appear as having been chosen with a purpose. Even where this connection of elements seems difficult to forge, we, the audience, will attempt to create such a connection, because we have come to consider elements 22

A Question of the Audience

of the same narrative as being related to one another. If we changed Forsters sentence as follows: “The king died, and then a tree was felled”, we would most likely try to find a connection between the death of a king and the felling of a tree (as a ritualistic or symbolic action after the death of a leader; to use the wood for his tomb; even as a punishment of a magical sort, for maybe the king died falling from that very tree?).

Forster’s two sentences about the king and the queen differ primarily in their clarity when postulating a causal connection. They differ not in kind, but merely gradually, and the second sentence (“the king died and then the queen died of grief”) simply makes its intention explicit to create a causal connection, while in case of the first sentence, this intention remains rather implicit. But still it remains.

We can therefore assume that on a deeper level the audience will add the causal element, which is missing from the first of the two sentences.

When making such “additions” we draw upon our general knowledge of the world (our experience, our “empirical reality”, which allows us to accept that a person can really die of grief) - but most of all we are motivated to make this addition because we can be sure of the goal-oriented or intentional character of deliberately shaped narratives.

How much this practically automatic co-operation of the audience in the creation of meaning influences the writing process can be illustrated by an anecdote Michael Haneke related in an interview with German film magazine Revolver, about his work on the script of his first feature film The Seventh Continent. The film tells of a family that first destroys all their earthly belongings and then collectively commits suicide: “I wanted to tell the story in flashbacks and have constantly invented the most incredible things for the whole family, a biography for everybody, etc. And then there was always the question: where do I now position this particular flashback?

So, one character does this and that, takes, for example, a glass and pouf!

Association! Then another thing. The funny thing was that every flashback automatically became an explanation. I then carefully worked out the flashbacks, always using diversions and being indirect, so that in no way they could be seen as explanatory, always going against expectations; all that was terribly tedious because I was not getting anywhere”. [my own translation from German].

In the end Haneke scrapped all the flashbacks, because he could not escape the mechanism of implicit causality. Because the audience knows that the flashback is chosen and positioned by the author, it is already asked to connect them with the current actions or situations of the characters in a 23

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causal construction. What’s more, flashbacks break up the chronological sequence of the action and thereby attract additional attention, so it is virtually impossible to regard the positioning and content of a flashback as being not meaningful or a-causal.

Most interesting maybe is the fact that by choosing to stick to a strict chronological sequence, Haneke managed to be least explanatory.

It is quite telling that the script was rejected by the TV-station that was meant to produce it, because it refused to give a clear causal motivation.

Consequently Haneke was forced to make The Seventh Continent his first feature film for the cinema.

We need to assume the aforementioned, unavoidable forms of audience co-operation if we want to become able to tell a story. But the role of the audience in the writing process goes further than that.

Imagining an audience is also necessary when deciding which elements of a story are needed to adequately tell exactly that story, which we have in mind at a given moment. Each effect, be it emotional, intellectual, informational or mood-related can only be achieved if we assume an audience that can react adequately to the narrative signals we plan to give – adequate in relation to the narrator’s intention. The reactions of this assumed audience we anticipate according to general experience, which, apart from our own life-experience, also includes experience with other (film-)stories.

Peter Brooks observes, in the preface to his book Reading for the plot: “... most viable works of literature tell us something about how they are to be read, guide us toward the condition of their interpretation”.

What he is referring to here is the interrelation between a work of art and its addressee as a complex process of what we might call “planting” and “payoff”. Umberto Eco speaks of the “model reader”, and how every text creates its own ideal reader. There is, beyond a series of general unspoken agreements, usually called narrative conventions, a number of things a reader needs to know to fully actualise a specific work.

In that sense, Pier-Paolo Pasolini’s film The gospel according to St. Matthew may need a different spectator than Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, although in both cases, the spectator will benefit from knowing certain things about the man called Jesus Christ and Christian faith.

Films acknowledge the mechanism of what I deliberately call “planting and payoff” (we normally use this term specifically when speaking about information we need to “plant” with an audience, to enable them to anticipate or understand some element of the narrative they will encounter later in the work) and very often it is in the opening, the exposition, that 24

A Question of the Audience

the idea of the ideal reader is most clearly indicated. For every script, every film - whether consciously or intuitively - creates a kind of tutorial for its audience, simply by the chosen sequence of images, characters and events.

When watching a film, we are first collecting information, taking in visual sensations and postponing judgment until we have a fairly good idea how the film author wants us to read his work. From then on, the successful tutorial focuses our gaze and attention, so that the narrative can move on more economically (and sometimes also more elliptically).

Here we already move into another interesting aspect of the writing and reception process, to be dealt with on another occasion. For now, the conclusion shall reflect that the role of the audience in the writing process (as its collaborator and addressee) cannot be denied and we might benefit from not seeing this as a threat, but rather be respectful of the audience as our most powerful ally.

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Idea, Concept, Soggetto

Idea, Concept, Soggetto*

by Gino Ventriglia In film or TV production the initial stages are often beset by the terminological and conceptual vagueness of the authors: the idea, concept, ’soggetto’, step outline treatment, and scene breakdown are all stages in drafting prior to the screenplay itself. They form as it were a series of “advances”, the first stages of an exploration whose final goal is the accomplished work.

In the course of his or her experience, every author will arrive at their own personal methods to achieve the best possible conditions when writing the first draft, and it may happen that through personal interpretations the various stages and dividing lines blur or overlap. After all, in the process of extracting from reality and imaginings a certain something to mould into precise narrative and dramatic form, endowing that ‘something’ with significance, an object imbued with sense - aesthetic, poetic, ethical - it is not always possible to take a logical, linear approach. Often, indeed, room must be made for insights and perceptions that emerge somewhat murkily, but which, investigated and developed in depth, may prove decisive for the final outcome.

Thus it is, I believe, of great importance to understand which particular needs - not only practical, but also logical - the various stages answer to, to identify them and define their requisites and nature.

*In Italian, the term ‘soggetto’, plural ‘soggetti’, is used to indicate the written document used to present a project to a producer in a rather defined shape, usually between five and fifteen pages: in English, it may correspond to the ‘short treatment’, as different from the (long) treatment - in Italian ‘trattamento’ - used to explore extensively the narrative universe told by story, usually from thirty pages up, and supply a more detailed layout of the story in its progressive articulation.

In this writing, we’ll keep the Italian word ‘soggetto’ for reasons that will become clear further on.

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THE IDEA

On what constitutes the initial impetus, the first moment of creation, there is ample consensus. ‘(…) a film can be born of an insignificant detail, like the impression of a colour, the memory of a look or a tune that comes back to your aural memory, obsessively, achingly, for days on end, or, as you remind me, La Dolce Vita dawned on me as the apparition of a woman walking down via Veneto one bright morning wrapped in a dress that made her look like a vegetable (…)’

Thus Federico Fellini, in his Fare un film, answered the interviewer’s question: ‘when and from where does the idea of a film emerge?’ It is also true that he immediately added that he was not sure whether he had been quite sincere when he gave the answer years before, but that hardly matters. The fact is that not so much as a trace of the ‘vegetable woman’ remained in the screenplay or subsequently in the finished film as shown.

The cues and prompts, the original sources of inspiration may be of the oddest and least expected, or of the most commonplace and everyday. But when the time comes to choose, to decide to follow up some particular initial prompt, the process to arrive at the screenplay involves a series of transitions, of stages, each aiming at picking out in ever sharper definition the story to be told, the drama to be enacted. Of course, as development proceeds what seemed settled for once and all may be reappraised, pitched on ever different planes; new themes, tones and viewpoints may emerge, departing from the original choices. And so, even the original ‘idea’ itself may be scrapped, for the only function it serves is to set in motion the process, the creative movement of that particular dramatic invention - a manifestly strategic function, closely bound up with the subjectivity, sensibility and culture of the individual author.

THE CONCEPT Between the initial idea and the first written draft of the story, the soggetto, there is an intermediate stage - the concept - the peculiar nature of which is not always clearly recognised: often it is seen as expansion of the original idea, or as a miniaturised form of the soggetto. It is not hard 28

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to see why, for both approximations contain an element of truth, and the process is the same, but they remain compromise definitions that end up by confounding the precise nature of that particular stage.

The concept is in fact a combination of various ideas (which may or may not include the original idea) bound together in a particular pattern; if the idea is an atom, then the concept is a molecule. It is already an object of some complexity, made up of the essential, distinctive features of a narrative structure: its function is to circumscribe a dramatic territory and denote a dramatic potential.

A man shipwrecked on a desert island: the image evoked with the bare words might be something like a cartoon in the popular press. But, again, it might form the initial idea of a concept. If I decide to take it up and follow it through, I might eventually arrive at something like Robinson Crusoe, Cast Away, or Umberto Eco’s Island of the Day Before. All three stories were generated by the same idea, born of the very same suggestion, but become three very different stories that clearly share certain ‘narrative topoi’, but are engineered into different mechanisms responding to diverse aesthetic and poetic strategies.

In the case of Eco’s novel the concept identification process is interesting; in a television interview the author explained that what “thickened” the initial idea into concept was the association (arbitrary and creative, a flash of inspiration) with a clock that could show the different times in various parts of the world. Behind the idea of the clock lay a place an island, for example - traversed by that particular meridian, the antimeridian opposite the prime meridian of Greenwich - marking the international dateline. Crossing this imaginary line running between the two poles of the planet, today becomes tomorrow or, depending on which way you go, today is still yesterday. Another relevant point was that in the 17th century, with colonisation at its height, States were preoccupied with the serious puzzle of finding a way to calculate longitude, ready to pay out lavishly to get their hands on such a scientific discovery.

These three elements - the idea-image of the man on the island, the meridian where yesterday, today and tomorrow mingle, and the feverish search for a method to calculate terrestrial longitude - are three ideas or atoms that, structured together in a particular pattern, constitute a molecule quite different from the Robinson Crusoe or Cast Away molecules.

It is no longer the original cue, but the Island of the Day Before concept 29

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- not yet the story (albeit in its essential movements - the soggetto) recounted in the book, but its constitutive ingredients (or an essential part of them).

As yet nothing is known of the tone, theme, viewpoint, character of the protagonist, or ending - all of which are to be invented and given expression. But the territory has been established, its narrative potential delineated: in the 17th century a man searching obsessively for the secret of longitude is shipwrecked on an island where conventional time becomes uncertain …

The concept is that fundamental stage in the ideation of the film when it is no longer the mere idea - I want to make a film about a castaway, a vegetable-woman, freedom - or in other words something that cannot yet be seen as an ‘offspring of the mind’, and has yet to find its own dramatic/narrative formulation, as with the soggetto, or in other words manipulation (‘treatment’) of a combination of ideas to construct a story for the cinema or television.

The increasingly widespread practice, also in Europe, of pitching, i.e. summary, oral presentation of projects to producers and networks, leads some people to confuse concept and pitch or take them as the same thing, using the terms as synonyms or considering the concept as a more or less written sort of pitch. Once again, the two things are correlated, but they do not work on the same plane.

Formulating a pitch is simply a technique to present a film or TV project as attractively and efficaciously as can reasonably be done: thus, I can construct the pitch of a concept (i.e. a project still in the earliest stages), although of course we know very well that the more advanced the state of project formulation, the better the pitch will prove. In fact, the pitch generated from the concept can be enhanced with further elements that have already been developed in the soggetto, or the step outline, or even the first draft: it now becomes possible to indicate the level of comedy or drama at which the concept has been pitched, the theme that can be explored with that concept, and so forth. In this respect, the concept presented in the pitch may not be limited to exposition of the main ingredients in the ‘promise of a story’, but may also contain precise indications about the story itself.

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Idea, Concept, Soggetto

SERIES When applied to projects for TV-series - excluding the para-cinematographic formats such as TV-movies and miniseries in two instalments - the concept category shows properties that endow it with further enhancement and development.

In general, inventing the concept of a TV-series includes in the organisation of distinctive ideas the matrix to generate narrative that can be treated from the particular point of view that is the underlying ‘deep philosophy’ of the series, the ‘vision’ it implies. While the standard investigation mechanism - for all such narrative - consists in identification of the culprit by the investigator, there are decidedly a great if not infinite number of possible concepts for a TV crime series. For example, in CSI the concept involves the final proof of guilt being obtained thanks to a technology able to produce indisputable facts. On the other hand, Columbo worked on an eminently logical plane, basing his proof of guilt on the contradictions between various versions of the events, including the events as they effectively were.

And again, looking back further into the past, Maigret proceeds with his investigations with increasingly sharp focus on the relations between the various characters - and thus the possible motives - and the victim, and the circle of suspects. These are all series that rest on a philosophy (reliance on technology, logic or psychology) implied by the concept, which is constantly put to the test and modulated in the stories of the series.

It is precisely to delimit and specify the areas through which the soggetti of the episodes can move that the ‘concept’ is defined in presenting projects for TV-series, associating it with the term ‘arena’. The term ‘arena’ is clearly understood in the sense of setting (a ‘where’ and ‘when’) but also, and above all, as indicating the theatre for the peculiar conflicts, able to sustain at length the varied repetition of the stories belonging to the concept, the ‘seam’ to mine for subjects befitting the series. In this respect the X-files arena is of a conceptual nature, lying in the unaccountable - from the presence of aliens on earth to the enigmas of antiquity, supernatural phenomena and esoteric cults.

Such is obviously the case with series of closed-end episodes (and also, in many respects, with films that give rise to sequels thanks to the popularity of their fantastic heroes, from 007 to Indiana Jones), but it also applies - on other planes - to continuing series, or serials, although here things are rather more complicated, meriting separate treatment.

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In the ‘bibles’ of series it is precisely the requisite of repetition/variation of stories belonging to a particular arena-concept that is played out to the full: the soggetto or screenplay of the pilot (which to a large extent lays the foundations for the universe of the series), the soggetti of the instalments to follow (the ‘legs’ of the concept, or its serial dimension), the recurrent, characteristic places of the series, the value themes and material favoured and suited to the series, the tones that create the colouring, the ‘spines’ of the leading roles, and their spans in the case of serials.

A FLASHBACK At this point let me slip in a brief flashback, re-evoking a particular milieu to which we are still indebted today. Of course, I do not imagine that my reconstruction will find everyone in total agreement, irrespective of the inevitable simplifications and schematizations made here.

Around the mid-1970s Hollywood - the Studio System - was on its knees.

The 90 million cinemagoers of 1946 had steadily dwindled over the following decades to a historical low of 17 million in the early seventies. It seemed as if audiences could not be torn away from their TV screens. Something of the sort was also happening in Italy, for different reasons, and with dire consequences for the movie industry as a whole.

And yet the majors managed to find a way out: on the one hand, the cinema was moving towards a more European style of films d’auteur with directors like Penn, Altman, Scorsese and Coppola, to name but a few, while on the other hand the renewed industrial vitality of the cinema as popular mass trend was the result of certain choices - possibly unwitting of their future potential but evident fruit of calculation - that gave rise to that phenomenon, still to be examined in sufficient depth, that became known as the New Hollywood.

The Majors - Universal taking the lead - decided to target a young audience, less reluctant to drag themselves away from family TV viewing and go out. Of course, to succeed in this the movies had to find a way to address the kids’ culture, consisting largely of comic strips (Marvel, above all), pulp-fiction, science fiction, horror, fantasy and westerns. And there had to be scriptwriters and directors acquainted through their personal experience with the imaginings generated in and by that culture. Thus came a season of hunting down young talents, often plucked by the industry from the university campuses even before they had completed their cinema studies.

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Idea, Concept, Soggetto

This was the generation of the movie ‘brat pack’, from Lucas to Spielberg and Milius - a generation that brought stories that, crucially, called for a radical change in movie language (at the visual level, in the first place).

Thus lavish funding was soon being poured into special effects, in the broad sense, from the traditional variety to ad hoc inventions, and movie budgets rose significantly as a result of these investments.

It was in this state of affairs that the distinction came about - a veritable line of demarcation, a ‘continental divide’ - between the High Budget Concept (i.e. movies rich in special effects) and the Low Budget Concept (films with no particular need of SFX).

In the space of a few years, however, the general increase in the average cost of a film evened out the budget aspect: a box-office star could cost as much as if not more than special effects. What remained unchanged was the distinction between the High Concept and Low Concept.

Legend attributes to Spielberg the dictum: “If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it’s going to make a pretty good movie”.

In a way, this encapsulates the essence of the high concept; a litmus test based on the effectiveness of a “pitchable” concept in one or two phrases that, in all its simplicity and immediacy, can be universally accessible - in its promise of a story, in its possible imaginings.

What the high concept is still taken to imply is a plot-oriented film, or in other words a movie that features a succession of surprising, spectacular events; some have even gone as far as theorising a particular ‘blockbuster’ dramaturgy as rollercoaster movie, following a progression marked by a startling twist of the plot every ten minutes (Geoff King). On the other hand, the low concept runs in the direction of a character-oriented film, with the stress on development in terms of the character’s psychology. It goes without saying that both elements (interesting characters in a gripping plot) are indispensable for any film, and that the ideal solution is the right balance between the essential features, but this is, of course, a matter of dosage and audience targeted.

THE SOGGETTO If the concept traces out an area rich in dramatic potential, the next step is drafting the soggetto (short treatment), which entails far more complex, interrelated choices. To begin with, in the process of becoming 33

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a treatment the concept will show just how far it can go - the length of narrative it can sustain, and the format that would best suit it. It will also be seen which are the major dramatic advances setting the pacing, what succession of events develops the psychological aspects of the characters or leads them towards achieving their goals, or both, and what tones will best bring out the potential of the concept - comic, tragic, dramatic, or a particular blend of them. When it comes to the soggetto, it is time to decide on the ending, and thus on the theme of the story. What is the point of telling this story? And, last but not least, how should the story best be written to capture the attention of the readers, and make them want to see the film of that particular story? At the soggetto stage it is perfectly legitimate to use any type of literary device to enthral the reader - it is the written page that has to arouse the reader’s interest, and keep it alive. Of course, the essential criterion behind all this is the power of the written word to conjure up mental images.

While theme and ending are still open to all sorts of possibilities in the concept, in the soggetto the choices will define an initial level of completeness, albeit by no means definitive. Obviously, however, if the draft of the screenplay has a different ending from the one decided on at an earlier stage, thorough scene rewriting is called for in order to bring the dramatic structure into line with the new ending and the new theme - and, in all probability, with the consequent re-nuancing of tone. Otherwise, the drama may sag; the desired effect may not prove so clear and powerful. If we decided that Thelma and Louise should have a happy end, then we would have to get to work not only on the screenplay, but even on the soggetto (not necessarily the concept!), or at least the step outline of the whole film.

It would be absurd to suppose that such a radical negative-positive change in parameters as decisive as the ending, and thus also the theme, could leave the structure, or, rather, the sense contents of the structure, quite unaffected. If Juliet had woken up in time, Romeo would not have killed himself, the two would have eloped and lived happily ever after, and the whole tragedy may well have been written in a significantly different way.

And this applies regardless of the examples of success that inconsistent films can enjoy with audiences, or post-production marketing choices, such as we have encountered in practical experience.

As already pointed out at the beginning of these pages, in the AngloAmerican market the soggetto, as a physical object of about 5 to 15 pages to be submitted to potential purchasers, is called ‘treatment’, or to be precise ‘short treatment’, in contrast with the ‘long treatment’, which 34

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contains all the scenes in narrative form, comparable to the scene breakdown, but with a less technical - graphic - framework. Until a few years ago, on the other hand, in Italy the soggetto was an expanded narration in which it was still possible to explore the universe of the film story to be enacted with literary means and devices, looking into the psychological makeup of the characters, their hidden thoughts, the descriptions of places and atmospheres, the possible repartee and even elements that had found no place in the screenplay. In the Avventurosa Storia del Cinema Italiano, scriptwriter Age defined it as the ‘romanzo del film’ - the novel of the film: the interesting point about this is that the screenplay became an adaptation of this novel, not to be published as such but written expressly to draw a screenplay from it. Nowadays this approach to treatment has become obsolete; the preference is for the more concise and functional form of the scene breakdown (in Italian, ‘scalettone’) or in other words the entire sequence of scenes in the film, each indicated with their specific dramatic functions in carrying the story forward. There is a certain resemblance here to the ‘shooting scripts’ of the old days, when dialogue scripts were not used and the list in sequence of the shots to be filmed “was” the dramatic text of the film, its ‘screenplay’.

There is one more point I would like to add about the ‘soggettisti’, of Italian cinema in the past. The role of the writer of soggetti has lost the specific nature it used to have, except perhaps a mention in the credits of ‘Soggetto by… ’. Probably it is no longer enough in today’s cinema and television to be a ‘mere’ soggetto writer, and to tell the truth I don’t know if it has ever been a real profession in itself, to be practised independently of the other roles involved in writing for the cinema or TV. Nevertheless, it is an image we are fond of - saying ‘I’m a soggetti writer’ suggests something like a truffle hound with a flair for sniffing out where the tasty tubers lie hidden. Or, better still, a gold prospector - someone who sifts through the real or imaginary world in search of precious nuggets - ideas, concepts, soggetti.

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On the Imperative for Action in Screenwriting: An Attempt at Moving from Aristotle to Sartre

On the Imperative for Action in Screenwriting: An Attempt at Moving from Aristotle to Sartre

by Antoine Le Bos Action The moment we approach the fundamentals of dramaturgy in screenwriting, one of the central questions that inevitably pops up is the notion that a character (and a protagonist, even more so), can only “be revealed” and truly exist eyeball-to-eyeball with the viewer, can only really “come to life” and grab her attention by expressing himself through action. That is, by way of concrete interactions with the world around him, by his way of interacting with others, or, more generally, with “what appears in front of him”. That imperative is so strong that those celebrated “screenwriting seminar hawkers” enthusiastically proclaim that a protagonist must “collide with the world”. According to them, that is the only possible technique for “advancing the story” in movies.

If we had to make a list of the various levels a screenwriter must attack as he launches into a rewrite of a script - by a writer with little experience - or a consultant or “script doctor” attempting to present a detailed diagnosis and handy suggestions for a feature-length screenplay, “not enough action” would certainly be among the first three items on their list of problems to solve. Whereas in a novel (or even in the theatre), the use of an interior voice can allow characters to “be revealed” without necessarily “setting them into motion”, the experienced screenwriter, for his own professional survival, is trained (or trains himself) to set those beings into motion, to shake them up, to create impact, to push them to react.

No sooner is that word “action” uttered and potential suspicion and justifiable anxiety inevitably jump out of the bushes. Isn’t the experienced screenwriter (as opposed to the emerging, “pure” writer-director…) some scary guardian and ruthless watchdog of the schematic, Hollywood-influenced vision of the world that valiant young filmmakers try to escape in every way possible?

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Having a little experience under your belt can easily sweep aside some objections. Doesn’t the screenwriter’s craft completely rest in his ability to reveal what could remain concealed deep down, inside a character? And isn’t character interaction with the outside world the only way to pull the character “out of him- or herself”, thus taking the viewer “inside”, or putting what is inside “out”?

Yet, does that unveiling have to come about through action?

In other words, is it so unimaginable to film a static protagonist, rejecting any possibility of thrusting him into action? Is it so unimaginable to use a character’s immobility as a potential - and potentially strong - means of cinematic exploration and deepening vision? To rephrase this: is launching a character into action a kind of dogmatic pollution that comes from the classics? Or does it originate from an even more inescapable reality, intrinsic to the film narrative?

Poetics revisited So, once again, let’s look into the fundamental theories that Western drama has revolved around ever since we first became involved in developing those great principles on how a staged narrative can best “capture” and “hold” an audience.

For advocates of the three-act narrative orthodoxy (“one hero, one goal, rising action! ...”), Aristotle is the number one authority, an inescapable reference, and the icon who gives a touch of theoretical blessing to often simplified equations. That’s reason enough for us to take a look at his Poetics — the pivotal “bible”, or it’s antithesis, for almost all occidental theories on dramaturgy; particularly from the Italian Renaissance on, by way of 17th century French theatre. During that period, which saw the creation of the first established theatres in Paris, the principle preoccupation of the dramaturge was analyzing the effect his work had on an audience. And Aristotle’s writings are the absolute touchstone (even for those who’ve never read them) on the rules that must be respected to reach the audience - rules that are supposedly categorical.

Jean Racine, to cite just one, is among the legions of devotees of the Poetics and the famous rule of three unities (unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action) - which, although never expressed by Aristotle, as such, is considered to be a direct extension of the master’s thinking.

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On the Imperative for Action in Screenwriting: An Attempt at Moving from Aristotle to Sartre

So let’s open Aristotle. The Poetics is a somewhat confused, incomplete work. (It’s probably missing some essential portions or chapters for its complete comprehension). At times, it even contradicts itself on certain points.

Incomplete transcriptions and successive translations over the course of 2,400 years do not make it any easier to understand. Nevertheless, some key elements emerge fairly clearly.

Aristotle was probably the first person to be intrigued by what “grabs” or “doesn’t grab” the viewer in the public experience of tragedy. Although his analysis remains surprisingly detached from any objectivity, he announces that certain plays are successful and attempts to analyze why. In doing so, as opposed to Plato before him, he attempts to introduce the “concrete world” into his analysis, thus leaving behind a strictly philosophical approach.

It’s more a kind of manual for poets - in other words, writers - and that’s where he piques our curiosity. He’s probably the first person in the history of thought to bring “criticism” out of its stylistic, or strictly poetic, parameters, in favour of a frontal attack on the dramatic structure of a work.

The writer must, above all, “construct an argument” (we find this concern among most dramaturgy and screenwriting gurus today) - meaning a narrative structure that escapes the trivial, the particular, in order to arrive at a kind of dramatic stimulation that’s universal in scope.

The next point in his “method” brings us back to the subject at hand.

For Aristotle, “tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of actions”. The essentials are found in “the combination of acts accomplished, since tragedy imitates, not men, but action, life”. (Note the equation “life = action”, in a world still light-years away from Hollywood.) And, a few lines later, our subject resurfaces: “Dramatic action, therefore, is not aimed at the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions.

Hence, the incidents and the plot are the end of tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all”.

(-Poetics, chapter VI.) So, “those who start in poetry are capable of accuracy of expression and of creating characters, before they are able to combine the actions…”.

His statement is very much in agreement with many experienced screenwriters. You’ve got to put in years of practice and experience before you can grasp how much prompting your characters into action generates an instinctive bond with the viewer.

But we must admit that Aristotle in no way answers our question…

Why? Why does it work like that? You might say, “Why look for the answer in ancient times, when it’s staring us right in the face?” As soon as the character makes a move, s/he expresses her intention. S/he makes us an 39

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accomplice in that action. To the viewer, sitting in a dark theatre watching her, s/he “betrays” where’s/he’s going, what s/he wants, what her intention is. And suddenly we understand (and anticipate) what may (or may not) become an obstacle to that intention; which in turn creates an expectation, anticipation, and incites the viewer’s participation in the film (or the performance) presented to her.

The body-brain system As another possible explanation of the viewer-character bond triggered by action, neurology offers up some interesting perspectives. Over the last few years, research on the brain has revealed the existence of a unified body-brain biological system. We’ve discovered that the human brain is divided into two distinct cerebral hemispheres. Cognitive, conscious and rational brain functions (linked to the neocortex), turned toward the outer world, are located on the left side of the brain. The right side holds the emotional, unconscious brain (linked to the limbic brain), which is particularly connected to bodily functions and primarily preoccupied with survival.

We share these right-brain functions with animals, including reptiles. Limbic organization is much simpler than that of the neocortex: it’s made up of neurons that are combined but not structured into a network, but it also responds instantaneously and is, therefore, capable of short-circuiting reason. This limbic brain is the one we call upon to seduce. It’s the entity that controls respiration, heartbeat, blood pressure, libido and appetite in the human body. It’s directly plugged into everything about us that’s purely animal, instinctive, and which escapes us altogether…

In the cinema, more than in the theatre (given the eyeball-to-eyeball sensation we experience when the character is shot in close-up), the viewer has an almost identical kind of access to a protagonist as in real-life, human interactions. If a large part of this “access” happens outside rational categories, via the limbic brain, the viewer is “grabbed”. Facing the screen, he stares the character right in the eye and, by reflex, tries to access his being in an attempt to discover what makes him similar - someone to love, someone to protect - or someone to run away from, to fear. Yet, when the protagonist comes into conflict with the world around him (when his desire is thwarted by an obstacle, or he’s humiliated by his beloved, or panicked about being discovered…), the viewer responds to that impulse through a kind of animal bonding - through fear, the immediate desire to protect, physical desire, irrational panic, etc…

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On the Imperative for Action in Screenwriting: An Attempt at Moving from Aristotle to Sartre

Those reflexes can only be generated by this play of situation-action that could lead the protagonist(s) into dead-end, humiliating or appalling situations. Which explains Aristotle’s obsession - the “arrangement of acts accomplished”, as a priority. And the obsession of assembly-line screenwriters - to push their protagonists in deeper and deeper, to grab them by their throats and force them to cough their guts up…

Yet, a premise on the order of “the writer has to try to trap the viewer”, even by way of his most animal instincts, is undoubtedly a little too short, a little too simple. Especially if we want our study to include a kind of cinema that’s equally capable of poetic - indeed, at times, metaphysical - exploration.

Existence of consciousness: Sartre In his A Short Organum for the Theatre, Bertolt Brecht, who rarely slips into the desire to grab us “by the gut”, makes use of Aristotle’s Poetics as a foil. He finds the work emblematic of a tradition we must fight against and reject - the bible of those who still dare to speak of the “eternal laws” of theatrical creation. Brecht insists that “dramatic theatre”, the theatre of catharsis, based on the audience’s identification with the protagonist(s), must give way to a non-Aristotelian dramaturgy, an “epic theatre” based on distance, which functions through the opposite principle. It’s no longer really a question of body and emotions. It’s a return to the brain, the cognitive brain.

He almost wants to sever the dramatic narrative from its organic component - that primitive element that Friedrich Nietzsche emphatically demands, in his The Birth of Tragedy, when he rails against the loss of vital density that ensued when the Greeks moved from the Dionysian power of pre-Socratic tragedy to the methodical world of Euripides, the father of “aesthetic Socratism”. The “primitive dramatic phenomenon”, Nietzsche tells us, “consists of (the spectator) seeing himself transformed and henceforth acting through another body, another character…”. The art of identification and cathartic functions… The Enlightenment led us to a glorification of omnivorous Reason. Where does this fear of narrative-via-the-gut, among so many “refined intellectuals” over the past three centuries, come from?

These considerations are not neutral. They fundamentally determine a relationship with the world that’s generated by the theatrical or cinematic 41

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narrative. Here, is it the dominant narrative form that helps generate our relationship with the world (A), or our dominant relationship with the world that produces a narrative typology (B)? Both obviously. But the political relevance of proposition (A) arouses our interest and whets our appetite to reread a bit of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

Because, here’s my question: Can the story of a character who is so confident in himself that he refuses to relinquish his comfortable situation, be the subject of a film today?

(Other than a documentary, of course.) In other words, can the notion of action, or setting the protagonist into motion, happen outside our conception of cinematic narrative? Can we spare the protagonist that clash with the world around him?

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s analysis is a departure from the fundamental opposition between consciousness and the thing (the “beingfor-itself” and the “being-in-itself”). Consciousness, as such, is “no-thing”, a non-being. A thing is what it is. (An ashtray is an ashtray.) A thing in itself is complete. On the contrary, human consciousness is characterized by the paradoxical fact that it isn’t identical to itself. Consciousness is always facing outward.

“All consciousness is the consciousness of something”. (Husserl). Consciousness is a movement; it’s a perception of that tree in front of us, or a building we can conjure up in our minds. It only exists in its relationship to something other than itself. So it’s condemned to be in motion, to endlessly move outside itself. Contrary to René Descartes’ anthropocentric intuition, a consciousness, in itself, doesn’t exist. It is nothing within itself (in the sense that things are). It only exists once it moves outside itself.

That’s why I can’t say, “I am me”.

In Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology, Sartre says, “If, impossible as it may be, you could enter ‘into’ a consciousness, you’d be sucked into a vortex and thrown back outside, next to that tree, in a heap of dust. For consciousness has no ‘inside.’ It’s precisely that being-beyond-itself, that absolute flight, that refusal to be a substance that makes it a consciousness”.

To summarize, consciousness is a void, a hole within the being, and a decompression of being, nothingness. And as Sartre-scholar Jean Beauffret proclaims, “It is the essence of what is most interior in us to refuse interiority”.

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On the Imperative for Action in Screenwriting: An Attempt at Moving from Aristotle to Sartre

Consciousness alone produces nothingness, not being. In other words, if the screenwriter is after density, he should avoid focusing on the immobility of an ego.

So, in Sartre, the existence (“ex-istence”, going outside oneself) of consciousness precedes its essence. Or we could say, man only exists once he acts. He is nothing within himself; he fundamentally exists in a void.

As a result, it is man’s duty to determine himself by his actions. And, in that sense, he is “forced to be free” - which is not without producing a certain anxiety that is close to fear of the void.

The need to act Getting back to the subject at hand, the filmmaker who says he wants to avoid “setting his world into action” strongly risks moving us towards the experience of its void.

That experience will only rarely merit conscious undertaking and wilful exploration.

Even among reputedly contemplative filmmakers, the concern over putting things in motion is noteworthy. In the sublimely slow Mother and Son, Alexander Sokurov plunges us into an existential, sensory, poetic experience, thanks to the final walk the son takes his dying mother on. That hypnotic stroll is a second-by-second battle against death. It is motion itself confronting immobility. When a protagonist is locked inside the concrete impossibility of rubbing against the world (like in Birdy or Johnny Got His Gun), the screenplay comes up with ways to create movement. In Birdy, it’s via flashbacks, or Nicolas Cage’s struggle to bring the hero back to life.

Johnny Got His Gun uses flashbacks, the protagonist’s voiceover narration; an initially tragic, terrifying situation capable of holding the viewer speechless; and by imposing immobility as the absolute obstacle that becomes the engine of an endless rage within the hero.

As such, it’s interesting to note how imposing non-action can be used with protagonists who are conditioned to take action. For example, Warriors, a miniseries produced by the BBC, which recounts the story of British peacekeeping forces who were sent to Bosnia, pulled into combat and forbidden to act in the face of that atrocity. That situation generates a power to engage the viewer that’s literally colossal. The struggle for the protagonists lies in trying to resist the overwhelming urge to scream, the urge to 43

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jump in to save the woman who’s being raped or the child who’s burning.

It operates on the notion of an obstacle to action obstructing the heroes’ desire to play a role that’s ultimately very classical – they are muzzled, neutralized. It’s as if their desires were hermetically sealed, provoking a rise in pressure that’s almost unbearable and creating an uncommon level of viewer identification.

Sartre cruelly said that man is nothing but the sum of his acts, not something ineffable, hidden in the depths of his heart and soul, something that exonerates him. In other words, man’s duty is to define himself through his actions; otherwise he is nothing. In the case of Warriors, the soldiers’ inability to act drove some of them mad, drove others to suicide. In Sartre’s words, they felt responsible for not being defined enough, in their own eyes.

In this season of ponderous political emptiness and global marketisation, forcing a protagonist to act may not be the formal ease of following in Aristotle’s footsteps. To my mind, it’s an organic necessity, as well as a bias that ultimately has far more political meaning than it seems.

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Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Now You See It, Now You Don’t Some introductory thoughts on point of view/perspective in film narratives; including some examples

by Franz Rodenkirchen “When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether everybody saw the same colours. Could a leaf be orange when some people look at it, but no one ever knows because they were taught to call orange “green”? To this day I haven’t figured out a way to find out if it’s true, so for all I know some people may see orange leaves”.

Taken from an Internet-Blog

Whenever the question of narrative perspective in films comes up, questions abound, making it immediately obvious that we have neither a clear vocabulary to talk about this, nor is there an established tradition in discussing it. A clarification of terms would be a first undertaking before one can really think of starting a discussion of content.

What’s more, the art of storytelling can operate deliberately with oscillating points-of-view and can obscure any clear delineation between fiction and reality. Therefore all attempts to categorize narrative perspectives and create models or typologies to discuss them are always only partial and not fully successful. Then again, they can still be useful when working with fictional narrative texts (for our purpose, films can also be considered texts).

The question which point of view the audience takes (or is posited in) towards the film-narrative seems to be one of the most important to ask when discussing scripts as well as films. How we follow a film-narrative depends to a large degree on how we posit ourselves or find ourselves posited. Inside or outside? In the middle of the action or rather like a fly on the wall? Next to the character or as a distant observer?

Every writer or writer/director has an opposite, an other, with whom she wants to communicate by means of the film, and consequently positions herself within the narrative, be it involuntarily or consciously planned.

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This position of author is defined not only in relation to the narrative, but at least to an equal measure in relation to the audience.

Within the space of this introduction I cannot possibly cover all possible approaches, so I want to settle for a predominantly practically oriented text that should help writers/directors and script editors who are actively working on projects, to continue exploring this matter.

It appears that some of the most frequently mentioned “problems” or “mistakes” in connection with film-narratives seem to be closely connected to questions of perspective. If the main character in a story is not present in one or two scenes of a script, it is quickly stated that those scenes are unfitting or disrupt the perspective. Most likely what is threatened here is the illusion of invisible narrative, a way to tell the story that draws as little attention as possible to its narrative means and techniques, comparable to jump cuts. Like ruptures in the visual flow of a film, changes of perspective tend to bring to mind the existence of the narrator and insist on the artificiality of the filmic universe. Therefore they are often considered a disturbance of audience identification (which is of course less serious for films that require a more reflecting audience).

The use of a voice-over narration (especially when using the voice-over of an on-screen character) to convey elements of the story, but even more so emotions and mental processes, for which no visual equivalent could be found, is also closely connected to questions of point-of-view/perspective.

Our first inquiry shall therefore be: in which contexts is the question of point-of-view and perspective actually relevant?

A first obvious answer: it is one important possibility of identification for an audience. It is also important in relation to the attitude we are to take towards the narrative and the actions shown. It is also important when distinguishing between reliable and unreliable narrators (for example in The Usual Suspects or Fight Club).

But the question of POV/perspective is maybe most important with regards to the complex inter-relation of POV/perspective of the camera and the POV/perspective of the person acting within the frame.

What kind of distinctions do we have to make regarding POV/perspective?

The easiest to confuse is the use of the term perspective as visual code and perspective as narrative strategy/agent.

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Visual code is meant as that which the camera “sees” or shows to the audience. Perspectives can be “objective” or “subjective”, the latter also being referred to as point-of-view shot. Even though the terms objective and subjective should be handled with care, I want to use them for a quick and simple distinction.

In film, what we understand as the subjective view usually refers to the gaze of the active character, whereby the camera takes the point-of-view of that character, who we consequently cannot see. The objective view would then be every other perspective the camera could take that is not explicitly the subjective of one character. As is immediately obvious, this distinction is not sufficient to grasp the divergent visual strategies of perspective.

Perspective as narrative strategies we know particularly from narrative fiction such as novels, short stories, etc. where besides the distinction between first person narrator and third person narrator (“I” or “he”) we find another distinction between personal and authorial narratives. The latter are categories that indicate which “view” the narrator persona (not to confuse with the physical author) takes with regards to the world of the narrative and the knowledge of its characters. Sometimes we use the term “Olympic” to indicate a particular authorial view that appears to give the narrator a godlike control over his material. Here we watch from above, we know it all, not only what happens, but also what each character feels, thinks, plans, etc.

In films, this is much more difficult to convey and if we do not want to make use of literary tools such as voice-over, we are forced to look for ways of how to visualise the interior world of the character through action (not in the Hollywood sense of Action with a capital “A”, but as doing rather than talking).

It would therefore be very interesting to consider which cinematic tools we have available to compensate for this lack of an inner voice and how point-of-view can maybe help here.

But it should also be clear that for this reason the distinction between a narrative and a visual point-of-view is much more difficult and the boundaries more blurred in film.

We need to make clear whether by perspective we mean the narrator’s or the character’s POV within the story/film. It is exactly the inclusion of the character’s POV that creates these blurred boundaries, because in film we need to distinguish the POV of character from the POV of the camera (which does not at all have to coincide with the perspective of the narrator, not even of the narrator-persona).

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And one more thing: subjective shots can lead us to assume that we are seeing things with the eyes of one particular character. When this subjective view is missing we are obviously expected to assume that we see things independently of any single character’s perspective. And while we are asked to assume that a character within the frame sees what we see, the objectified gaze is always the result of a narrator we are asked to imagine (despite the “willing suspension of disbelief”).

Then there is the impression of an almost documentary, objectified, factual gaze, where things are exactly what they seem and the camera has just been used to neutrally record events.

In this kind of opposition, subjective and objective perspectives also are strongly connected to the credibility of the material on show. A special view on this neutral gaze of the camera is of course to be seen in the work (and the writings) of Robert Bresson.

A good example of the complex questions regarding visual and narrative perspective would be Andrea Arnold’s complex thriller Red Road. The first half of the film works like a taut thriller that takes its suspense from the audience’s limited perspective (knowledge) of both the main character’s back-story and the motives for her present actions. This character (Jackie) is working in a CCTV-surveillance centre, and while we see what she sees, we can’t make as much sense of it as she can. But although she sees “all”, she can’t look behind the surface of the image, so the “meaning” can be concealed and misreadings can (and do) happen.

At the same time, the narrator doesn’t allow us to see enough to understand everything about Jackie’s past and her motives, limiting our perspective in a similar way. As an audience, we are just aware of a diffuse threat and observe the agitated behaviour of Jackie. The tension is actually created through the techniques of storytelling; we could say the story happens between the narrator and the audience.

After about 50% of the film, when we have finally caught up with Jackie’s back-story, and have consequently also been made aware of the cause of her emotional state, the narration shifts gear and we are allowed to see all that happens with the character. The story now happens between the character and the audience and vicarious identification is encouraged more strongly, while the narrator moves into the background, her tools a lot less visible from then on.

Still, the narrator has one trump card up her sleeve and she plays it at the very end to elicit the strongest emotional response from the audience (through the final reveal about Jackie’s own guilt).

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In the Chandler adaptation The Lady in the Lake (1947) by Robert Montgomery, after a screenplay by Steve Fisher, the action is completely presented through the eyes of our main character, private detective Philip Marlowe. Detective Marlowe, played by director Montgomery, is behind the camera during the whole length of the film. We hear him talk, see the other actors react to his words and actions, but him we only see as a shadow or sometimes as a reflection in a mirror. The film therefore appears to be completely subjective from Marlowe’s perspective. When Marlowe is addressed, the other actors directly face the camera (an interesting borderline case of almost breaking the invisible “fourth wall”).

Sometimes we see a part of Marlowe’s arms or legs. To be as realistic as possible, we also get extreme close-ups of objects (a phone receiver when Marlowe makes a phone call) or body parts (a fist hitting Marlowe in the face, Marlowe kissing a girl). When Marlowe walks, the camera sways slightly, when he is hit in the face it wobbles, and when he’s knocked out, the screen goes black.

Why this huge effort in 1947 for what was essentially a B-movie, and long before small 35mm-cameras or steady-cams were around? A first answer might be that the strategy is meant to heighten identification with the character. We share everything with our protagonist, we’re always right there when it happens.

While a detective story seems to be especially suited to such an experiment, because the audience can always get the clues fresh and join the guessing game, the interesting contradiction comes from the character of the detective, as he is usually portrayed. As protector of order he is called in when order gets disturbed, to restore it. By definition, he has no own stake in the matter - he is “objective”. So the subjective view of the detective is at odds with his traditional role.

What’s more, the constant subjective shots rather confuse and undermine the confidence of the spectator; because our vision is limited there is a lot less control of the environment as such.

Another thing to consider for a contemporary audience is the fact that these POV shots were later used as a trademark of stalker movies (especially from the 70s onwards). Consequently the best combination of genre and subjective camera style is to be found in the modern horror movie, and of course The Blair Witch Project has used that to the max.

In addition, one might say that filming exclusively with subjective shots has not heightened identification in Lady in the Lake, because it puts us into the same line of vision as the character, but doesn’t say much about how that character is and feels. So maybe Marlowe is not the main character?

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Indeed, he is the detective and by definition, he should not get personally involved, although eventually he does “get the girl”.

But most interesting are maybe the four shots, which apart form the credits, break the total subjective strategy. In these shots Marlowe is seated in his chair and addresses the audience directly: “Right now, you’re reading in the newspapers and hearing over the radios about a murder. They call it ‚The Case of the Lady in the Lake.’ It’s a good title. It fits. What you’ve read and what you’ve heard is one thing. The real thing is something else. There’s only one guy who knows that. I know it”.

This seems to justify the choice of perspective through the narrator’s special relation to the case. He alone knows it all, he is the master of this story, and what’s more, if only he knows it, he is also the one who creates it for us, right here and now. And he has a promise for us, if we buy into the deal: “You’ll see it just as I saw it. You’ll meet the people. You’ll find the clues.

And maybe you’ll solve it quick. And maybe you won’t. You think you will, eh? OK (points his finger at the camera), you’re smart. But let me give you a tip. You’ve got to watch them. You’ve got to watch them all the time.

Because things happen when you least expect them”.

The privileged perspective is therefore used to suggest a closeness to the events, but also to pose a challenge to the audience to measure their wits with him. Of course they can only lose. But it clarifies the main purpose of the subjective POV as a tool of heightened suspense – and while Marlowe promises us immediacy (“right now” suggests we are still actively involved), he also indicates that he already knows the ending.

The playfulness of Lady in the Lake and its contradictory intentions, combined with some rather heavy-handed narration lead to mixed responses and it is generally agreed that the film represents “an interesting failure”.

A more recent example of a similar strategy that takes more than a leaf out of the Film Noir-repository is Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000). Here the subjective narration is used to reflect upon the different narrative planes (that seem to have different reality status) and lay open their artificiality.

Also here the narrator addresses his audience directly, albeit only in a voice over, not via the camera, so that the fourth wall is actually never breached.

The narrator presents a story that he himself calls “probably made up”, inspired by his long observations of the street outside his window. Still, at one point he inserts himself as a real person into the action of his story and we start accompanying him. The play with different roles, identities and 50

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questionable realities is key to the functioning of the story as a whole, so in this case the visual strategy mirrors and doubles the complex narrative relations. Therefore Lou Ye’s film uses the subjective narrative as an adequate tool that befits the central character of his film, while Montgomery’s subjective detective Marlowe could have solved his case also in a more objective way. But it is to be noted that also Lou Ye’s nameless narrator has only a supporting role in the central story.

For sure one could have long debates whether such experiments have any merit and actually support the intentions and themes of the respective story, or if they aren’t mostly seeking attention for their cleverness or simply for “being different”, a bit like the fractured chronologies of recent years have sometimes proven to be rather self-serving than truly necessary for their stories. Still, despite their seemingly mostly visual strategies, many of these elements can already be worked with in script stage.

This can also be seen in Lady in the Lake, where the seemingly objective narrator Marlowe is interrupted in his last monologue to the audience by the arrival of one of the film’s characters (one of the previous main suspects and antagonists). She kisses him and we learn that they plan to go away together and start a new life. This turn of events changes the status of the narrative and re-integrates it into the realm of conventional fiction.

The seeming outside perspective of Marlowe terminates, the fourth wall is firmly closed and so is the story.

Another form of filmic narration in the first person - without the camera taking the subjective view of the character - is the use of a voice-over, which, as I already mentioned, is more of a literary device than a tool of visual storytelling.

Hence we find this tool quite often in literary adaptations (and we tend to find them less than satisfactory at times, because we might feel the screenwriter failed to find a visual solution), but more generally in films that deal with the inner world of its protagonists - another form of subjectivity - and in certain genres such as Film Noir.

A great example of a well-integrated voice-over is Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, based on the script by Paul Schrader. Starting with the first image we accompany the main character, taxi driver Travis Bickle, watch his routine, and hear his thoughts in a kind of stream-of-consciousness commentary, that was later taken to its breathless culmination by Gaspar Noe in Seul contre tous (I stand alone, 1999).

The first thing we register is the contrast between inner and outer world, 51

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subjective experience and action of the protagonist. While we see Travis act and hear what he thinks about it, we follow the gaze of the camera, which is not at all identical with Travis’ gaze, nor necessarily with his observations. In Seul contre Tous this even becomes the key element of the narrative, because we are invited to register the difference between the grandiose, aggressive and violent thoughts of the character and his possibilities (and choices) for action. In this juxtaposition the drama of the character is eventually played out.

Scorsese remains more homogenous in his depiction of Travis, but he too is a character we are developing rather ambivalent feelings for, and Scorsese knows how to use this for dramatic effects (for example in the famous scene of aftermath when Travis has ended his shooting spree and is sitting on the couch, with the camera adopting a distant perspective from high up).

In terms of the rules of narrative perspective in film, Taxi Driver is often cited as a tight and very successfully working example, maybe just because the immediately established rule to stay very close to the character and have him in every scene of the film is broken only once.

The one scene without Travis takes place in the lair of Iris’ pimp Sport (played by Harvey Keitel), where Sport uses all his conviction to erase any doubts Travis might have raised in Iris’ mind about her working as a prostitute. Reportedly the scene was shot quite late during production and gave Scorsese some headaches because Travis wasn’t in it and for him this meant a break in the narration’s perspective. For this reason he had Travis wait outside the house while Iris was inside, so his presence would justify our watching of Iris and Sport, although Travis could actually not see them.

Implicitly we learn how important this homogenous view must have been for Scorsese, how much he must’ve considered this one cut to a scene without the main character a break of conventions. Some writers go so far as to interpret this scene as stemming from Travis’ imagination, to keep the unbroken one-character perspective.

An interesting side-aspect here is the thought that Scorsese must have feared the audience would not understand why Iris doesn’t just shift her loyalties to Travis. He obviously deemed the scene indispensable to motivate Iris’ continuous resistance to Travis’ attempts of “saving” her, so he rather risked a break in perspective than a break in causality of action and motivation.

When we don’t see everything with the eyes of one character then we often know things the character doesn’t know, for example what happened 52

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in a character’s absence, or at the same time in another place, but in any way relevant for the character’s own story.

This gain in knowledge also removes us a bit from the character and we are asked to register more, to not only accompany a character and experience things vicariously, but have more of an outside, maybe even reflecting perspective - or shift our attention to something beyond the character. In genre films this is often the plot, or rather, the story, which sometimes requires us to take different perspectives one after the other, so that we don’t miss anything crucial. At the same time we can sometimes gain a certain independence of the tight psychology of experience, we remove ourselves from the one time of a character and can “inhabit” several times.

An example of changing perspective to support the effects of the narration can be seen in Halloween by John Carpenter (written by Carpenter and Debra Hill, 1979).

The film opens with a seemingly free-floating camera, we are looking from the subjective view of an unseen person while we approach a house.

The invisible observer seems to be a stealthy voyeur, who later dons a mask, so that we are forced to look through the eyeholes of that mask and so underline the forced inhabitancy of that person’s private gaze. Our invisible ego first explores the inside of the house then arrives in the room of a teenage girl. It/we attack the girl with a large knife and kill her. We leave the house, still in the subjective view, when a couple arrives in a car.

Now the man rips the mask off “our” face and with this we jump into an objective POV. We now see the killer is a small boy. Parents and child stand still as if in a tableau while the camera moves away, higher and higher, until it assumes an Olympic vision.

Cut to the present. 15 years later. We meet Dr. Loomis and a nurse, driving in a car, observed by the camera. And from now on we remain in this observational POV, with the camera assuming the position of a knowing narrator (sometimes knowing in advance), who can already go to the next position before the action follows. This knowledge is necessary to create suspense and have the crucial parallel montage: what happens in the house of the babysitter, while the young couple is slaughtered in the house just opposite, etc.?

After its eerie subjective opening, Halloween consistently uses an outer perspective that is not connected to one character, and is used for the creation of maximum suspense. We get to see just what excites us most, what we need to know to create and uphold the tension of the moment. Never do we return to the subjective gaze of the opening shot, although the young killer returns as an adult in the main part of the film and 53

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commits more murders. All murders in the present are always shown from a perspective close to the victim, seeing just what they see, but knowing (unlike them), that the killer is lurking close by. One of the most effective shots is on a street in broad daylight, with the teenagers just walking along chatting, and after they have passed the well-pruned hedge between two houses, the killer steps out from behind it into the street and looks after them, something only we see and that creates a strong feeling of dread. It is this difference between the knowledge of the audience versus the knowledge of the characters, sometimes combined in the same shot, where the film draws most of its suspense from (and actually the whole Slasher-genre).

It is interesting to remark that suspense can also work the other way round, as I have mentioned above when citing Red Road, where the character knows more than we do and the narrator uses this to create suspense.

We touch here the question of the distribution of information, which is key for most suspense plots. Meaning that also Hitchcock’s famous distinction between suspense and surprise (the bomb under the table) is also a question of narrative perspective.

We all remember the surprise version of the story, with the people sitting around a table talking and suddenly a bomb goes off. In the suspense version we know there’s the bomb under the table, while the characters don’t.

We also know when it is supposed to explode and we know how much time is left until that moment (the proverbial “ticking clock”). It is quite possible to ask if this is merely a case of distribution of information or the build-up of an emotional arc of suspense. Let’s imagine different points of view. In one example we could see the bomb being placed under the table and then see the people seated at the table from the POV of the hidden bomber.

What if this guy has “honourable” goals, so we may hope the bomb will go off at the right moment (we could think of the assassination attempts against Hitler). But what if it is not someone as evil as Hitler, but just a regular “bad guy”? And what if the bomber isn’t acting for the best of humankind but from a more personal motivation? It might be an interesting experiment to present such a scene from different points of view and see how this could change our attitude towards the doer and the deed.

We could invent more variations of this, but their effect would always depend on our position within the story, meaning how close we are to a character versus its context, the specific causality of the action. Depending on our knowledge and perspective our attitude will shift. For the choice of POV (not only the camera’s) is one of the most effective tools to steer 54

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the emotional responses of the audience, their attitude towards the character(s) and the conflicts/questions connected to it.

A nice example that again goes back to Hitchcock can be seen in Psycho. After Norman Bates has found our dead main character Marion Crane murdered in the shower, he quickly cleans up all traces of the deed.

Then he puts Marion’s corpse into the trunk of her car and drives it into the swamp. We see the vehicle sink, when suddenly it stops, with the trunk still sticking out. And although just a few minutes have passed since the murder of Marion, almost everyone holds their breath, hoping the car might continue to sink and vanish completely. This identification with the perpetrator is clearly influenced by the choice of narrative perspective.

What we have discussed up until now seems to indicate that we need to differentiate the material further.

Obviously there is a form of subjective perspective that is not identical with a subjective gaze of the camera and likewise there is an objective perspective where a character can be continuously present. Both can exist with a character. It is just that we see different things. The presence of a character within the scene appears to be a condition for our gaze (without her presence we couldn’t see anything), but the direction might allow us to explore the space differently from the character in the scene.

We can register things the character doesn’t, we can draw different conclusions, we can even understand things differently and this difference is instrumental, not accidental.

In most films we jump between different options. We might enter the room with a character, we look around on our own, register some detail the character registers too (maybe sooner, maybe later?), all this we do visually. But it is our connection to that character, the perspective we have onto him, that determines if we align our own perception with the character’s or maybe deliberately look for differences. And this can largely be done already in script stage.

As in most central aspects of filmmaking, also here the rules are established in the beginning. If we break a constant one-character perspective after 50 minutes without an absolute narrative necessity, the audience will experience it as a break in the non-verbal agreement of the previous 50 minutes of viewing. So if we do have one homogenous perspective, any digression is usually an indication of an unsolved script problem. Quite often it is because the author finds that some piece of information must be given under all circumstances and he couldn’t come 55

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up with a better way to do it. But this is mostly true for films that rely heavily on coherence and cause-effect logic on their stories.

We could try to think about the different aspects of perspective in combination with the distinction between plot-driven and characterdriven storytelling. If we have to be with the character, and the character wants to know what happens in the house across the street, she has to go there and we have to be with her. We might then see things with the eyes of the character, or not. But we start on a common ground with the character. Events will be shown in their relevance for the character and we can observe them as such in a character-driven film. The character is much more an agent of our gaze in the plot-driven film, where we use characters as justification to observe and continue down the path the story leads us.

It could be interesting to shift perspective willingly, to switch between different character perspectives and see how this influences our experience of the story. There are films that do similar things to create a kind of productive insecurity that increases the tension (The Usual Suspects would be an example, also David Fincher’s Fight Club makes use of a change of perspective as a key element of its story).

In a film like Gus van Sant’s Elephant the different perspectives are rather used to avoid mono-causality and subjectivity. Still, while we shift perspective and relive moments with different characters, it is not predominantly their difference we are asked to observe, but their individual singularity that some might also call isolation.

Episodic or multi-strand narratives can have a one character perspective for each storyline, but whenever the stories touch each other and characters start to interact, the focus can shift, which can be difficult, because in multi-strand storylines we tend to favour some characters over others anyway. This could be one reason why we usually do not find strong subjectivity in such films and why they are quite often held together by a unifying theme, rather than a strong identification with one character. So while our favourite character is maybe not to be seen at the moment, we still have an event, an action that relates to the overall “meaningfulness” of the narrative.

This leads us back to the simple observation from the beginning that a lot of people seem to find it disturbing if a film with one clear main character contains scenes in which this character doesn’t appear.

But sometimes it is enough if the actions of the other characters re56

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late to our absent main character. A good example here is Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967). In the long sequence where the police tail our “samourai” Jeff Costello through the metro system of Paris, Costello is often just represented by a red bulb on a board. Still, the view of the concerted action and the determined behaviour of the police strengthen our empathy for the physically absent hero. He is the lonesome wolf (says the barkeeper at one point) and the scenes in which others act without him, but because of him, only increase this loneliness.

As a further indication of how much ideas of perspective can be used to great effect, I would like to present a longer quote from Luc Dardenne’s notes from the preparation of their film Le Fils (The Son, 2002): “A common element between Olivier (main character in Le Fils) and Rosetta (main character in Rosetta) is the mystery. As we filmed Rosetta and peered through the door of the waffle stand, we tried to position the eye of the camera such that it could not observe everything that Rosetta saw, but still be very close to her point of view. The tension between what Rosetta sees and almost seeing what Rosetta sees, this is what creates the suspense of the mystery (the secret). The more the borders of this margin come closer to one another without reaching each other, the stronger the current of the mystery that connects them.

When Olivier, standing on his toes peeks through the office window of the director he sees Francis, his hand, just signing a document, his arm, his chest, his face. The eye of the camera, unable to take the same place as Olivier’s eyes, because part of the window frame and Olivier’s head prevent it, can see a part of Francis’ body, but not his face. When the eye of the camera manages to focus on Francis’ hand, who is about to sign the document, the suspense of the mystery increases for the audience, for seeing clearly what Olivier sees, without being able to see the face, increases the desire to see this face. To find the “bad place” for the camera, to arrange things such that it might as well try to get to the right place, the place from which the character watches, but can’t stay there because of the character’s being there, because of an obstacle, a delay - this is our way to create suspense for the spectator, while at the same time we give our characters a secret, hence, an existence”. (My own translation from a German translation) From here, the real investigation might just be about to start.

What we can note as a preliminary insight of this first exploration is the confidence that questions of narrative/visual perspective are both 57

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complex and crucial at the same time. Just because we find many wellknown concepts from older arts (like literature, maybe even painting) or our own daily processes of perception, these questions can yield very useful strategies and tools, without being too obvious about it. As we have seen, it was exactly the fear to draw too much attention on questions of perspective that helped create some of the unwritten laws of dealing with it.

Understanding perspective is a stepping-stone to understanding the complex interrelation between the storyteller and his audience, which lies at the heart of our engagement with the seventh art.

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Paris-Texas - an Ideal Development Scheme? The Importance of Finding a Driving Force…

Paris-Texas - an Ideal Development Scheme?

The Importance of Finding a Driving Force…

by Antoine Le Bos

At the Angers Film Festival, we had a pretty interesting discussion around the film Paris-Texas. But that debate launched another discussion, between me and myself, which I would like to share with you.

With Paris-Texas, Wim Wenders managed to reach a kind of audience he wasn’t used to reaching until that film, he connected with people coming from very different backgrounds, ages, countries, and in amazing numbers for the first time in his career (I was18, knowing very little about cinema, and the film impressed me to a degree I wasn’t used to at that time, as much as Apocalypse Now or Kubrick’s 2001). Years after this success, which some critics may have considered as the mere result of a short lasting “trend”-effect after winning the Cannes’ Golden Palm, it could be interesting to take a look at the screenplay he wrote with Sam Shepard.

Why did that film reach so many people? How did these pictures get to have such a long-lasting effect and imprint on the viewers?

First and foremost, let’s take a ‘cold’ look at the film.

On a purely formal level, it is a pretty overstated picture; the photography can even seem kind of heavy looking at it frame by frame! As if both the director and the DOP had been working too long in advertising. Apart from the landscapes, the frame always includes very obvious colour themes, and plays surprisingly with red and blue all the way through, until the peepshow moment in the very last part of the movie.

In a quite heavy symbolic use, the red seems to underline every possible link to love: bed covers, a woman’s shoes, Nastassja Kinsky’s car and clothes, the father’s and son’s shirts when they re-unite to find the mother, and even Travis’ hat in the desert is red: love drove him mad, love still weighs on his mind, the pain in his mind pushes him to walk, heading nowhere… Like an advert, everything is clearly pointed out for the viewer, and thank you, we get it. Red = love = blood is a kind of equation that we 59

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might find tiring after a while. Not to mention all the sky-blue cars in the renting company (+ the rental sign, Avis, is… red, of course…), and then the car is drowned in a huge perfect blue sky: Travis was “out of the blue”, and he is still lost to the world; he is “out there”! Out there being the desert, where motels and windmills of course have been painted with the very same two colours, for the sake of the viewer. Looking at the composition of the frames themselves, it’s nearly “too perfect”. In the car, Travis is - little by little – trapped by his brother, who brings him back to society.

Compared to the amazing free spaces of Mother Nature, the new “world” is like a prison that gradually takes him back again, puts him into boxes…

The picture speaks too much in a way. It’s overplaying, overstating.

If we continue to look at it carefully, taking the angle of psychological coherence, the film can appear to be pretty weak in a way. Why did Travis really leave them? We never really understand it. Any father in the same position, if his wife had tried to kill him, would have tried to save his son. Travis says Jane has never been a real mother, then why couldn’t he take care of the kid? Why is Travis leaving them again at the end, if not in order to create the lonesome-cowboy-effect ending? Guilt cannot be the only explanation: after all that time, he could be forgiven, and in a way, we feel that Jane is about to forgive him in the last peepshow moment. Why is Jane suddenly accepting to see her son, and it seems that she’s accepting to take her son back, even if she had done everything to stay away from him all those years? Why is it so simple for the son (Hunter) to leave his adopted parents that easily: he’s been sharing everything with them for the last four years, to a point where he considered them as his true parents, having only seen his real parents on an old super-8 film?

If we continue our dirty job of looking at flaws, we could also spend some time analysing the second half of the script: the way they find Jane, and how Travis finds a way to talk to her; it all sounds too easy. The script is rushing to make things happen; the scriptwriter is in a hurry - they have to close the package.

The more closely we look at the film, the more we look at the script itself - the more we discover its obvious imperfections. But what cannot be denied is the fact that the film has been totally successful in “reaching” audiences. And the Golden Palm was a unanimous choice of the Cannesjury, whose members seem to have been overwhelmed by a wave of faith and enthusiasm for what the film was giving an audience.

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Paris-Texas - an Ideal Development Scheme? The Importance of Finding a Driving Force…

Clearly the film must have reached something.

According to us, whatever the imperfections of the film are, whatever the “holes” are, Paris-Texas has a driving force that grabs the viewer. What we call driving force is what we could name the emotional engine, which is what pushes the character(s) forward, what drives the quest, the search, and the desire (both for these characters and for the viewer). And as soon as you have that driving force (not to be mixed up with the theme), everything is possible.

And that should be the very first angle for us to look at in a material in any scriptwriting process, be it a dive into a first draft, a rewrite, or even an adaptation.

I recently found myself working on a script adapted from a novel.

I deliberately asked the director who had been writing the first draft alone if I could avoid looking at the novel. I wanted to try to restructure the material of the script itself without any regard for the novel. The director had selected all the material he found tasty in the novel, and I wanted to stay in this tasty world he had created. It was wonderfully rich, full of poetry, but there was no driving force at all. And to my surprise, in reinventing a struggle, a desire within that world, in reinvesting the material with what I thought was a strong “emotional engine”, I reinvented the driving force that the novel initially had, without knowing it! This is to say that the director (a quite talented one I think), obsessed with his search for visuals, for scenes and characters, had been diving into the novel without looking for any “deep engine” to build his story; and that engine, to the director’s utter surprise, was right there in front of him, in the novel. And very often that is what happens: the writer-director, both drowned in and fascinated by his own material, doesn’t look for the driving force he needs, doesn’t realize that the script he is trying to write doesn’t give him an “emotional engine” he can rely on. Often, young writer-directors either are genuinely looking for that driving force but don’t know how to build it properly into their story, or they tend to think that such a driving force could damage their material.

My personal belief is that the “engine” in a script not only cannot damage a poetic material, but the very duty of that scriptwriting device is to help “deliver” this poetry to the public, thus helping it to vibrate properly with the audience, helping it to flow through their veins, bodies, and minds, instead of remaining in a closed system that only the writerdirector is connected to.

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When that drive is in place in a script, another huge advantage for the writer is that the imperfections can often be taken as strengths in the film.

The “holes” become genius ideas, become parameters that the spectator will want to dig into and think about… By using the engine of a story properly a writer and/or director can free himself or herself from the painful job of engineering an End to give an “answer”, of taking care of every detail, because when the audience isn’t “taken” by the story, they look at everything with a very sharp eye: the images, the quality of the dialogues, the logic of the actions, set-design etc. - whatever they are drawn to notice.

So, in a way, working properly on structure early enough is the best way to free yourself and allow a real creative process to happen during both the shooting and the editing of the film.

What I’ve discovered, looking through all the interviews given by both Wenders and Sam Shepard (co-writer of Paris-Texas; L.M. Kit Carson is credited for the adaptation), is that in a way, and not voluntarily at all, the writing process of the script had experienced a kind of “ideal” creative path…

First of all, before the shooting even started, they discovered that the initial second half of the script wasn’t what they were looking for. Wenders started to shoot having only the first half of the script. Thanks to the production plan, he was able to shoot the film chronologically, leaving him (and Sam Shepard, who was working on another project far away from the set) some more time to think about the second half.

What allowed them to start was the strong feeling of having in their hands what they needed to dive into the story: 1. The poetic and thematic parameters they wanted to build the film with: space, the loss of any connection, innocence, parentage, brotherhood, paternity (can one learn to be a father from scratch, from a blank page?), and the quest of one man: can you survive the loss of everything?

Can you destroy yourself with love? These poetic parameters were not put on the page as precise questions that begged precise answers, but as a quest in itself for Wenders, a way to consider the making of the film as a way to dig into a path in mind and space.

2. A strong “driving force”, an emotional engine able to powerfully take the viewer and make him a part of that poetic journey. In fact, in the first half of the movie, this driving force works with two engines, which are two quests: 62

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A) The quest of the brother (Walt) (first part of the first half): finding Travis, finding out what happened to him, why he disappeared all these years, and helping Travis to reconnect with his son. This could be summed up with the idea: “to help Travis come back to life”. What makes the quest very powerful for both Walt and the viewer is that Travis is his brother, who is totally lost (doesn’t even know his own name), and Walt, having no kid of his own, has become the adoptive father of Travis’ son (Hunter) during all these years.

B) Travis’ quest (starting slowly, gaining strength in Los Angeles, and in the second part of the first half of the story): finding out who he is, and who he was. Reconnecting with life again. Recreating a link with his own son, which leads him to what the second half of the story will be about: finding Jane, Hunter’s mother and the love of his life. This quest will be taken together with his son. Travis’ quest is reinforced by the fact that Hunter initially doesn’t recognize Travis as his father. Walt’s wife was so dedicated in bringing up Hunter (they thought Travis was dead!) that Travis’ reconnection with his son is a nightmare for her (and for Walt). Travis’ quest is further reinforced (quite artificially, we must admit) by the fact that what happened four years earlier seems to have been so terrible it is nearly impossible to tell. And in fact, when they shot the middle of the film, both Wenders and Shepard were unable to tell us what happened, simply because they didn’t know it themselves…

But who cares, what we ask of the filmmaker is to take us with them and they take us! In this film the driving force is powerful enough to allow Wenders to build his film with a pretty slow pace, surrounding us with deeply poetic parameters, or parameters that we can perceive as being poetic because we are taken by them.

And not having enough time to construct the second half of the story properly, they could only count on the strength of what they had already put in place for us. In other words, the strong drive and quest of the story/characters creates enough dynamic to allow Wenders to climb into the “boat” of what he’s already created in the first half, and allow the river of the story (to use his own words) to continue it’s path as naturally as possible. In other words, the story guides him more than he guides the film. In an interview with Laurent Tirard, more than 20 years later, Wenders says: “- in doing Paris, Texas, I had a kind of revelation. I understood that a story was like a river, and if we took the risk of putting our little boat on it, and if 63

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we trusted that river and its flow strongly enough, then the boat could be taken to some amazing place”.

To return to the delivery of the second part of the script: While they were already shooting, Wenders sent Shepard the part with Travis and his son leaving Los Angeles to try to find Jane in Houston, knowing that the fifth of each month, she would go to a bank to send some money for her kid. This sounds like a poor idea: why on the fifth? Apart from the fact that the scriptwriter needs it, it doesn’t sound realistic at all that she sends money on the very same day each month, but who cares, we are with our characters, able to swallow anything, because the first part of the story made us want to follow them wherever they went…

And just a few days before they reached that point in the story on set, Shepard delivered the very last part, when Travis eventually finds Jane, the famous peep show scenes that - in the final parts - reveal what happened four years ago. Shepard delivered them by phone, at night, with the first assistant director (Claire Denis) taking notes all night so they could prepare the shooting plans for the next days. They were in a hurry, they had no time to think clearly and discuss the ending. They rushed towards that ending.

And even if you can feel Shepard’s huge talent in putting words in the actors’ mouths in the dialogues, and even if the peep show idea gives a strength to these two major scenes of the third act, you can clearly feel how rushed the end of the script has been. They had to end it, and didn’t know how.

They had to find a way to close the story, after spending an hour and a half telling the viewer that something terrible had happened four years before that very moment; they had to finally deliver this “terrible truth”. It feels like a big unwrapping, and there is a lot of awkwardness in it, a lot of holes, a lot of non-resolution, rescued by style and by the actors. But do we care?

I don’t think so: in a way, if they had taken all the time needed to close the script properly before the shoot, they might have lost the flow, the current, the tide that the film was creating by itself. Holes and awkwardness are part of the beauty of this film, of its mystery.

If they had had the time to write 2 or 3 more drafts to deliver a proper ending for such a script, they would have probably tried to deliver some understandable conclusion, some clear answers to the questions the story had raised. These answers would have tried to resolve some thematic issues, which could have damaged the film’s natural path. Sometimes, scripts cannot be conclusive. Sometimes, stories lead towards opening up 64

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more questions than they can solve; certain films are not aiming at telling any “truth” in particular, but are opening gaps instead, abysses. Certain films can be designed as a means to prove something, but others are designed to question, to leave their doubts wide open, and often these films cannot know precisely what they will find before they end the process of coming into being.

That is precisely why, for some projects, finding the driving force, this “emotional engine” that pushes the script forward, has to be the central obsession before any attempt at finding a theme, finding “what the author wants to say”. For some of them, the making of the film is part of the process to find the core of the deep metaphors that will shape the soul of the film.

For Paris-Texas, trying to find one or two “core themes” for the film is nearly impossible.

Let’s try with a list of thematic questions: 1. Do we come from somewhere?

2. Do we (as humans) go anywhere?

3. Do our children owe their love to us?

4. Can we get used to life?

5. Is love an obstacle to living?

6. Can you still love when everything has been destroyed in you?

7. Is it possible to recover from the worst pain?

8. Can we survive the fact that our world is “canning” us?

(Putting us in small boxes)?

9. Can we (truly) communicate with others?

10. Is society and progress a machine that destroys our soul (any origin in us)?

11. Is progress making us come from nowhere?

12. Is love helping us to come from somewhere?

13. Does parenthood mean something?

And we could go on like that for another page.

If we asked a panel of viewers which number they would choose from the above list as a possible thematic core of the film, we can be sure we would end up with at least ten different possibilities.

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In other words, Paris-Texas can be considered as thematically open. And that is a result of the fact that Wenders and Shepard didn’t (couldn’t) impose a strategy for the ending of the film, they had to let it be.

This is where I wish to come back to methodology.

For this type of film, which is strongly driven by a poetic vision, ParisTexas has been involuntarily following an ideal script development path.

The writers had all the time they needed to write the first half of the story, giving them, firstly, time to discover the poetic and human material they wanted to build their film on, and secondly to find a strong, powerful quest/engine/driving force with which they could create the true strength of the story.

And once they had that potential, they were lucky enough to be allowed to start shooting the material and transform this river/flow/current core of the story into a real living being; and having started this flow, they could only deliver the “result” of that driving force, the second part of the story then becoming some animalistic, somewhat spontaneous offspring of the initial input, allowing the shoot to be a kind of quest in itself, following the quest driven by the characters… footstep after footstep.

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Email Conversation 2008 - 2009

Email Conversation 2008 - 2009 Adaptation

with Gino Ventriglia, Jeff Rush, Franz Rodenkirchen, Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten, Antoine Le Bos. Gino Ventriglia: Hello, everybody.

The following notes are meant to start out a conversation about some of the problems raised by the adaptation process.

In the fifties and sixties, Italian screenwriters were used to work on original screenplays by writing down a short treatment (the ‘subject’) and a rough step-outline. Then, in order to prepare the first draft, they wrote a longer treatment: sometimes, it could run up to two hundred pages, well beyond the strictly necessary material needed for the script. The world of their story was explored in depth with the tools usually available to novelists - thoughts of the characters, detailed back-stories and psychologies to build up motivations, dialogues, accurate descriptions of places and actions, and so on. In their words, they considered the long treatment as ‘the novel of the film’, a novel from which to draw - to adapt - the screenplay.

I find this approach interesting. I guess it was not so much a problem of proving themselves as full ‘writers’: the problem was that the screenwriters often were considered a minor species of literary storyteller by critics and scholars. But the long treatment was neither meant to be published, nor to experiment linguistic or narrative styles. It was rather a process aimed to create and know an entire fictional world, developing its imagery to a full extent through the written word: and the form of the novel was perceived as a more flexible tool compared to the necessarily rigid form of the screenplay (deriving its actual shape from a mix of theatre drama writing and the early ‘shooting script’ - the list of shots to be taken to cover a scene and tell the story visually). In order to research the different potentials of the story, in terms of theme and plot and characters, the ‘novel’ offered an ‘objectivised’ world - from which to pick only those elements useful to tell the story they wanted to tell.

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That approach goes into a line of thought claiming that every screenplay, original or not, is in some way the adaptation from some kind of pre-existing ‘text’ (either in literature, or in the oral tradition, or in real life, or other sources). It also goes in the direction of those who support the idea that there is only a limited amount of possible story patterns (Howard Hawks, to name one). The consequence of such conceptions is to push the idea of adaptation very far, till it entirely overlaps the same drama writing; I think that our terminology is too broad: under the word ‘adaptation’, different kinds of operations and processes are crowded together.

Let’s consider the case, not unusual, of a script adapted from (in this case, it would be more correct to say ‘based on’) a short story - or newspaper story - to make a 100-minute motion picture. Here, the writer has to invent and fill in all that is missing in the few pages of the story (new or different characters and events and twists, in order to make those few elements that have interested him work dramaturgically) - and somehow he must refer to some dramatic writing pattern to structure the hundred minutes or more of screen narrative. That may mean to have a hypothesis of a theme, which works as a compass to create the single steps (scenes or sequences) needed to develop the story.

In The Spider’s Stratagem, for example, Bertolucci (along with co-writers E. De Gregorio and M. Parolini) retains just the main plot mechanism of the four pages of J. L. Borges’ Theme of the Hero and the Traitor: the whole fictional universe is totally re-invented, in time and space, characters and events.

In this case it was possible to avoid the main issue of the relation between Story (the bare main plot events and characters of the story) and Style (the original writer’s peculiar way to tell the story) as posed by RushDancyger; or, in McFarlane’s terminology, between Narration and Narrative. Because what was retained in the adaptation process was only a dramaturgical knot and some movements of the plot, and no Style (or Narrative) was strongly implied in the original text. So, it was relatively easy and ‘harmless’ to retain one element of Borges poetics, and re-elaborate it through Bertolucci’s poetics and aesthetics. Probably, most adaptations from newspaper stories can be treated in the same way.

Very different is the case of Fellini and B. Zapponi in adapting and shooting Toby Dammit - although it’s not a full-length script: here, very little is left of both poetics and aesthetics of E. A. Poe’s Never Bet the Devil your 68

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Head. In that case, it’s much more evident that the intention of the author was to cannibalize the original and rewrite it within the categories of his own poetics and aesthetics. The remains of the original text are just the name of one character and the way he loses his life - his head cut off. No trace of Poe’s theme, nor characters or plot, nor story or style.

On another level, how to consider a particular kind of adaptation like Twelve Monkeys, directed by Terry Gilliam and adapted by J. and D. Peoples, from another very singular short movie, La Jetee, written and directed by Chris Marker? I don’t think that we can talk of a ‘remake’, as much as an adaptation, although the source material is already a movie. In a way, it’s like an author writing a novel out of another author’s short story.

In all these three cases, I’d consider the adaptation process much closer to the screenwriting process of an original script, seeing the source material as more ‘inspirational’ rather than the actual object of an ‘adaptation’ for the movie theatre. And probably, in the spectator’s mind, there’s already the awareness that the book (or the short) and the film are two different aesthetical objects, to consider and enjoy through different systems of categories.

That may not be true for very well known books: I’m thinking, for instance, of the two versions of Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos De Laclos. In Dangerous Liaisons, by S. Frears’ and C. Hampton (who had also written the play), the epistolary novel is strongly treated as ‘the novel of cruelty’ meant to be by the original French writer, whereas in Valmont, by J. C. Carriére and M. Forman, a large part of its power is lost because of different choices, both in the adaptation and directing.

Can the well-known ‘text’ to adapt then be considered a sort of ‘partitura’ (score/composition), where each player can ‘perform’ according to his/ her own interpretation? And therefore, will the text be exposed to more or less successful or effective interpretations?

A connected issue is about the endings, which, I guess we all agree, ‘contain’ and reveal the theme of the story. In the end of Stephen King’s Apt Pupil, the teenager Todd kills his school psychological consultant Ed French, then goes up to the highway with his rifle and ammunition to shoot randomly, and is taken by police only five hours later. His initiation to evil is completed, but it ends up in a tragedy. In the adaptation, directed

by Brian Singer and written by B. Boyce, most of the movements of the 69

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novel are kept, but in the end Todd doesn’t kill French, he just blackmails him through the threat of a lie. He gets away with his misfits, and wins.

Changing sense of the theme and part of the tone (it’s not a tragedy), makes it a proper adaptation, or just a ‘based on’ new story?

In other words, if we adapt Romeo and Juliet, and everything is just the same, except for the ending (Juliet wakes up in time and they live happily forever), is it still Shakespeare’s work of art, although not a tragedy anymore, or is it something completely different? Of course, the theme would be the same, but the sense of it would change: instead of ‘the conflicts and the conventions of the adults killing (the love of) the innocents’, it would be ‘the love of the innocents wins over the conflicts and the conventions of the adults’.

One last question arising: is there some kind of narrative text that is impossible to adapt for the screen, regardless of its success? As far as I may think, probably only Finnegan’s Wake might resist an adaptation, but I’m not even so sure about that…

Jeff Rush: Hi All, Gino raised so many issues I don’t know where to start. Just what is an adaptation and is everything really an adaptation in some way or another? The critical people talk about inter-textuality, the fact that every creative act is a borrowing or reworking of the sea of mediated stories in which we live. The new media people talk about the docu-verse, a universe of existing documents that makes writing an organization of links, explicit or otherwise.

But to be specific for a moment, I wonder what everyone thought of the end of No Country for Old Men, particularly the stuff with the sheriff played

by Tommy Lee Jones. I had read the book and found much of the first half very well done but a somewhat literal take on the book, which is okay, but I wasn’t exactly getting much in the way of resonance out of it. The increased role of the sheriff in the second half really captured me. Yet the essential irony of the book escaped me. It seemed literal, No Country for Old Men, the sheriff was old, and it made sense that he wasn’t up for it anymore.

I went back to the book and realized what had been cut and wonder now about the choices. In the book, much is made of him being a war hero.

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There are recurrent first person mediations by Ed Tom (that was the sheriff’s name) that conveyed an underlying anxiety even before the action built. But we never knew what the anxiety was. Then right prior to his giving up on catching Bardem’s character, there is a long scene, not in the movie, where he confesses to the old man (his uncle), how the medal he received during the war was a fraud. He really ran and left his men exposed (or at least he thought he did, it is presented with enough ambiguity to think about it). The essential irony of the book becomes much richer at that point as the fragility and fundamental clutch on life at any age replaces that sense of growing old and tired that the title hints at.

Now you can see why they cut this: 1) In the novel, it is a long, expositional dialogue scene, 2) the character of the sheriff is much more compromised (yet richer) if we know about his earlier failures, and 3) this removed the first person that is so hard in film (but that also provides a moral perspective on the book but maybe, lacking that apparent moral perspective, they did not need to undercut). And they left that lovely ending and allowed Ed Tom’s dreams.

Still I wonder. Could that anxiety be added to the sheriff right from the beginning? Could there have been more sense of his moral perspective set up and then knocked down and would it have given it more depth (especially in the middle)? What equivalents to his first-person monologues are there in film (short of voice over)? Or am I asking for something that actually is there and I’m not seeing it?

Franz Rodenkirchen: Dear friends, colleagues and partners in crime, It’s been a while. Haven’t I written this reply many times in my head? Of course I have. Every time I thought of it, a different aspect came back to me that I wished to respond to.

But maybe I have to start with a kind of confession: if given the choice, I’d always say I prefer an original screenplay to an adaptation. It is an impulse I had never questioned up until now, really. Needless to say, quite a few of my favourite films are adaptations of pre-existing works, mostly other narratives. Indeed it seems that the question of adaptation versus 71

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original work, if it isn’t only some very personal thing I have, seems to relate to a claim we make on new works, new scripts, new film ideas for them to offer something that “adds” to the corpus of already existing works.

Or maybe I should rather say I tend to make that claim? And would that mean that an adaptation is less “new”?

I fully realise that my own impulse is rather unsupportable once I scrutinize it a bit more. Still, the little voice in the back of my head pops up sometimes.

It seems to me there is a very basic quality inherent in the idea of adaptation: that, in order for it to be adaptable, there has to be something which foregoes the specific form in which it is presented, meaning that, if something can be a comic book, a novel, an opera, a ballet or a film, and maybe even a painting, there must be some core element which is independent of the different ways of expressing it. Rather like a liquid that can assume the form of different containers, while it can also become frozen or turn into gas. I guess in that respect Gino’s propositions were just trying to sketch the vast landscape of the “adaptable” (the “liquid”), which of course goes way beyond the written narrative (as just one potential “container”).

One of the first things that strikes me is that in the fifties and sixties, a lot of films were made that naturally assumed a relation between the novel and the fiction film, as well as between the novelist or writer of literature and the scriptwriter/filmmaker. If we look for example at films like Hiroshima Mon Amour by Alain Resnais (based on the book by Marguerite Duras), or Belle de Jour by Luis Bunuel (based on the novel by Joseph Kessel), or indeed Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (adapted from Alain RobbeGrillet’s work), the films themselves seem to retain a more writerly, novelistic, or narrative (as opposed to dramatic) way to tell their story. While they clearly also needed to adapt the written work they based their film on, it was not so much an adaptation that was focused on storytelling, on primarily causality-driven “plots”, but an exploration which often used comparable techniques - “inferential walks in the fictional woods”, as Umberto Eco would call it.

Working with Eastern-European storytellers and seeing their particular storytelling and filmmaking traditions, I often found that the scripts were still closer to novels, not plot-driven, highly dramatic affairs that used storytelling tools to carefully prepare emotional effects on their audience. If this is nowadays at least partly considered dubious, it is mostly due to the perception of adaptation as a strategy to expand/repeat the commercial 72

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success of a written work in different media (novel, film, musical), instead of having a “new idea”.

Nowadays we often find the suggestion of novelists adapting their own work for the screen should be rejected, because it will most likely result in failure. The writers try to protect the integrity of their work, which of course stems from the medium they based it in, let’s say the novel. So the assumption (and quite often also the fact) is, that writers aren’t tough enough to make the necessary cuts and changes when adapting their own work.

But what is it actually that is adapted? What makes an adaptation “successful” or “failed”? And who’s to tell?

First, the idea to adapt a certain work indicates that there’s a perceived potential that the work could retain some essence in another medium. This already depends on what one finds most interesting in the source material.

For some, it is mostly the mere facts and circumstances of the story: follow the plot, throw out all superfluous material. For others, it is the attempt at a faithful rendering of that which made the original work effective for them as audience. This can be mood, atmosphere, the emotional journey of the audience independent of any specific character, etc.

We all know of the people who go to the cinema to watch the adaptation of a favourite novel and come out disappointed: “I liked the novel better”, is the most common remark. Usually this is because the film had to select its material from the vast possibilities a novel usually offers (which is why many consider short stories so much more adaptable, as Gino also remarks). I myself, as a huge fan of the novels, went to see the Harry Potter-series, not hoping for much, actually dreading it. And despite knowing that they just had to be severely cut down in content, it was exactly the filmmakers’ attempt to retain as many story elements as possible, the focus on the mere causal sequence of events, which made it so unsuccessful as an adaptation for me. There was no room whatsoever to get to know the characters, not a moment to stay with them, feel them, get under their skin a bit, or indeed, sniff the atmosphere of Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry. Had I really expected anything else? No, but still I went, hoping to be able to experience again the unique atmosphere I so love in the books and especially the strong emotional theme(s). Interestingly it was the third instalment of the series Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that I felt succeeded best. It was also the one that took the biggest creative license with the original material and in terms of fidelity was the most unfaithful! It was necessary to create the feeling for the characters on screen.

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But actually, and maybe this expands on the idea of what “makes” a good adaptation, I also felt that most of the people who artistically worked on the film, had either never read the novels, or if they had, hadn’t found an emotional entrance into their world.

A necessity for creative license in the adaptation process seems to be quite frequent. Apart from a more formulaic suspense story (or detective mystery), I have often found when working with adaptations that one needed to almost exorcise the novel from the script. With every new draft of the script, it needed to grow more and more independent of the source material and find its own successful strategy. The same seems to work for adaptations of personal experiences. What seems to be the biggest asset, the writer’s intimate knowledge of every angle and detail, often proves to be the greatest obstacle in making the necessary dramatic decisions or indeed, find the dramatic focus (if it is dramatic storytelling we’re after) that actually gets to the core of the personal experience. We need to find the suitable/adaptable elements for the respective medium, before we can go about discussing techniques and “plot”.

What indeed makes a successful adaptation? Is Antonioni’s Blow Up such a case? Whoever has read the short story by Julio Cortazar on which Blow Up is based, will find little resemblance at first glance. Maybe even at second glance. Who would want to judge whether Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is a successful adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a book written more than half a century before the American war in Vietnam?

I happen to have revisited an old favourite film of mine, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, of course another adaptation. Reportedly “based on a true story” (and played accordingly in the film), the film is a rather faithful rendering of the novel by Joan Lindsay. The most obvious but maybe crucial change is that Peter Weir and his scriptwriter Cliff Green decided to focus even stronger on the mystery, the “what happened” and consequently the desire of the audience to get to the bottom of this mystery. All material (it wasn’t much) that would distract from focussing on this desire to “know” fell along the wayside, either in the adaptation or later in the editing. By making the whole thing “based on a true story” the writers (both Joan Lindsay and Cliff Green) could get away with having an open ending and even derive strength from it for their narrative: it is exactly the openness that goes so much against the usual conventions of the mystery and our sense of closure, which gave the film its intense atmospheric effect - and after-effect. I still remember how, as roman74

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tic 13-year-olds, we’d quote from the dialogue to allude to the sense of mystery the film so consequently conveys. And as we all have painfully understood at one point in our lives, the mystery is only exciting as long as it is alive - once we learn what is behind, we’re disappointed because the mystery is essentially empty.

As I start digressing (reminiscing, dreaming), I’d rather stop here and throw the hook out. Catch, anyone?

Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten: Dear everyone.

Gino talked about how the Italian screenwriters of the fifties and sixties wrote long documents exploring the world of the story in depth, with a more literary focus. I find this approach most relevant to today’s screenwriting/adaptation process. In working with a variety of writers and writer/ directors from a wide background and range, with a diversity of themes and approaches, one must constantly re-invent new methods to explore. I try to pick up the impulse from the writer as to what would be the most useful approach for them; recently having found that several writers have been ”liberated” through this free-styling.

The series of documents then become in fact ”adaptable” to the screen format.

In one case as a bonus we discovered that the film-writer also was a fantastic prose-writer, and that the work-in-progress-discovery-material actually materialized itself as a publishable - and thus - literary work.

In another case the content to be explored in the film seemed not suitable for a “normal” script format at all, but rather suggested that the writer/ director should devise a new format; one that most suitably would convey the story to decision-makers, collaborators and others in the next step of the process.

After all, there are script formats that we call standard, but when did Standard ever measure up to Visionary?

Of course the script shall be an easy blueprint for all to work with, and we are creatures of habit. But I’d like to remind myself that there is no death penalty (yet) for re-invention. So, in conclusion: sometimes the script has 75

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to adapt to the material, and the material should lead the way for what documents to be produced.

On a completely different note, talking of “pure” adaptation, i.e. literary works being transformed into films, I was interestingly re-reminded (via the initiation of this conversation) that a surprisingly high number of (personally so considered) key oeuvres were in fact adaptations.

I re-discovered for instance that Kubrick based eleven out of his thirteen films on literary texts, some very obviously so: Eyes Wide Shut (Arthur Schnitzler), The Shining (Stephen King), Full Metal Jacket (Gustaf Hasford), Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov), Barry Lyndon (William Makepeace Thackeray), A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess), 2001 (Arthur C Clarke), Dr. Strangelove (Peter George), Spartacus (Howard Fast) - and those I have not seen too; Paths of Glory (1957, novel by Humphrey Cobb) and The Killing (1956, novel by Lionel White). Only the first two: Killers Kiss (1955) and Fear and Desire (1953) seem to be original screenplays.

What does it all mean? Perhaps Kubrick uncovered that there was more depth to be explored through adaptation, rather than starting “from scratch”?

I mean no one can accuse Kubrick of being lazy, considering all the research he put into each film, so it would not read as easier, but conceivably more suitable to his style.

A lot of adapted works I had read feverishly, long before they became films, like The Piano Teacher (Elfride Jelinek, 1983), Cronenburg ´s Crash (J.G. Ballard, 1973), Requiem for a Dream (Hubert Selby, 1973), Wise Blood (Flannery O’ Connor, 1952) - but quite a few were discoveries first made through the films.

One of them was Fassbinder’s version of Berlin Alexanderplatz (named by imdb.com as the “longest narrative ever made”) based on the novel by Alfred Döblin from 1929. The experience of seeing this entire film work in a marathon silver screen viewing is one of my strongest cinematic experiences ever.

From an adaptation point of view, I suppose Fassbinder decided he needed the 931 minutes to fully adapt such a complex and innovative - visionary - novel, and so that’s why it has that TV-ish format. But to me, it will always be One Film (a masterpiece, actually); not in any way a serial product.

Also: I never knew Nostalghia (Tarkovskij, 1983) was co-written with Tonino Guerra (what did he NOT write?) Suddenly that peculiarly kindred spirit 76

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of L’Eclisse, La Notte, and L’Avventura surfaces, and it all makes sense: the influence of this magnificent signature writer interflows into a film, which I always felt was so “Tarkovskij”. But then of course, it is both Russian, and Italian, as well.

Medea. This is another alluring case. The half-swede, half-dane Carl Th. Dreyer (who, by the way, mainly adapted plays, novellas and novels for his films) wrote and planned to make the film, but never did. Lars von Trier filmed his script years later (1988), casting Udo Kier as Jason in the script written by his genius predecessor/colleague, then dead since 20 years. This Medea was - as they are - based on the play by Euripides (who for a guy who’s been dead since 406 BC, gets a lot of film credits… some ten official versions of Medea exist).

A note on the collaborative force, for me another form of Adaptation - adapting to each other, to the material, to the ultimate goal of the director, to the group, to the situation etcetera. In one interview the “all time adaptor” and woman, Suso Cecchi D´Amico uses an interesting word for her working role. She is - so far, at the humble age of 94 - credited with 117 films, like Rome Open City (with 4 others), The Bicycle Thief (with 5 others, based on the novel by Luigi Bartolini), Miracle in Milano (with 5 others, based on Zavattini’s novel), The Leopard (with 4 others, based on Lampedusa’s novel), The Stranger (with 3 others, one being Visconti, based on Camus’ novel), Rocco and his brothers (with 9 others, all men). She has also worked with Derek Jarman, Antonioni, Moravia… and so on.

Anyway, she said in this interview that: “My work has something of the Artisan in it. And that is something I like very much. /--/ To understand what the director is interested in and what he does best, and then to give him something that suits him. In the end Visconti and I hardly talked at all about the project itself, because I knew exactly what he wanted. For example when I wrote the Proust screenplay for him, it was the easiest work I ever did, because we had talked about Proust for so many years that I knew which were the scenes he wanted and just what kind of picture he would like”.

So, again, the word Adaptation is open: in this case meaning almost adapting to the mind of another.

My last ‘implant’ to the discussion is 24 Hour Psycho (1993) by Douglas Gordon, which is a drastic re-invention of an existing film into - if one 77

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chooses to see it that way - an evolved form, into the art world (that has always loved and related to film). A slowed-down version of Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960), shown in the art space, screened indirectly through a mirror reflection. (As a detail one can note that Psycho was based on the novel by Robert Bloch and turned into a screenplay by Joseph Stefano, and then - as is the custom - adapted by Hitchcock into this film).

So - looking at this simple example, there seems to be a limitless number of adaptation levels and depths. The way Jeff suggest the critical and the new media people discuss things is indeed highly relevant and inspiring, I want to learn about it, Jeff!

And, dispatching this last as a submarine to perchance float up: moral judgements/invisible censoring in adaptation: In the Swedish film Let the Right One In (written by John Ajvide Lindqvist, directed by Tomas Alfredsson, 2008), the paedophiliac element is elegantly removed from the adapted film. It might make it better but: what - if anything - can happen to the moral, social intent of a literary work, as it turns into film?

Is this one reason why adaption is so exciting; that entirely new, deep meanings can Appear, but also Disappear?

Antoine Le Bos: Adapting Proust and a few other things.

When that subject (adaptation) was picked up to start this e-mail conversation, I thought that I couldn’t wake myself up on such a topic that I felt was too theoretical. But the way Gino has started it is so opening and refreshing that I’d like to add a few things (as somebody famous said, “we like to add…”).

To take up on Gino’s comments from the last paragraph: on top of the list of written materials or novels supposedly impossible to adapt for the screen there is Marcel Proust’s Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu; because of it’s obsession for details, because of it’s lack of clear dramaturgy, lack of action, lack of clear human quests, fights and interactions, because of it’s amazing dedication to the inside voice of the narrator, to his flow of very intimate sensations. And there we have this amazing example of Raoul Ruiz’ adaptation of Le Temps Retrouvé for the screen, with Deneuve, Mal78

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kovich and others. When Ruiz asked Gilles Taurand to write the adaptation, he only gave him a few months to deliver a shootable draft. Knowing how huge the challenge was, how completely lost in Proust’s material a screenwriter could be (Taurand explained how mad and deep his dive into Proust has been), the short amount of time given to the writer is a clear sign of Raoul Ruiz’s desire. He didn’t want to find a narrative “way” into Proust’s novel. He didn’t want to find a trick to create a narrative engine in the too rich material given by the novelist that would easily take the spectator to the end of the movie.

The script he asked Taurand to write was just a way to get the characters moving properly on stage, to get some logic and dynamic connections between elements like places, objects, facts and people, in order to avoid a complete surrealistic experience like Bunuel’s Andalusian Dog (even if Ruiz would probably have loved this kind of attempt, but his producer wouldn’t have financed it!).

And here is another case for Gino’s list: adaptation that just asks to organize a bit (and simplify) an initial material that is considered as being “too rich”. Ruiz probably only wanted a script in order to “play” with Proust’s parameters once he was on the set. The script is there to make an understandable list of Marcel’s very rich material, but the real purpose of the director is to make things fly, to turn the spectators head and sensations, to invent new correspondences, resonances between people, facts, places and objects. He invented the most amazing travelling of objects we’ve ever seen on a screen. Not the camera turning around reality, but the world of things turning around the camera, as if things and facts were dancing around us with a life of their own. Here the adaptation clearly is the occasion for the director to project his sensations and feelings about the original novel (you cannot adapt Proust without trying to say something about him…), without caring that much about narration. In fact, in this film, narration is very difficult to follow for the viewer who is not already close to Proust’s world. But the same viewer dives into a dizzying world and has to forget logic and let the senses take over on brain, which in a way can be considered as Proust’s signature, thus proving that Ruiz’ adaptation made it!

The question that arises here is: in such an extreme case, would we recommend (as story editors or script-consultants) to a young writer-director to let narration down to such an extent? At first sight, I can say why not: when you deal with a work as well-established, strong and acclaimed in the 79

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best society as Proust-novels, you can well decide to restructure the official categories and leave the beast demolished. The recent (and sometimes painful) history of art has been widely built on wiping out all pre-existing constructions, so why not continue that pretty enjoyable game.

But when I look at it more carefully, I’m not that sure. First of all, why continue to destroy, when so much has been wiped out already? Second of all, Ruiz chooses as a writer one of the more gifted European screenwriters of that period. He clearly knows that when Taurand builds a story, he is very conscious about how to use all the tricks that make a story go forward.

And even when Ruiz will destroy elements of that initial structure when shooting or editing, there will still be some of that building energy in place.

Thirdly, the moment in time at which this film has been produced, the huge power of the producer (Paulo Branco) in the French and European financing system at that time, made it possible for such an extreme experience (high budget and lack of understandable narration) to be produced. We all know that this has become very different these days, apart maybe for acclaimed directors that can attract the public in movie theatres to share very odd experiences (but even David Lynch is in trouble when his narration becomes weaker, look at Inland Empire…). I thus consider that working as much as possible to assist (and insist) a young writer on building a dramaturgical coherence and strength with his own material is the only way to help imaginary worlds of tomorrow and unusual ways to look at today’s societies to be delivered to the public.

PS: Maybe for further conversations…

This gives me a good launching pad to jump to a subject that I’d love to debate with you (huge jump, sorry!): as screenwriting coaches, we often see young screenwriters try to avoid by any means to use dramaturgic devices to develop their script. Can we let them drive into the wall full speed, in order for instance that after five to ten years of crashing into the walls; they realize that drama structure is just a way to link the spectator to their work, emotions and feelings? For the talented, our job would then be to make them crash as quickly as possible so that they accept to work properly on their writing craft (or find co-writers…). Or is it possible to help them find the right track as quickly as possible, as if they had no time? The answer is probably somewhere in between, and clearly depends on the personality, mind and abilities of the writer.

But what strikes me is how we mostly try to work on this with our minds 80

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and voices, whereas the core lies in our stomachs and emotions. A few years ago, I dealt with a workshop that was involving both young actors and young writers. I chose to create exercises that were linking the type of processes you use with actors to better the potential power of a scene and writing exercises (writing scenes from situations found in the nearby street). The immediate lesson that the writers took from the acting work was obvious: if there is no conflict or strong desire for something (no objective or “motivation” for the main characters), the actors weren’t able to find anything convincing. The actors had in a way to transform themselves into “animals” looking for conflict, trouble or desire, thus inventing the “engine” that would provide them enough electricity in the blood to do their job properly. And the writers discovered that if they wanted to give the actors the right material, they had to be (like actors!) hunting for conflict, hunting for words that hurt, for not confessed desires, or for the worst fears. If they didn’t want to completely loose the control over their script when it was in the hands of actors, they just had no choice!

Jeff Rush: Hi All, We’re all still in a post-Obama glow over here, although given how bad the world looks since, he will need to work magic. Speaking of which leads me to think about another form of adaption - adaptation of history (and wizards); particularly in light of Franz’s discussion about Harry Potter. He talked about his love of the books (I love them too) and how he dreaded seeing the adaptations. I’m wondering how adaptations have different effects on us when we love/hate the original. And also, how our feelings about adaptations may change when our feelings about the original changes, a kind of extension of the film into day-to-day life that doesn’t happen in the same way with original scripts.

What started me on this was the question of seeing Oliver Stone’s W. In the run-up to the election, no one would see it because of the fear that if Obama lost, the film would continue to represent our future (or close enough). It wasn’t that we thought the film represented the “truth”, but rather that we were afraid we would be haunted by its images, which corresponded with our fears. We would not be able to get them out of our minds.

Now that it is over, the movie seems a goof and I put it on my Netflix list.

It can’t hurt me anymore.

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Or take Hotel Rwanda. I thought I knew enough to recognize all the story tricks that were used to make the film watchable, especially the focus on the internal life of the main character played by Don Cheadle (who I’d watch in anything). I thought I could imagine beyond the film the reality that was Rwanda. But I didn’t realize the extent to which I had been taken in.

A few weeks ago, I saw the Austrian documentary-maker Hubert Sauper’s Kisangani Diary, a brutal railway trip into Zaire, where UN troops discover thousands of Rwandan refugees. What struck me most was the impersonality of the documentary footage. How casually the bodies are handled, how indifferent the camera feels when it records a row of dead babies, how the emptiness of the human husk overcomes any other point of view.

The notion of a story defeats the possibility of seeing that. But I also realize that while I accepted the impersonality in a doc, I would not accept it in fiction.

One of the better pieces to come out of 9/11 was Paul Greengrass’ United 93. What’s good about it is that it does not only focus on one or two characters, and it does not give you anything about them beyond how they act on that morning. This gives the film a sense of historical weight because our focus is directed to the event and not to the individuals. On the other hand, what is missing from the film is a perspective, a sense of the meaning of the event, as interpreted through the characters. It is a conundrum particular to this form of adaptation. The weight of the historic adaptation seems to require a distance that destroys narrative involvement. I wish I knew how to solve it.

I’m done with adaptation. I wonder if it is not time to move our discussion to the next topic. One new topic might be the issue that Antoine raised - the question of do we teach/think of scripts in terms of the organization we know ahead of time or do we let our students/writers discover as they go. I just read a piece by the English novelist Zadie Smith called Two Paths for the Novel (available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083) which I associate with this question. She considers what she calls “lyric realism” which she compares to more ambitious narrative, and asks whether the ambitious narrative doesn’t speak more cogently to our time (even though the lyric realism sells better). I wonder whether leading our students/writers to certain organizations that we know ahead of time doesn’t reproduce the limitations of this lyric realism.

PS: I almost forgot Proust. I really appreciated Antoine’s discussion of Temps Retrouve, a film I had never heard of. Watching the film, which I liked a great 82

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deal, I wondered if we should not also add a category of adaptation that only works narratively when considered as mediation on an existing work that the viewer already knows. As Antoine says, I can’t imagine what sense the film would make if you did not know the world of the books. However, as almost a series of variations on Proust’s work, it is wonderful (particularly John Malkovich as the Baron de Charlus).

Ruiz’s film leads me to Chantal Akerman and Eric De Kuyer’s La Captive, another Proust-inspired screenplay. The film is narratively coherent even without knowing Proust, but American critics found it cold and inhuman.

However, I found it quite powerful, particularly in its sexual representation.

The writers find a masturbatory sexuality in the fictional Marcel that I had never quite imagined in the book, but that adds a layer of isolation to him that I hadn’t before thought about. However, the film ultimately requires the same knowledge of the character from the book. Without the ability to imagine the character’s vacillating thoughts about Albertine, the American critics are probably right - the film remains cold and flat Gino Ventriglia: I find that every conversation on adaptation has a sort of ‘natural’ tendency to quickly become much wider than the starting point meant to be.

It’s a fact. Not only because any process of re-mediation (as defined by Bolter and Grusin: that is, of transforming a text conceived for a medium into the text usable for another medium) has to do with the ‘correct’ and ‘appropriate’ translation of the original text into the new language, which might seem ‘only’ a problem of technical mastering of two languages (the source’s language, for example the written pages of a novel, and the language of destination, say the written pages of a script, or the audiovisual sequences of a film). In fact, the technical mastering of the different languages is just the final skill that is necessary to give shape and style to a series of choices that have been made before.

In Mario Lavagetto’s famous essay, Stanza 43, he mentions one episode that happened in real life to Marcel Proust and a friend of his, Reynaldo Hahn: during a walk in a country garden, the writer stopped in front of a bush of Bengala roses. He asked his friend to leave him alone for a while.

His friend went on walking on his own, and, after a certain time, he returned to the same spot to find Marcel still standing in front of the roses, staring at them. The episode - and variations of it - has been told a number 83

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of times, even by Proust himself: it has been taken into consideration by different commentators because it is found to be particularly meaningful to define the peculiar perception and glance that Proust has on the surroundings, especially on the objects, which is crucial to understanding his works of art, as Antoine’s observations point out. Surprisingly, the simple episode has raised different interpretations: on one side Ernst Robert Curtius reads it as a classical contemplation, as the process by which Proust ‘absorbs’ the appearances (Aufsagen der Erscheinungen), he appropriates the world. On another side, Jean Paul Sartre denies the possibility of knowing by ‘eating’ the object, the roses stay there, in their ‘otherness’ that cannot be ‘digested’ and become contents of conscience; knowing is more like ‘exploding oneself’ towards what is out there. Giacomo Debenedetti reads the same episode in another way: not so much as Proust looking for the essence of the roses, on the contrary, Proust ‘exposing himself ‘ to be looked for ‘by the roses’, abandoning himself to be tempted and seduced by the essence of those roses.

We are here in front of different, in a way diverging, interpretations of the same ‘scene’ (and conceptions of the processes of perception and knowledge): in one it is the ‘movement’ of a person toward the object in order to grab its inner secret, in the other the co-presence of entities irreducible of one to the other, in the third the ‘opening’ of that same person to the object in order to be affected - and modified - by it.

If this were a scene of a script to translate into images with all its implied meanings, the author should make the choice to go with either one interpretation - or propose a fourth one - since ‘a man standing in front of a bush of roses’ doesn’t really say more than that. So, the author would be called to find, in terms of cinematic language, the proper techniques the ‘comparable techniques’ mentioned by Franz in his intervention - to express one of the possible meanings of that scene, given that we want to focus on the way Proust’s perception worked, and not just on the fact that a man walks in a garden and stops in front of a bush of roses. It is clear that each interpretation has a radically different set of image sequences to properly correspond to the selected sense.

Whatever the final rendering of the ‘scene’ is, a huge amount of interpretation of the text has been done to get the right meanings of the original material, on many different levels, and that effort is just the first step to determine the following adaptation choices. The process doesn’t stop there, because if the interpretation of the original text is indispensable in 84

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order to understand materials and intentions of the original author, a new set of choices is now necessary to define the criteria of the adaptation itself. And that implies the intentions of the adaptation writer: given that he/she has studied the original text and interpreted it, what are his/her intentions to be expressed in the new text? In other words, what is the ‘use’ that the author of the adaptation wants to make of both - the original materials and the chosen interpretation?

The many issues connected to the fidelity to the original source and its author’s intentions find their limits in the interpretation that the adaptation author prefers and the use that he/she wants to make of it. In his Saying almost the same thing, a composite essay on translation, Umberto Eco points out the differences between Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and its filmic adaptation, Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice. In the latter, the choice is made to change Gustav Aschenbach’s profession, a 50 year old scholar of art and history in the novel, characterized by his neoclassic love for the perfection of the form (in a way, a critical - or ironic - treatment of the ‘winkelmannian aesthete’), to a musician - fond of Mahler - in the film. That change is read as the symptom of a strong divergence in the themes - the intentions - that the two authors, Mann and Visconti, aim to express. The literary pages tell the story of Aschenbach’s shocking discovery that his admiration for Tadzio, a 14 year old boy, at first observed as a classical piece of art - a statue - for the perfection of his shape, is stirring in his mind and body an erotic passion; he finds death because it is his platonic sense of algid beauty that falls apart in the face of a very earthly lust (it is Apollo who is defeated by Dionysus). In Visconti’s version, Aschenbach is already a decadent musician who fits well in Venice, where the plague has spread. And the process of falling into a carnal passion is not all in Aschenbach’s mind: in the novel, the innocent Tadzio looks at him a few times and smiles at him once, whereas in the movie Aschenbach falls at first sight and the boy, the actor is a little older than 14, is at least ambiguous in his interaction with the musician. So, what is missed are the original intentions of Mann’s work, the hard fall of an idealistic belief crashed by the power and liveliness of carnal passion: in Visconti’s work, it becomes a sort of agony, because he suffers since the beginning - he feels guilty toward his family and, above all, he has never been touched before by the myth of male beauty.

In this case, it’s hard to believe that Visconti was not aware of the new and different implications of his adaptation: his culture was too refined and deep to question his ability to properly interpret Mann’s intentions in 85

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his novel. Visconti just used the original text, and bent it to his own intentions: on a superficial level, most of the original materials are kept - with the exception of Aschenbach’s profession, and, partly, the age of the protagonists - but reorganized on a deeper level to tell his own story, to express the intentions and the theme that he wanted to show. That means that the two Death in Venice, are two artistic pieces of art, very strictly connected, and yet to be considered, in a way, entirely independent of each other.

The considerations developed here maybe explain the fact that when we talk about adaptation, we are playing with an ‘equation’ with multiple and difficult solutions: the variables are many - the interpretation of the original material, the intentions the authors want to express in their adaptation, the final transmutation (a term that recalls alchemic processes) from one language system to another, and the realization of it. And moreover, these paradigms are to be crossed with the personal tastes and ‘encyclopedia’ that the authors of the adaptation possess.

On paper, the work on an adaptation may seem easier: the fictional world is already there, built and furnished, it’s just a matter of choosing the right pieces we want to bring with us into the new universe. But one soon realizes that the operation of removal raises major questions that are at the core of any narrative form. And working with scriptwriters, as coaches on adaptations requires us to lead the journey through a more complex and intricate path. Which may well be the topic of our next conversation.

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by Tutors and Alumni

Life-Like: The Schizophrenia of the Limitless Possibilities

Life-Like: The Schizophrenia of the Limitless Possibilities

by Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten - A four year old could do this.

- So bring me a four year old Groucho Marx

- I know everything.

Julius, 4

Script Editor? Script doctor, coach, advisor, consultant?

Really? So what do you do?

When trying to answer this at dinner party level, there are follow-up questions; sometimes out of pure curiosity, sometimes out of slight suspicion.

The friendly alternative would be: “How does what you do relate to lets say: - A curator in art?

- An editor in publishing?

- A dramaturge in the theatre?

- A lawyer with their client?”

Does it relate at all?”

It does and it does not, I would say.

But perhaps it actually (if anything) relates to the work that goes on in psychology-related therapy-sessions, and the long-term process this would imply.

Or, rather than “fixing things and healing”, it might even be a form of “evil doctoring”, that disturbs, unleashes, discovers and unearths, one that brings pleasure through pain (or even pain through pleasure).

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of the broadcaster and that specific feel needed for that specific product.

But a script editor - or script consultant - for feature films is quite a different story. There is no executive rewriting whatsoever is going on.

Let’s continue to define by the negatives, about what we are not: We are not teachers. We are not co-writers (unless we are co-writers).

But we are creatures that writers (I know from my own experience as a writer), often feel a desperate need for.

This creature is not the director, with whom you can have a most amazing and extremely fruitful dialogue and discovery process. (Actually you can have this with the director, even if the director happens to be you).

This creature is not the producer, who can also - if the writer is lucky (or rather: if the producer her- or himself is lucky) - be full of brainpower and sensitivity.

No, this creature, the script consultant, is a weird hybrid. It is an artistic flying partner to the writer’s soul. This creature has voluntarily spent most of its time gathering knowledge and input that will be of use to the writer (/director) and her/his art.

The script consultant is the secret collaborator, infiltrator - crucial at pushing issues that need to be addressed (again and again with tireless perseverance) and who wants, just like the pre-audience it truly is, to be seduced, overturned, shocked and mesmerized beyond hitherto unknown grounds. Or at least not bored, which is already a lot to ask for.

It is someone who can search out the identifiable character moments and the functioning/dysfunctional emotional elements, the plot points, the gripping events. In my work as a consultant I turn into a homing pigeon: where is the identification? Emotion? Anger? Distortion? Logic?

And all this, while there is still a chance to make it all stronger, more influential, coherent, more funny and daring: before big unnecessary money starts to roll. (By the way, when I say the script, I sometimes mean the idea, sometimes the fully written story or sometimes the actual film as it becomes, which of course is when we are past the development phase.)

To quote a commissioning executive: “Development is cheap”. But the work we do is not cheap - it is very valuable and precious.

Screenwriting - of course - is an expression all of its own, having to its advantage that it is not poetry, not literature and not journalism; it is something entirely of its own, and can therefore be approached as such.

It is a to-be-film, a blueprint of drawings that will become the actual “be-ing”. The writing does not have to be pleasing, skilful, first-rate or 90

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beautiful (but it most certainly can be! And sometimes is!) What it has to do though, is to communicate its intentions to those who will commit to make the film, in all steps of the process The script consultant - to my mind - will try to help in this process. By listening, channelling and exploring. Friedrich Jürgenson, one of the pioneers in contacting and electronically recording “the other side” (the so called dead people), used his polyglot experience to hear what he realised was there. He was a “hyper cultured madman” who used his knowledge of ten languages to intently listen for messages from the dead, and to interpret them to those of us less so gifted.

In the same way, the script in all its forms is speaking to its “side-soul”, wanting to show itself, and at that same moment it begins to make demands on me, the living, the receiver. I, as a script advisor must approach it with all languages at hand.

The story demands things from me - through the inbuilt dramatic “indications” (avoiding the crippling word “rules”…), explored through centuries of human emotion. It demands: - Structure - when, what, why - Theme - the all around God; why are we here, what is the meaning, what for?

- Discipline - how, to what extent, with what, why?

- Order and chronology - to whom, why, with who, when, place in time - Rhythm - flow, energy, variation, impact - Timing - when does it occur?

- Urgency - there is no other way, it must happen, it must be - Details - meaning, surface, depth, hidden, open, difference - Gravity - where is it attached, how does it stand, where are the bearings, where does air come in, will it hold?

- Realness - deep human research (mental, physical, archive, psychological, historical, poetical) - Expression - irony, humour, reference, memory, details - Innovation - building on context, entering new territories, rules versus freedom Why am I, the script consultant there? To improve something? To break through to the innermost of the hearts of the stories? To make them richer, fuller, harder, more charged? Hopefully. I try - aided by the mother of wisdom: necessity - to help crack through the crust of pain and fear, in a trustful way, so that flaws in the human condition can be shifted into pleasure 91

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and raw beauty; into a film worth seeing, and a film that can express the filmmakers intention and emotional “brain”.

How to “help” writers, without loading onto her/him stale and inhibiting tools? Honestly, I’ve been not-helped by a large number of people in my writing situation: misunderstood - mislead - misguided.

How to avoid being one of those mis-consultants?

I strive for “non formula”: the living story, the life force, the relationships, flow, events, webs, circles, control, spirituality, movement, dream, emotion, structure and impact. As grateful as I should be to all those that I’ve learned from, I feel that my investment toward instinct and logic, meaning and invention is best rewarded.

Working with stories must never be routine.

Must never be convenient.

Must always be new, challenging.

Must be born out of immense curiosity; curiosity bordering on perversion: patiently (having many children trains your patience…) extracting from the writer: “How do you see it? Where does it come from? How did it make you feel? How could it happen? What do you want to do with it?”

The details, the specifics, the personal imprints: “Listen to what I have to say. I’m not saying it yet, but if you wait I might. Be prepared, wait, be open. Listen. Don’t judge what I am about to say, because you really have no idea about it yet, so you can’t know anything”.

Entering into new zones, exploring them, accepting the conditions, as alien or foreign, as it all may seem at first. Allowing and welcoming that there are hugely varied circumstances and personalities among us, and that maybe it can somehow be brought to communicate meaningful artistic and human experiences on film.

I have it all. All the things I have experienced I have everything still in my head; it gets just more and more. Memories are the map.

I know everything.

Julius, 4 years old

I remember thinking as a kid: how stupid, when they explained to me 92

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about Buster Keaton falling over: “Do you know how good you have to be, to look so bad?” How the simple - allegedly - is very hard to achieve.

As a child of course one finds this ridiculous. At 4 or 5 you know everything. You master the universe and why would you have to pretend you are bad? If you want to do it badly, you just do it badly - it’s easy. If you want to do it well, you decide that’s what you do.

As a grown up, or “adult”, one must increasingly fight for, strive for, this natural superiority of pretending not to know anything, not having any preconceived notions, of being able to fall over well. (The artist Pipilotti Rist made a filmed multi-piece in which she collapses and “dies” in parking lots, parks and streets all around the world. I was impressed with her capacity to do what (mostly) only children can do: just go for it. Try collapsing in the street just because you tell your brain to do it. Anyway.)

So then: if I am lucky, I have become a Keaton type of character who spent 25 years training to fall over (“badly”) in a believable way; someone who painstakingly can overthrow the learned to make it seem unlearned.

To make professional script consulting seem simple, flow-like, stoned, impulsive, and natural: child-like.

So is what am I really saying: “Be a child in the writing room”?

Well, this is such a hypothetical question - so let’s just avoid that thought. The world would be an entirely different place if we were able to transform. And we are for the most part unable.

As adults, we are (as a rule) far away from that childish original creator’s channel. We must make do with what we have learned, and try very hard to protect that thin dying streak of creativity within ourselves, that allows us to have insightful ideas that inspire us in the moment; that creativity which can suggest, propose, inspire. We must make do with trying to combine all that we’ve learned and experienced, into a concoction of “stringent” and slimmed down version of Creativity.

Children already have the thing we must make up for, when we’re trying to dissolve our learned experience and to free our spirits: they have deep imagination. They know everything. They can tell you anything, make anything happen, they have no limits, no structural problems. The 3-6 year old runs the innumerable possibilities and options through the brain.

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are still in there, and we just need to tap into it, and re-learn from it...

With deep imagination I here mean the ability to enter (fully) into someone else’s world, into their dreams, thoughts and their logic. Children know - instinctively - how to identify, and they know how to create distance to what happens, to see it from all angles, to change point of view. If I can do anything even near this as a script consultant, then I think I’m worthy of that professional title.

The difference, of course, in being adults, is that we feel superior to children in having our pasts, our growing-up perspective - that we know stuff, like the pains of being heartbroken, of loosing someone tragically, of being abused, maltreated or abandoned; and (possibly, hopefully) we have experienced great relief, joy and true passion. This is all useful material in the script development room.

(Although I would argue that children’s intuitive senses are so strong that they can sense this without having experienced it yet themselves.

That they play out and think out all this beforehand, preparing themselves for the real McCoy. (Mimesis, anybody?) When you hear children play they are - as a matter of fact - often more uncompromising and hardcore, real than us adults.)

But. It is still in this human experience (and the “refinement” of it) where we adults can research around and be guided to grasp and understand where we can turn into Drama, all that pain (and yes, all that laughter…) that we have been put through so far.

I find myself more and more drawn to the land of “classical” themes: redemption, destiny, guilt, greed, jealousy, fate… as we strive once again for the stories we work with to become more realistic and true to our “modern” times. Alienation, loneliness, solitude is as eternal a thing as heritage or revenge.

Finding the structural ways to differentiate the effects, to take control of how the story is told for supreme achievement and reaction is sometimes very hard work - and I don’t believe set formulas ever really work.

(I do agree with Paul Schrader when he talks about testing your stories verbally by watching the way people leave you alone or follow you wherever you go, to hear more); and: the pieces of story, the way the events unfold, the emotional impact it has - these are areas, which are all approachable in a session.

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there, building the trust and the confidence to actually do it. Making it become that which no one knows it can be!

It is not hocus-pocus, though it’s certainly dealing with secret inspiration, opening up the senses to the unknown and to the underlying chemistry that must be allowed to bubble up. The second you enter the development room there must be focus, a concentration - I hesitate to say “performance”, but if the session has worked well, a post-adrenaline fatigue is felt. Thus I understand that somehow there’s an element of performance involved. It is like having been to a special place.

(What to name that sudden unreal moment in a session when the problem “solves” itself - how to describe the poetry and surprise when this feeling takes over the room - oh man, there it is, the solution, the light, the way to go! We know it, we recognize it, it makes sense, and it is storytelling logic, as we have defined it there and then in that room. Group-dynamic magic? Divine intervention? Or just plain ol’ hard work…? It is, for sure, a form of spiritual wavelength insight).

As a script consultant, to be confused or weak between the two principal players - the script and the creator of the script - is not a useful idea. Your loyalty as a script consultant is only, must only be, with the script. I must be able to take position. Sometimes the script, the story, demands for me to be “opposite” the writer. My job is to make the script do what the writer deep down wants it to do. “It isn’t good because you like it, and it isn’t bad because you don’t”. Liking has nothing to do with it, really, in the process.

As a script consultant I act out of a combination of many years of using and studying traditional structures, and out of the implanted DNA of storytelling principles. I have disciplined and trained myself in order to create a path towards the use of deep intuition.

Even if sometimes the writer “disagrees” with her/his own script, I have to ensure that the script stands on its own merits, and then focus on creating a story that moves from paper onto film, and into the hearts of humans.

Helping the writer to bring out the things that she/he doesn’t even know are dying to come out - and even some that they may not want to come out.

Orhan Pamuk says about Albert Camus that the writer’s “metaphysical prose ushers the reader into a mysterious landscape that we long to understand: to see it take on meaning is to know that literature has - like life - limitless possibilities”. And further: “We are attached to a writer not just because he ushered us into a world 95

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that continues to haunt us, but because he has made us who we are”.

Maybe to a certain extent developing scripts (films) lives in this beautiful and simple idea: Films make us/made us who we are.

What I know and feel (about scripts and films) has grown out of reading scripts and watching films. So what I feed back into filmmaking, is what scripts and films have given to me; and, of course, having said this, what has not contributed to film making? Art, theatre, performance, literature, architecture, technology, music, and science: Everything!

So. A crucial part of the system of Screenwriting is the films themselves: Not only those films just made (or being made), but also, naturally, those made by timeless and brave pioneers, and those films that we haven’t even seen yet, the films that are being written now! Constant gathering of knowledge via the films, the scripts and the ideas behind is what shows us the way. I’d like to stay “confused” and open, in this focused search for the limitless possibilities.

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Working with a Script Editor - from Killers to Fairy Godmothers

by Jenni Toivoniemi (S&P Alumni)

I recently discussed script editing with a producer at a cocktail party. The young and confident producer told me that he just didn’t get it, why do I want to work with a script editor? “Don’t you trust yourself?” he asked. I have also been asked if the script editor is the second (or the third in that case) screenwriter of the script. One producer described the script editor as “a person who is called upon just before the shooting because financiers are not happy with the script”.

In spite of some discouraging experiences in my short career as a scriptwriter, I have a profound belief that in the process of writing a film, a qualified script editor helps me to write a better script. I also think it is a good idea financially for the producer. Still, a bad script editor with too much power in the process is likely to help destroy the whole project.

Script editing is a fairly new position in the (Finnish) film industry and there are a lot of misunderstandings and different ideas about what it is the script editor does and how that benefits the film. I have heard of some script editors (with different titles, but let’s use the term ‘editor’ for all those people who, sometimes, are paid to help the writer write the script) being called “the killers”. They are the persons who often come to a project quite late, probably when time is running out and the writer has been struggling on her own for a long time and nobody is satisfied with the result. Enter the magical script editor (often called “doctor”) to the rescue and in just a few weeks s/he “polishes” the script, weeds out all irregularities and - let’s shoot.

The end result is often “right” looking from the outside, but lacks an inner cohesion or worse - a meaning. The poor script editors are not the only ones to blame in these situations - usually there have been problems in the whole process. It might be that the director, writer and producer are not 97

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making the same film, although they think they are, and it is sold to financiers as such. In those cases the position of the script editor can indeed be very unpleasant. But that is a whole other story of it’s own.

Now I am trying to see, if there are some basic rules or codes of ethics that could be used in the process of developing a script with a script editor. My point of view is simply based on my own practical experiences as a young writer in the beginning of my career. I think that by researching the process of professional script writing and editing we can also learn a lot about how to teach (or at least how not to teach) this difficult craft. For most of us, the first experiences of script editing come during student film making from different teachers in film schools and courses. I am not trying to make declarations here, but to take a part in an ongoing discussion I find very important to keep flowing.

I First experiences on editing - film schools and courses Scriptwriters usually either attend film school or take some courses in scriptwriting. The quality of education varies greatly. My education consists of theoretical university studies of film, theatre and literature on BA level and several scriptwriting courses for professionals. The first experiences on script editing came from the teachers at those courses, professional scriptwriters or - as called in Finland - dramatists.

I was lucky because my first teacher, in an intensive six-month screenwriting course I took in the nineties, was a good, gentle teacher. When I had no idea what I was doing and had a desperate need to be good at it, she was just what I needed - she helped me to write with just my intuition.

Sure, she taught me the basics and the theory too, but I remember her mostly from being very encouraging and supportive - just what a 20-year old insecure girl needed.

Later, after university, when I went back to screenwriting, I learned to really appreciate my first teacher. After a year in a screenwriting course my writing was completely blocked. The treatment I had worked on for months was a mess - an interesting mess, but a mess - and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. If I compared the “story” I had, it was much weaker than any of the writing I had done years before. Intuitively I knew how to write a story, but when all the theory and analyzing came in, it all disappeared. I felt very insecure and anxious.

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How did I get there? The course consisted of a few weekend workshops with high profile Finnish scriptwriters who came in to share their ideas of what scriptwriting is. Along with that we were developing our own scripts with the help of an experienced dramatist - or script editor, if we want to call him that. Taking this course you could have easily misunderstood that in order to write a script you first invent the basic plot points and structure and then fill out the rest. I just knew that you couldn’t have the structure before you had the material, but that was not explained and I started to feel trapped. At the intensive group development sessions things got worse. Even though the script editor was intelligent and had a lot of knowledge, I didn’t see the connection between theory and practice. His method was to talk philosophically about the themes of the scripts, recommending some reading on philosophy and when it got to the actual script he would start to suggest wild turning points and events that had nothing to do with the story. Or at least I didn’t see the connection. I got more and more confused. I could see that my story lacked structure and the script editor had a point in what he said. The events he suggested to add to my script were more dynamic than mine, but seemed completely artificial from the point of view of the story. I started to lose contact with what I wanted to tell and if I really wanted to tell anything at all. After months of frustration I was left with this strange mixture that combined everything - I had gotten so confused that I tried to keep anything anyone had said they liked. Somewhere, I had secretly tried to keep the story I wanted to tell alive. This is not the end of the story, because later I entered the professional world with my idea, but more about that later.

II Experiences in other media - are there similarities?

I have aimed at film from the very beginning, but I am a writer and I write for several media. This is why I see the relationship of a screenwriter and a script editor in a wider context. It resembles the relationship between a journalist and her editor at the magazine or an author and her publishing editor at the book publishing company. Those are occupations often misunderstood too, but at least in Finland they are by now well recognized: good editors are well paid and wanted staff.

When I write an article for a magazine I always work with an editor.

A good editor helps me to write a better article with my own personal writing style. They simply help to find the structure to best serve the content.

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It is always a pleasure to work with a good editor, because they always make your writing better.

This fall I attended a workshop with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jacqui Banaszynski who said: “The better you get, the more you need a good editor”.

She said she never works without an editor. If a quality editor is not available through the magazine, she uses her own network of contacts. Her inspiring workshop gave me some new tools for understanding and improving my writing process. I found the six step list she used to describe the process useful and I am going to share it here, because it helps me to explain the places where editing takes place. I also think that the writing process is not that different when you write fiction scripts. Different lecturers on writing have used a concept of six (or more or less) steps and I have come across it earlier as well, so here is what I got out of Jacqui Banaszynski’s lecture - with some notions of my own: 1. Conceive - the idea and testing of the idea.

Writing an article starts with the editor ordering an article on a certain topic or the journalist suggesting an article on a topic of her own. Then the writer and the editor discuss the idea. It depends on the editor and the case how many limitations are given for the author. Always - as a minimum - the amount of characters and the fee are limited. A good editor gives enough to work with, but doesn’t limit the journalist too much - a writer needs enough freedom to be able to write a personal article. This is the first time you ask the fundamental questions - what do I really want to find out and which point of view will I use? The time spent on the first step helps enormously in the second step.

2. Collect - reporting the research, interviews etc.

The second step, the so-called field work, reveals if the original idea really works or not. The writer needs to know what she is looking for, but she has to be able to change the concept if the reality does not back it up.

3. Focus - finding the primary mission When all the research is done, the writer needs to go back to the fundamental questions. The writer needs time to digest the material and it is often fruitful to discuss with the editor at this point and check if something has to be changed in the original topic. Again, there are no short cuts from this step. Writers need to spend time with this step; otherwise the next steps will become painful.

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4. Organizing the material After defining the focus the organization of the material starts - what is needed for the article and what can be left out. When the writer knows the material and what will be used, writing of the first draft can begin.

5. Draft - writing the first draft While writing the first draft, the writer should be able to forget the inner editor and let the text flow. That’s why notebooks and material may better stay closed at this point.

6. Revise - rewriting When the first draft is finished the editor comes in again and comments the draft - writes in questions and suggestions. After which, the writer goes back and writes the second draft, sometimes a third.

This all sounds very simple, but in reality it is not. I think many writers try to jump ahead of one or more of these steps, at least that is what I have done.

It is easy to get lost in collecting the material if you haven’t spent enough time with the first step. And you get really stuck when you try to write the first draft before you have spent time focusing and organising your material.

And sometimes it just doesn’t work.

Sometimes the editing process ends up with you getting your article back as something you don’t want to put your name on anymore. Then you re-write it and work with the editor, both of you are trying to make compromises and the result is usually something that neither of you is very pleased with. There are several things causing this unfortunate result: the lack of respect, time, experience, talent or all of these. Sometimes the problem seems to be, that the editor, usually originally a writer herself, maybe wants to be the author of the article. Maybe she is frustrated with her busy schedule and not having time to write herself. Not recognising her need, she starts writing your article. Never a good idea.

I don’t have any personal experience working with a book editor, but I have interviewed some in research I was working on1 and I also have several friends in the book publishing industry. My understanding is that the role of the publishing editor is similar, but due to the nature of the work, often more delicate.

1

Culture-Biz http://www.finnekvit.org/projects.html

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III Back to films – protecting the creative process Now, when we go to the world of film, we end up in a much more complex situation. When you write articles pretty much everybody’s comments are relevant - at least every possible reader’s comments. You find out what is written in too complicated a way and when they lose interest.

But when it comes to scriptwriting, the synopsis, treatments and drafts are not something that everybody knows how to read. In my experience very few people do, actually. It does not mean that all kinds of comments could not be useful, but it means that you need to learn to interpret the comments and not take them literally. Also, it is very difficult to get financed during the firsts phases (or steps) of the writing process - so you are usually pushed to write a draft too soon.

Because filmmaking is teamwork there are always several people commenting the script. The people who have power over the script and who you have to listen to are at least the producer, the director and several financiers. Sometimes one, or several of these people work - or think that they work - as a script editor. The co-operation between the scriptwriter and director is of course crucial. There is no point in writing anything that the director doesn’t believe in. It still doesn’t mean that a good director is necessarily a skilful script editor.

The role of the creative producer is a topic of it’s own - but as I see it the producer has to choose to work with people s/he believes are talented, choose a project s/he believes in, and then create the conditions under which the project can get realised to it’s full potential. This includes protecting the scriptwriter and the project during the long and exhausting financing process, which usually happens at the same time as the writing takes place.

One of the things that the producer can do is to hire a good script editor.

A skilful script editor can sometimes also be a good mediator for the film on negotiations with financiers - when the writer, director and producer are often already too involved to see clearly.

And so we are back to the question: what is it actually, that makes the script editor good or less good? Are there any rules?

Let’s go back to the script I was writing on the film course, the one that got completely tangled up. Some time later I was happy to get to know a talented script editor through a friend and this editor did me a favour 102

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and commented on my script. It was an hour in a coffee shop and it was a liberating and wonderful experience. He saw all the material and potential there and tried to follow the different stories that it might contain and gently tried to find out what it was that I originally wanted to tell.

The first twenty minutes we discussed one story and then I, almost accidentally, mentioned a minor sentence in the script, how “that was actually what I was trying to do in the first place”. Immediately the editor turned his point of view and said I should forget everything we had talked about before. And then we discussed the material from another angle. After that I was able to write a treatment that made some sense. A producer and a director got interested and with the help of the script editor (that I convinced the producer to hire) I was able to write a quality first draft of the one-hour script in just four weeks.

What did he do differently?

First of all, he wanted to find out what I was trying to do, not to tell me what he thought I should do. He didn’t force his opinions on what was interesting in the themes, which of the possible themes the material provided that I should pick. He just pushed me to understand what it was that spoke to me in the characters and the story. When he felt he knew what I was trying to do, he was able to show me what belonged to the theme and the story and what I wanted to tell; this process made it easy for me to strip out things I didn’t need. When you are blocked it is often a situation where you are afraid to let anything go because you don’t know what is important and what is not.

Often the script editor is only attached to the project when time is running out and several versions of the script have been written. I am sure that this is not a very rewarding time to jump in. I find it most fruitful to get the script editor on board in the early stages of the work. At the point when you already have some material, a hunch of what you are doing, but are still working with the synopsis/treatment. People have different ways of working, but I find it better to spend lots of time in the treatment and synopsis phase. When you have a solid treatment the draft usually doesn’t take long to write. No matter what you prefer, it is probably not a very good idea to show very early drafts to many people; readers tend to fall in love with different things and when you have as much material as a draft needs, it becomes more and more difficult to manage all the feedback you get.

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I personally find it very challenging sometimes to recognize when I am reluctant and protective just because it is not easy to learn of your mistakes and when it is your intuition telling you to protect your script from harmful feedback. I hope and believe that this is something experience will teach me.

IV Script&Pitch - experience and the international dimension Another experience - or a series of experiences - on script editors that I find fruitful to share is the script that took me to Script&Pitch Workshops.

My co-writer Kirsikka Saari and I had previously attended a national workshop with our idea and had gotten feedback from interested producers. Our treatment was also commented on by a well-known international “script guru”, who was very positive and mainly gave suggestions to changes on a rather superficial level. All the time we wondered a little, “How can this be so easy?” and we had our doubts. We wanted to get help and luckily we got selected for Script&Pitch.

In reality we would of course secretly have wanted to have been just admired and cheered. It wasn’t all that nice and easy when already during the first workshop the whole story was ripped into pieces. But we had to agree - it was deconstruction in a constructive way. Our mentor Gino Ventriglia - our fairy godfather - pushed us towards the wall and asked all the hard questions. I am so grateful that those questions got asked at that point, and not later. We got lost during the Script&Pitch experience too, but we also got help and tools to find the path again.

An international workshop was also a very useful lesson on communicating your ideas and script to people outside of your own immediate culture. Even though Europeans have so much in common, there are a lot of things that you cannot take for granted. It doesn’t mean all those things should be eliminated from the script - quite the contrary - but they are things we just have to be aware of. Sometimes it was very frustrating when we got feedback on something completely irrelevant because of cultural differences, but I think we learned a lot about which words to avoid, and which kind of things you need to clarify or leave out from short versions of the story.

The other part of the Script&Pitch-ideology, learning to pitch, helped with that too. We, like many writers, were reluctant to pitch and consid104

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ered it as the “selling tool for the producers”. After Script&Pitch we were converted. As a writer you do need many other people to work with you and to find them, you need to learn to communicate your thoughts even when they are not clear and ready. Pitching is terribly painful, because you get caught by yourself as to where there are holes and problems in your story. I am not saying I know how to pitch yet, or that it is something I love, but at least I know it is something I need to take seriously. And if it wasn’t so painful, I’d pitch all the time.

Looking back we could have written the original version of the script too, it might have worked on the outside. But it would not have been the film we wanted to write. Instead, Script&Pitch helped us to choose the hard but rewarding way and we learned a lot about the craft and what we want to learn more about and who we want to become as scriptwriters.

V A wish list for the fairy godmothers - and all the other commentators I see the work of the script editor (and other editors, as mentioned earlier) as similar to the work of a midwife. It is not the job of the midwife to criticize the baby, but to help the mother to get it out, leaving both the baby and the mother well and alive. Just like the work of the editor is not about what he likes or doesn’t like in the script; it is in the heart of the script editor’s job to help the writer to find the emotional theme of the story and help the writer to keep it clear as the work goes on and the ways of working may alter. It might be that what is important in the script is something the editor doesn’t like at all. It is his or her job to clear this up in the beginning. It might be that in this case she is not the right person to work with this writer. Or she needs to take into consideration that doing the job means helping a writer to write a script she doesn’t like.

The questions that should be asked in the beginning are: can you work on those premises and can the writer work with you? It goes back to the respect. Do you respect the script and the writer even if you don’t like the script? Does s/he respect you? There are always writers who are not willing to question themselves or to work hard. If the writer doesn’t respect the editor, it doesn’t matter how good the editor is. The writer has to do the hard work, no editor can do it for him/her.

When it comes to the hard work itself, it doesn’t stop when the emotional theme is finally clear - quite the contrary. It does help a lot and it 105

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saves time and versions (and money!), but after the theme is clear, working with the script editor is very practical work with the structure and the scenes. The script editor helps to keep the core of the story clear and moving when the story and characters are leading the writer. It is always the writer who makes the choices, but a good editor has many suggestions to lead the writer to find his/her way to tell the story on screen.

I am looking at my personal experience so far, working with editors in different fields, and will try to sum up some good and bad policies on editing from the writer’s point of view. I don’t think there are any tricks or “to do”-methods in becoming a really good script editor. Or if there is, I am sure one should have worked in film much longer to know them. I believe there are no short cuts - there has to be a lot of talent and then enormous amounts of work and studies of dramaturgy and how to work with people.

I have enormous respect for these people, since I already know they are a rare species. I believe that discussing the policies on how to give constructive feedback is still fruitful for everybody working with scripts and every writer can have a say in that. So, in the end what I can do is to collect a kind of wish list for people who read and comment (my) scripts: 1. Respect the script and the writer, it sounds simple but it is not. It is frustrating to read bad scripts. Many scripts are bad, and most are bad at some point. Respect means that the commentator needs to believe this could become a good script and that this writer could do it. If she doesn’t believe that, there is no point in working with this project.

2. Ask, don’t assume to know what the script/treatment/synopsis is all about. Try to find different options on what it could be about and what supports it. Listen to the writer and try to let her tell what she is trying to do.

3. Recognize your own need to write and express yourself. If you want to write yourself and your writing is stuck for one reason or another, you are not necessarily in the right place to give feedback. A writer with a block is often passive-aggressive and it might be difficult to recognize your own feelings of bitterness, resentment or envy for a person who actually is writing. And when you have those feelings and you are not recognising them, you are not likely to see things clearly. You are not the author of the script you are commenting. This doesn’t mean you can’t contribute enormously to the script and that your ideas and suggestions would not count. If there is respect, a writer with a head on 106

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her shoulders will take all the good ideas and suck them into the script.

But you need to be willing to give them.

I am sure my wish list may change over time when I get more experience. So far I am very grateful to all the people who have spent their time and energy with my scripts - without the less rewarding experiences I might not have learned to value the rewarding ones.

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Impostors?

by Antoine Bataille (S&P Alumni) In feature films, script development and the task of script editors is usually envisaged in a context of crisis, when an author is blocked or when the script doesn’t satisfy the financiers. Nevertheless, authors often call on script editors to get an assessment on their latest draft rather than to save their script heading towards a near deadline. The aim is often to open new perspectives for the project, or to choose some, rather than desperately finding a solution to a problem that has been subsisting in the story since the beginning of the development process.

But what does a script editor bring to the process when the writing is in progress and the author is quite optimistic about it? Script editors are often asked for a fresh view. They are often confronted with projects that have been in development for some time and have to quickly merge into them. They only have a few hours to digest a script and must be aware of all its aspects (themes, plots, subplots, characters, rhythm, beats). When an author looking towards financing has to confront his artistic intentions and the singularity of his project, facing the many demands and expectations from his different collaborators, the main challenge of a script editor (hired by that author) lies certainly in the necessity to obey to that singularity, without taking the place of a co-author.

An author writing a story proposes a game whose rules are decided by him, and script editors must quickly enter the game respecting these rules. Script editors have to submit to the singularity and the style of the author. Also, fictions try to incite us into adopting a new vision of such or such an aspect of the world and script editors have to perceive that new vision of the real world while it hasn’t yet emerged in the frame of the script. Thus, the main obstacle to the script editor’s task lies in the subjectivity of the author’s intentions and the obvious impossibility to communicate these fully and logically.

For some partisans of “auteurism”, the writer’s obligatory solitude is enough to invalidate the work of any script consultant. The French director Christophe Honoré declared this in a recent interview: “Nobody is able to 109

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read a screenplay. And we can go further: there are no good script readers as there are no good novel readers. The principle of reading is an experience of solitude, of absolute intimacy. Reading creates a relation between an experience of life and some words. How could an experienced reading be an objective work that can be shared?” He points to the unfinished nature of a screenplay and the impossibility to objectively foresee a film from a screenplay, and claims that, “the new jobs, which have been created at the television channels and some production companies, script readers, are the jobs of the greatest impostors in the world”1.

From the point of view of a script editor, that position is of course unbearable, but really interesting because it reflects the kind of preconceptions and mistrusts that some scriptwriters can have towards script editors. In spite of its radicalism, Honoré’s provocative declaration holds some truth. We could say that it permits us to focus on an important paradox existing in the script editing process: the involvement of a script editor in a script cannot be objective since it has to be emotional, and not only logical. I here understand an emotion as an event, a transitory and ephemeral moment between the perception of the script elements (description sentences, dialogues, rhythm) and the construction of a representation or an interpretation of these script elements in the frame of a story. This phenomenon, consisting of setting the mind in motion, is the essence of the narrative process. Honoré points out that the limits set by this emotional involvement renders useless any assessment of a script. It is true that the phenomenon of narration always ends on a subjective interpretation; all stories sound a bit different in everyone’s mind. But, the important thing is the dynamic moment of the emotion, not the story as a result. From my short experience, I could say that above all, the task of a script editor differs from that of a common reading by the necessity to put into words what is emotionally disturbing during the first reading of the script, not in the story that the script editor understood. Usually, authors are conscious of the weak parts of their scripts, they can feel where the script doesn’t work. The task of a script editor doesn’t only consist of finding these weak moments of the story, but also in discovering what mechanisms that are producing this feeling of dysfunction. In other words, the main goal of the analysis of a script lies in the necessity to find the words and the logical development that permits one to understand what disturbs at such or such a moment of the reading. Being attentive to one’s own affects and emotions, 1 “Le scénario n’est pas une histoire” (The script is not a story), interview with Christophe Honoré

by Frédéric Davoust in La Gazette des scénaristes, Paris, December 2007, nb.32, pp.46-48

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acting as a human seismograph, are necessary conditions, an unavoidable first step to begin the true analytic work.

Then, the script is explored in many ways, according to such or such a character’s trajectory, some scenes are read and read again, till the discovery of the thing, the detail, a line, a sentence in the descriptions, a turning point, a jump..., whatever it is that is preventing the whole plot from working. Thus, script editing can be considered a precision work, which allows one to give importance to the general structure as much as to the details. During this second step of the analysis, the affective and emotional involvement of the script editor, his role as a human seismograph, must be kept in the background. To take a concrete example, the final scene of a feature film script I worked on appeared to be an easy turn over. A main character [A] was meeting a secondary character [B] and was seeing this secondary character [B] acting in a way, which created doubts on everything [A] had learned about [B] during the story. The denouement had already occurred and there was an obvious intention to create an overture at the very end of the story. That final scene was written brilliantly, the atmosphere, the rhythm, and the dramatic tension were there. Moreover, it was pushing the whole story into a wide reflection on beliefs, by the sudden reemergence of an inherent doubt motivating the main character’s quest. But in the story, the event appeared as something artificial. In spite of the evident cinematographic beauty of the scene and its undeniably strong moral questioning, the easiest reaction of a script consultant would have been to argue that if the scene didn’t work in the screenplay, it wouldn’t work on the screen, and that the only thing to do would be to take it out and let the story finish in a more classical way with the denouement. After a long discussion about this scene, no solution was really foreseen and as a script editor, I had a feeling of failure. As [A] was the main character, the one in which the audience is supposed to project itself, the main question remaining was: “What can [A] do to make this scene believable?” But one of the foreseen solutions, then adopted by the author, came from the secondary character [B], from a detail. In the situation of a meeting, [A] and [B] were equally conscious of the presence of the other, which meant that [B] could control what he was letting the main character [A] discover. The important detail, in fact, wasn’t the main character’s point of view, but the secondary character’s. In the new draft, [B] is not able to notice the presence of [A] when he acts in a way that creates doubt about everything [A] has learned about [B] during the story. [A] is kept at a distance while he observes [B]. Concretely, it just meant changing a few sentences in a description paragraph, but the audience, identifying with the main character [A], may now be moved by this scene because the accidental nature of the 111

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event became believable. The problem was emotional because the dramatic event didn’t move us, but the way to find a solution was logical. In such a task, some books of script theory can be very useful. Working with books doesn’t consist in finding the right way to shape a story, but it can help to conceptualize what is creating a feeling of malaise during the first reading. In the present case, it was a problem of dramatic irony.

To attempt an answer to the apparent paradox of the subjectivity of the script editor, one could argue that the right position is a position in movement. Script editing requires a necessity to be able to switch between an affective or emotional position, and a distant and analytical one. In such a methodological attitude, the influence of some trends in the literary critique may be recognizable2. The idea here is not to blindly use the theories developed to study literary works, but to consider the history of literary critique as a long adventure of thought that can provide patterns in order to shape the paradox created by the respective subjectivities of authors and script editors.

In spite of trying to elaborate an a priori method, a script editor can remain being an impostor to the film project. Any of the most elaborated techniques or methods include the risk of losing sight of the author’s intentions. Here are the limits of a written assessment and the necessity of dialogue between the author and the script editor. Any method remains incomplete and unfinished because the deep soul of any story keeps being elusive. When I start a new collaboration, I usually take the necessary time, in a first meeting, or – if we haven’t had the possibility to meet yet – in the beginning of the first written assessment, to explain how I have understood the emotional theme of the story3. This step of the work may seem unnecessary or superfluous. On the contrary, I consider it the only way to be sure that everyone involved in the project’s development are moving in the same direction. And during the collaboration process, adjustments still have to be made. At work, I expect the authors to be able to tell me “I don’t like that idea”, or “I don’t agree with you when you say (or write) that”. Negations, opposition, are definitely indispensable to working in a common field, and writers must know that they are the only ones who can give their script editors the necessary boundaries for an efficient performance.

One can distinguish here the attitude of German hermeneutic and its influence on the so-called “Geneva School”. See for example Leo Spitzer, Linguistic and Literary History, 1948 or Jean Starobinski, “La relation critique” in L’œil Vivant, 1970

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On the notion of ‘emotional theme’, I refer to Franz Rodenkirchen’s essay, “… but words would only make it smaller: emotional theme and storytelling”, in Script&Pitch Insights //1 - 2007

3

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Developing a project requires understanding. Till the end of collaboration, a script editor keeps exploring and discovering an unknown territory, a bit like the audience during a screening, and the objections, the barriers set by the writer are in my view precious clues for a script editor to gradually establish a map of this unknown territory and complete his knowledge of the unending sense of the story. The task of a script editor doesn’t consist in remodeling this territory, but in imagining some possibilities for the audience to discover this territory in a subtle and unexpected manner. It consists in finding or drafting new paths. In some scripts, many interesting situations appear from a cinematographic point of view, and a general emotional theme can be roughly felt, but the reading, from the beginning to the end, remains difficult and somewhat boring. In those cases, a narrative red line doesn’t seem to be clearly enough constructed, and after the reading, the script editor might say things like: “It’s both an interesting and a ‘confusing’ script”, or “This script is emotionally involving, yet it remains difficult to see where it wants to take us”. During meetings with writers, that situation is usually embarrassing, both for the author and the script editor. Some of the questions asked by the script editor may seem idiotic to the author to whom the answer is clear and evident. The challenge is therefore often to find out what energy, what main movement could put the whole script into motion, within the frame of a story. That story can sometimes be extremely simple, and the risk to force the plot must be taken into consideration. This depends of course on the author’s intentions and the necessity to respect these intentions through a dialectical approach to script editing. Here lies the difference between a script editor and a co-author: a script editor doesn’t create and keeps criticizing, so to speak. And when a script editor gives ideas for rewriting, it comes more from a desire to challenge the fertility of the intentions or the way they are reached, rather than a will to offer the right direction to follow in the writing. Testing the limits of an author’s imagination and being conscious of these limits is releasing for a script editor.

Another main limit of the script editing process comes from the strange and ambiguous literary nature of a screenplay. Writing a script is like taking up an impossible challenge because the written language is limited to describe what’s going to happen on the screen. As every script development professional knows, a screenplay must obey to some precise presentational and writing rules. The descriptions must be written in the narrative present, and never go beyond the description of sounds, images and movements that could potentially be perceived by the audience during the 113

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screening4. Thus, from a literary point of view, a screenplay is a relatively poor thing, which excludes any of the poetic resources of the written language used in novels and poetry. No metaphors, no comparisons or any other stylistic devices are allowed5. But on the other hand, the aim of a screenplay is to indicate the idea of a possible movie, which will probably be shot. The quality of a good script comes from its capacity to suggest emotions and stories through a maximal use of the resources of the words printed on the paper, as poetry does. The paradox of a screenplay is that it both is and isn’t a poetic object. For that reason, and in spite of its literary poverty, a screenplay can suggest many different things, including a story, of course, but not only a story. From such a point of view, we could say that the term of script editor is more relevant than the term of story editor because the script elements are not only narrative.

So what are the limits, set by the non-narrative elements of a screenplay in the script editing process? How to deal with it as a script editor who tries not to act too much like an impostor? A script editor who tries to act with tact and sensibility will notice that the necessity for action doesn’t always or only include dramatic action. The movement of bodies and things, which are described in a screenplay, are in fact the very essence of action in a film before the understanding of all these actions in the causal chain of a plot. Concretely, when you read a screenplay, at such or such a moment, something happens in you, affects you. You’re touched, but sometimes, you cannot link it to a narrative emotion depending on the story. It’s like discovering a hidden treasure that mustn’t be let buried. You just think about what’s going to happen on the screen; you’re already into moving pictures and your mind has escaped the textual nature of the screenplay. Screenplays providing beautiful images escaping the narration are often delicious readings. The true problem, which appears here, from the point of view of a script editor rather than the point of view of a film analyst, is the determination of which degree of tolerance to adopt during the approach to such or such a script. That indispensable tact lies, I think, in the necessity for a script editor to know film history and theory as much as narrative techniques. Sometimes, these particular and cinematographic moments must prevail over the story. And then, the decision to adapt the situations to the story, or on the contrary, to adapt the story to the situations, must be for such or such a case, the object of a clear decision taken by the author to make the script editor’s work possible.

Objections could be made for some exceptional cases when some more ‘interior’ or subjective descriptions make the reading easier and quicker.

4

As for the case of ‘interior’ descriptions, some exceptions to that rule can be relevant.

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So, who are the real impostors? It’s well known that many script doctors are actually script charlatans and a script editor who claims to be an expert of storytelling can be considered an impostor. Honoré is absolutely right when he determines the limits of a screenplay, but his way to use these limits to radically refuse any form of script consulting has certainly something ideological to it. Script writing is obviously something that is irreducible to logic developments, but not sacred enough to be untouchable. Judges, psychoanalysts and journalists perform a job, which keeps a part of subjectivity; but are they impostors for that? Not if they are able to reconsider permanently their own method, position and thought processes. Thus, the main challenge for script editors today is certainly to be able to work outside of the classical narrative forms. In such an uncertain framework, when no certitudes or laws can be established about what will work and what won’t work on the screen, it’s among the author’s responsibilities to set the rules of the game. Script editors are ideally not there to save a bad script – even if they are sometimes unfortunately hired to take up this difficult challenge – but to play the author’s game.

Such a challenge means a lot in contemporary storytelling. We all have a natural tendency to represent our lives and history through plots including quests, beats and denouements. Our illusions are often made of narrative forms, and since Cervantes’ Don Quichotte, many great novels and films deal with the way of fiction and storytelling to build these illusions. Nevertheless, for a few decades, this phenomenon has taken a more imposing dimension. Storytelling is now everywhere in the media. It has become a very efficient persuasion technique in all kinds of advertising campaigns.

But contrary to traditional stories, myths and legends, whose richness is the plurality of representation they can offer, these new kinds of stories are shaped in very standardized ways and always end up in an obvious message. They don’t carry any doubt and their suggestive strength is closed on one precise and targeted interpretation 6. Thus, as the 20th century’s visual arts used to deal with the predominance of images in our civilization (see Pop Art, as an evident example of the reaction of visual arts towards advertising and mass culture), a question to keep in mind for script develop See for example Christian Salmon, Storytelling. La Machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits (Storytelling. Bewitching the Modern Mind), 2007, ed. La Découverte. The English translation will be published in February 2010. Christian Salmon defends the thesis of the existence of a “new narrative order” made of the accumulation of formatted stories told through the media. According to the author, this “new narrative order” enables a restraint understanding of reality and the control of peoples’ emotional responses. This book was subject to some controversial issues because of its Orwellian perspective.

6

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ment professionals is therefore: how to write film scripts in a world flooded by narrative forms, which often obey to the same rules? Storytelling and fiction, which has escaped the fields of films and novels, becomes a battlefield and independent filmmakers have a duty to tell original and new stories, also within a context that tends to refine and weaken these stories.

The struggle met by any good author is to propose new views on the real world by telling stories that strive towards singular forms and rules. Script editors, who often jump from one project to another, from one story to another, are among the best observers of our narrative landscape, its limits and its margins. The fervor expressed in their work, as for independent producers, is precisely to contribute to making these original stories possible. Any person calling themselves a script editor, and who doesn’t intend above all to be an ally in such a struggle can be denounced as an impostor.

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How Do You Know When The Customer Is Happy?

How Do You Know When The Customer Is Happy?

A beginner’s tour across story editing, developing and doctoring

by Atso Pärnänen (S&P Alumni) A Pacific setting in which a Mallickian voice over starts: “What is this typing in the midst of nature...”. The camera glides over the ocean and settles on an island, finally descending and finding a group of people sitting in a circle beneath the palm trees.

In the middle, a medicine man, the guru of this group, is tossing out pages and pages of paper into a fire while the group looks in awe.

They all come from different backgrounds, not just race and color, culture and tax rate, but from genres. On the left, little Miss Romantic Comedy is ready with her hankies, on the right the Science Fiction nut protects himself from too much sunlight, or so he says, with a tin foil wrapped around his head. The War Movie buff is all dressed in camo and holds a stick imagining it’s a rifle.

I leave the Island of Script Pimping and switch off the Webcam. Outside a rainy, gray fall day is dawning. On my desk a pile of scripts supposedly contributes towards the right to claim oneself to be a professional of some sort.

The scripts, treatments and the emailing in relation to them tells almost of a new form of networking. Fine. I’ll read. As long as it does not divert from my other goals. Plenty of storylines of my own to sort out, blank pages to fill, meetings to go to.

While the scripts waiting to be read may not bare any resemblance to each other and the writers are as mixed a bunch as the stories they are telling, it does not change the fact that from myths to movies, whether art house or mainstream, there are certain steps in the creative process of achieving a good story. At best, developing a screenplay is like a good scene with great dialog. It is done with passion, yet always with respect. Not to ridicule but to improve. To find ways, to seek, to explore and understand stories and structures, forms that can be different depending on each screenplay. Like a coach for quality the story editor tries to make sense from it all, but...

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How do you know if the customer is happy? And for whom are you really working? Heated debates can take place, new pages appear, but to know for sure if you are truly helping a script or are just turning into an opinion machine is something worth considering.

To make room on my desk I lift a recent book purchase dealing with current affairs and it reminds me of a quote from the now former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who said: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know”. Those lines, as funny as they might first sound, start a thinking process. Not a look back, not a sentimental round up of a one year adventure at Script&Pitch, best described as a decameronian feast for writers gathered to pitch their stories, a rare pearl among the many empty shells of film education. No, none of that, but more an effort to try to understand which way, what kind of an assault to make, while preparing to head to the jungle of these unknowns of storytelling. Many maps have been provided; some have offered even a compass. The flora and fauna remains varied. There are many ways, methods and styles to come ashore to the island of writers.

A sound bite could easily give the impression that story editing must be one of the easiest jobs ever. You browse a few scripts, take out a red pen and mark down: “Write it again. Make it better”. Sure, repetition can introduce something new and make things better, but “write it again” and thinking that that is all there is to this job is like saying that every director will reach the quality of William Wyler by asking the actors to “Do it again”.

During the golden era of Hollywood some screenwriters used to write treatments that went up to 200 pages. Characters and all story possibilities were explored. Which film fund member would have time, interest and capability to go through a memo like that today? Besides what was once good during the studio system is not necessarily adaptable as such today and could contribute towards the already strong resistance to actually read the script instead of just listening to a pitch. Good news is that more and more industry people seem to be showing an interest for skills in story editing. Bad news? Undoubtedly this does not tone down the “Hollywood Suit-effect” in which the advice from them will still be to add an explosion on page 25 (always worth considering!). This time the arguments and the confidence may reach a higher level though, while everything else stays the same. Development and fine tuning things are a must, but an 118

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endless tour of workshops and seminars can lead to indecision, formulated approaches and kill the risk taking spirit of the participants which will still be needed in the process. I assume that the amount of flops and successes will remain to be affected by many variables, whatever the amount of story editors in the industry.

Sometimes one wonders if the many fine schemes and workshops are just a way to make the knitters of the quilt feel better and help them to make a living; an effort to create a consensus of sorts in which many would at least appear to be happy. It is easy to point towards a workshop, market or a talent scheme and then close the door on a young wannabe’s face. No unsolicited scripts please.

If we do find ourselves back on the school bench then we face a new set of questions by looking at our fellow students. How many of them will actually during their studies read scripts, how many will learn to write something for micro-budget movies (meaning your explosion on page 25 is smaller than you would like it to be), how many will be taught how to get some doors open, how to get an agent or more precisely: who will introduce you to one... Many get into the hallways, but fewer inside the rooms.

Out of the many ways to go forward one of the best approaches is of course the John Sayles one. He is a respected script doctor and writer for films like Apollo 13, The Fugitive, Jurassic Park IV (Yes, your beloved Mr. Independent of Lone Star fame) and uses this as a way to fund his own films. See this happening in your neck of the woods?

But, enough about money, since in Europe it is never about money (probably because there never is enough of it) but about higher qualities such as finding a voice: A European voice for screenwriting. I assume that this voice, like the rest of the continent, must be something constantly out of tune then.

In Europe everyone is an island, but all of them form an archipelago in which a lot of shouting from one island to another takes place. This chain of islands is best entered by being born as a son or daughter to the king of the island or to someone in the court.

Like dogs sniffing the behind of another canine it does not really matter what kind of excrement you produce if the sniffing process has resulted in an acceptance to spend time and play with the limited resources that the islands, always in fear of a tide that will sweep over them, provide.

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Sure, there are also walls and groins protecting the sometimes very vacuum packed industry products being made in California. Products that at times have captured only a bit of the refreshing Santa Ana winds. But in any case, the shores of the mainland of motion are always open for business and perhaps thus, at least for this hack, getting in touch and hearing back has so far proven to be a lot faster process when dealing with Americans or the British. Europe, it seems, can afford to be slow and quiet with so many masterpieces already produced.

During the writing of these ramblings I receive an email from a story development workshop titled “The three act structure will kill you”. Whoa! And I thought the job of a story editor was fairly safe! If the film does not succeed it is hardly the story editor who gets blamed. If it’ s a success... I guess then you can be assured that the customer, the producer, the writer, the audience indeed is happy, just don’t expect a credit or a bonus. Perhaps another assignment.

Irving Thalberg produced circa 100 movies during his career and took an on screen credit for none. By the age in which many are nowadays considered only mature enough to be accepted to study film, Thalberg had already produced an impressive list of motion pictures. Today the credit battles start at schools, since often it is all about making the CV look impressive, whatever that means in the film industry, so no wonder the average length of a contract keeps getting longer. Somewhere on the dotted line a preferred story editor might be mentioned. Creating a good story is nice. Coming up with a franchise even better.

I look again at the pile of scripts on my desk. These are my customers. The characters in them friends that I must nurture. The world they bring alive and make me believe in something worth disappearing into.

The end product, the script, should be ready to go into production. Thus it is still only something that is part of a process trying to reach the screen.

Who buys scripts collected into one Best Screenplays Of The Year–book? Ever seen it among the National Book- and Faulkner- award winners as best sellers during Christmas time?

The words, carefully crafted, constantly rewritten and structured become something to be thrown away, archived, at best argued between the producer and the director obviously without the presence of the writer.

Yet Greek plays are still being staged even if the original cast is long gone.

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How Do You Know When The Customer Is Happy?

Nitrate films have exploded in the archives, digital ones need back ups every now and then. The scripts of the lost films offer a chance for a remake. Some faith in the word staying around can be kept.

As this essay is not so much an article or reflections for the beginner as they are by a beginner, it might be better to just go and take a look at series produced by the BBC in the 70s: Colditz, a series about prisoners of war in Germany has cheap sets, but the characters work and you are bound to follow it. The Onedin Line, which works also as a great “market economy for dummies” does the same. As does pretty much any British series about a murder in a small village from Morse to Wexford, from Dalgliesh & Pascoe to Midsummer Murders, from Frost to Lewis etc. etc. The Brits seem to get the characters right. Walking the long hallways of the museums of an empire and studying the by gone figures must contribute to the quality of writing and acting that the John Bull studios constantly offer us. Even if on the other hand countries with strong national broadcasting traditions often find their film industry in everlasting turmoil.

These examples do of course not offer the more alternative and wacky, “Let’s try to reinvent the wheel by making it a square”-approaches. I mean this with no disrespect towards the more experimental ways of telling stories and trying to come up with ideas for that. It is just that if you look at some of the festival entries in recent years it would appear, that while the thesis on this matter might be good and worth studying, the filmmakers might not have the intelligence to live up to Jean Cocteau’s famous “Astonish me”comment, which most seem to interpret as “Shock me with something sick and disguise it as social commentary”. The original “Astonish me” was apparently also a favorite of the young Kubrick. Later, it has been said, he told “I’m still fooling them”. Perhaps astonishing and fooling are not that far from each other in the film business, but it seems the con men capable of pulling off the heist are fewer and fewer.

To believe that a commando group of story editors can improve the situation is almost something to use to calm the nerves of ministers of culture and committees of filmmaking. Surely talent has a way of braking through, help or no help, and what makes the film industry so great is that people with no talent can do extremely well too.

So what do I know about scriptwriting, story editing? Not much. I know that a long walk is often better than making your back hurt from too much sitting. I know that story editing is coaching, nurturing. I know that story 121

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consulting is like an affair and can turn out to be costly. I know that script doctoring is like going to the doctor who cures by fixing or cutting, perhaps even implanting something new.

The questions start to outnumber the answers. The diagnosis is perhaps not coming to a conclusion, but hopefully I’m at least left with better questions after this reconnaissance mission to the many unknowns and knowns, that contribute into developing a script. I have not ended up with a list of rules, but still some sort of “checks and balances” has started to form. Although one could as well argue that it is only the opinion machine that has gone through lubrication and this time with better oil.

So... If you want to train yourself as a story editor or writer you train yourself in the streets, in the hallways of libraries, in the darkness of the cinema, by listening to older people and thinking that, now, at the age of 28, your grandfather would have just been returning from the war.

And the future? In a few years one should have “stolen” enough unused ideas to create a really good script or see the publication of a motivational self-help book.

By that time story editing will have started to affect your daily life. Every look and comment from the opposite sex could be fine-tuned or analyzed to come with a subtext. You are desperately waiting for the tipping point, for the beat of the conversation, so that it will again be your point of view that dominates. There are plenty of moments in the day that you consider rewriting, but surely being a story editor will someday turn a man into a perfect husband, since sentences like “Aha, OK, Yes...How do you feel about it?” can never be exploited enough when listening to a writer all set out to film an Asian version of Zabriskie Point, just because the funding is there.

But if you did not take my quote from Mr. Rumsfeld seriously enough then let’s go back to the Pentagon once more and start learning from the OODALoop, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. A concept created

by USAF Colonel John Boyd and perhaps something that every story editor should consider, since, as we learned from Samuel Fuller: “Film is a battleground”. If you want to survive on it, make it a Western. Now go and charge up the hill!

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Answering Questions on Script Editing - from 3 Script&Pitch Alumni

Answering Questions on Script Editing - from 3 Script&Pitch Alumni

by Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten Questions from Story Editor Malva Guicheney: Malva: Would you agree that part of the work of a story editor has a lot in common with the work of a psychoanalyst?

And - how do you understand when the time has come to stop pushing the writer in his/her search into the inner and most hidden motivations that gave him/her the need to write the story?

Marietta: First of all I can’t really say my work relates directly to that of a psychoanalyst, since I have no experience as one at all… But, that said, there is certainly a lot of psychology and analysis involved in this work. Secondly. It’s all a process between more people. So I don’t feel it’s really me pushing, at best it should feel like a collaboration of some sort. The writer should need me for his or her purposes, in order for the story to develop along the best potential lines.

Malva: As a script editor you often get to read material that is badly presented.

Sometimes, nonetheless, you see that the project has potential: which elements help you evaluate projects?

Marietta: Sending sloppy material is not to be recommended, as it diminishes the authority of the writer, and creates irritation. However, still, in the situation, I automatically seek out the goodies, it happens without a plan: I search for the soul and the heart. Where is the fire, the passion, and the urgency? I then - of course - use my knowledge to instinctively discern where the project is at; is it the right time to get involved? Is the project at a state relevant to what is demanded of it - in relation to the work and time plan ahead? Are the major elements missing? What is there, and what is not there?

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Malva: Could you briefly explain the difference between a script editor and a cowriter?

Marietta: As a co-writer you are an equal part in a duo (or trio etc.) with the other writer(s). You can be the director as well, or the other writer can be, or both of you together. A script consultant is not responsible for the script and should not have any such ambition, and for sure no hidden co-writing ambitions.

Malva: Would you agree that the most difficult aspect of working as a script editor is gaining the writer’s trust? How do you manage to build a trustful relationship, when writers “as a rule” have a tendency not to trust anybody about their work?

Marietta: The most difficult aspect for me is not trust, and I’m not sure that writers as a rule don’t trust. Actually, as a new writer, trusting the advice of others too easily can be even more dangerous. So, for me, being qualified, that is, for the consultant to be knowledgeable and educated enough creates trust firstly.

One should NOT - as a writer - trust anybody who claims to be a script consultant. One would not even consider letting a person who said they like and know about teeth drill inside your mouth. Many people “know about film”, and approaching the “knower” professionally must be done with great caution. My pool of training, capacity and experience is the source from which the writer can decide to trust me or not. The writer should feel safe about my skills and then for sure we can disagree about attitudes, taste etcetera, in a fruitful and dynamic way. I am disciplined, passionate and serious, and I expect the writer to be as well. If we are on different levels with this, there might be friction.

Secondly. I am loyal to the script, not the writer. So if pushed, I will stand up for the script. Sometimes the writer will inevitably confuse - or resent - that, because they trust their story as it already is, and not me and what I claim needs to be done. Or they are actually lazy (we writers are lazy and scared and manipulative in avoiding pain) so they can use you as an excuse to avoid doing the work. But, honestly I don’t often find trust to emerge as a problem. Also, every development phase is an individual process, and what happens is not to be confused with liking or disliking. If a writer is angry with you, it can be because they are angry about things not working in their story. Or they need another kind of story advisor. It’s important to not be afraid to admit and face these things, or to feel fear in general.

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Malva: Once you gain the writer’s trust it could happen that the initial obstacles a project often encounters during development discourage him/her (i.e. not getting the professionals s/he wants; not finding funds and so on). At that stage a writer could loose the trust in you: how do you deal with this in the interest of the project?

Marietta: The process of writing a feature script involves a LOT of ups and downs.

There WILL be discouragement for sure, sooner or later. This is part of the work. Your function is not to give funds (unless you have a job giving funds, or are independently wealthy by birth and habit) so this is not something the writer can “blame” you for. If they do, chances are they need to gain knowledge about the film world, and themselves. On another note, if the writer looses trust in you for some reason, I think truly the trust needs to be re-built, or the collaboration disrupted. Trust is so crucial in the working process. This is for instance why, when confronted, you must not lie to the writer regarding your position, just because it seemed an easy solution at a certain moment.

Questions from Writer/Director Petr Vaclav: Petr: The first quality of any script doctor (or consultant) is the right diagnosis of the text, and the right opinion about how to continue the work on it. Directions to change, things to keep, stuff to throw away. But, a) this is a very subjective matter. Isn’t it? - and b) how do you deal with that?

Marietta: a) The answer to this is yes and no. Of course the experience and personality of the one who makes the ‘diagnose’ changes how the material is perceived. And, as with everything else, there is no right or wrong.

So from the writer’s (the “diagnosed”) point of view, it is naturally important to know who makes the diagnosis. What capability does the ”doctor” consultant possess? b) Professionally speaking, one can’t just go in and “feel” things based on nothing. One has to analyze what is there on the page (and look at previous work from the creator) - and from there the process starts.

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The work in sessions is mainly about discovery: what is the project really about? Very often the true nature of the project needs to be uncovered. There is sometimes a discrepancy between when the writer understands her/his own intentions, and is able to face the emotional issues and the work process implied, and between when I, as the consultant, understand them.

Petr: Are there some objective criteria?

Marietta: There are storytelling mechanisms, but again: I prefer not to be locked in any predetermined views; I prefer to be overwhelmed, surprised. And each and every human and project must be approached in this way: anew.

Petr: Do you agree that bad “doctoring� can happen? Bad medicine can be chosen? How to avoid it?

Marietta: I do agree. With my own material I am very choosy as to whom I show it to, and whom I listen to in what way. And I always take into consideration their taste, personality, professional background, experience, attitude, passion etcetera. How to avoid it? Writer/directors (and producers, commissioners and so on) should be very attentive and critical about the true authority and craftsmanship of script consultants.

Petr: Is there any sure method of how to understand how to help the text?

Marietta: There is no sure method. The most efficient way for me to move into the process is curiosity.

Petr: Is there any system for how to go through the text and understand what is strong, what is weak, where the real theme is, the real heart of the project?

Marietta: There are of course methods that one uses. Out of the dramatically oriented, trained and structured section of my brain-bank, I design instinctively: 126

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for each project there emerges a form of special strategy, based on the type of problems that are inherent in it, and based on the experience and attitude of the writer. You can’t just apply a set of rules and throw them out, or imply that there are preconceived “solutions” or methods that work on anything.

Based on the analysis of the project, I use dramatically relevant questions in regards to theme, character, urgency, personal connections etc. I never sit with a “form” in my hand. But of course, before reaching that state one must actively learn something… And then - passionately and continuously - cultivate an approach to working with stories and film.

Petr: Don’t you think that the Script&Pitch sessions are short, that the work is not as serious as it could be?

Marietta: In Script&Pitch the strength is, among many other things, the long period over which it stretches, nine months (plus Alumni). The sessions are intended to spark hours of work from the writers, work that they must do on their own, in their gloomy solitude. A session should not, in my opinion, exhaust the writer; it should energize the writer, and create a desire for them to run back to the drawing board.

Check up on the progress is done through Skype-sessions. Before the next sessions, the writers are supposed to work very hard on producing new material. They are also encouraged to use the story editor trainee, and their fellow writers if needed. If new work is then in fact delivered, the sessions are extremely useful.

From my perspective I really see the progress during this nine-month period. Having said that - if the writer has not understood that most of the work needs to be done by them, there can be a problem. The sessions don’t make the writers’ work. The writers can use the others in the group and the tutor for their own purposes and needs.

Then, the pitching sessions are inherently hard for most writers, so just that we do so many in so many different forms, to a number of different forums is amazing! I’ve seen terrified writers develop into well-versed and relaxed front-line figures for their well deserving projects.

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badly communicated. Sometimes, everything is pretty unconscious; badly translated into scenes, into situations.

Do you need to meet the author in order to understand what he wants to really speak about?

Marietta: First of all, this happens not only to beginner writers, it is part of the nature of scriptwriting. Secondly, I can probably read between the lines what it is “about”. But it is the writer that needs to become aware of what she/he is doing, in order to be able to do the work. So the answer would be yes. It is crucial.

Petr: Do you need to know the person in order to have the key for his work?

Marietta: Not at all, you get to know them as writers in the process and sometimes you get to know other sides too. But the main aim is: this script, this story, this film, through this writer/director at this moment in time. But then again, since it takes time to create trust and discovering artistic bonds, working again with the same people can of course be extremely rewarding and fruitful, as it deepens the exploration and the artistic process.

Questions from Writer/Director Marta Parlatore: Marta: On which basis do you pick the projects to work on? What does an idea have to have to interest you?

Marietta: Well. Often I don’t pick the projects myself, they are offered to me. But of course there are ideas that interest you more, on a personal level, and on a professional level. Originality is key; that I feel the material has a freshness and uniqueness to it; that I haven’t read (or seen) something similar last week or last year.

I want to feel that there is emotion, connection, urgency. But also that the creator of the material has worked on it, that it’s not sloppy or haphazard, that there is obvious thought and hours involved. It’s also great if surprise or discovery is part of the emotion I experience.

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Marta: Do you think a good editor should be able to work on any kind of script or does personal taste matter for the process?

Marietta: First of all, lets not call me an editor. I’d prefer it to be counselling, consulting or creativity person or whatever… editor is another kind of work.

A word on personal taste: I wrote my cinema studies thesis about art-and orgy-films like Flaming Creatures, but at the same time I love Gone With the Wind. So taste for me is obviously not in genre, but in something else. But again, personality issues cannot be overlooked.

Marta: Are there scripts, ideas, which you could not work on? Which ones and why?

Marietta: You mean like projects that are immoral or likewise appalling? Honestly, I’d probably be intrigued by anything… But, its more like this: nowadays I try not to say yes to projects that bore me, in which I already from the beginning see no potential. In the past, for survival purposes, I have worked on projects that I did not appreciate at all, and this is bad for everyone. Some projects match better with you, just like lovers or friends.

Marta: What kind of connection needs to be there between editor and writer to make the process work at best?

Marietta: I’d say building trust is definitely a key issue (see other section of text). It’s crucial to take clear stands. The personal connection is sometimes natural, fast and easy, even deep; sometimes it takes months and continues to be difficult. One has to find a professional attitude towards this. Patience is sister to trust. And humour, of course, the ultimate survival kit… Respecting the differences and borders, and recognizing each other’s unique areas of knowledge is also very important.

By the way: I like this quote from one of my sessions: Marietta: “We have two hours: what would you most want from me?”

The writer: - “Praise…?”

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Marta: How much of a psychologist (or even psychiatrist, sometimes) should an editor be in the relationship with the writer?

Marietta: It is interesting that this question comes up again... which also points to the fact that writers are sensitive, manipulative, sincere and complicated creatures. I try to focus on the project, on finding processes that don’t stop the flow, that don’t create panic and writing blocks. Inventing new types of documents, freeing the mind to any type of writing that keeps the process going. I am strict with deadlines (necessary pressure) but open to new styles, forms and initiatives. Anything that can create flow and creativity like music, photography, art, research in all it forms is crucial for me; also creating and maintaining energy and “desire” for the project, as time goes by.

Marta: How do you deal with the writer’s emotions during the development process?

Marietta: Ah. This is where group dynamics are truly invaluable. The writer can find her/his opposition where they need it, but they can also find comfort with a fellow colleague who really supports the project. As writers we need both; pain and love. And finding the way into a good story is very often about confronting emotions you had no idea about; for the writer this can create confusion and panic. Again: if the writer blocks, out of fear or immaturity towards the project, a lot of negative things can happen. So moving forward forcefully but respectfully is part of my strategy. The writer/director carries this golden egg around, and at the right time s/he is ready to release it into the world.

Then all of us can see it, and together, interactively, we can discern what it was, is and can be.

Marta: Is the writer’s personality a tool with which you work? If so, how?

Marietta: Of course - it’s a very exciting process, getting to know a person: their values, their past, their secrets and all of it! Writers carry an amazing source within them, as humans and as creators. The stories are naturally enriched through moving closer to the personal, the private, the secret and the painful. It is a truly educational and entertaining process sometimes... Within 130

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any group personal bonds evolve, and also these personality combinations can sometimes be crucial.

Marta: Is script editing only about technique or is there an X-factor to the process?

If so, what do you think it could be?

Marietta: I rely on all the techniques I have learned in the last 20 plus years (through film school, cinema studies, “classical” dramaturgy methods, workshops, mentors, formulas etc.) but: I do all I can to forget “method” in the moment.

It may seem haphazard and awkward, but there is an idea and thought behind it, believe me…

The key thing here is preparation: I am always well prepared with intricate notes etc. But actually, I rarely look at my notes in the sessions. I do of course when there is a scene-to-scene session, when it’s more into details. (I have, by the way, been in script meetings with Fund Commissioners where they did not even have the script in the room. I find that extremely offensive!)

To prepare well in advance, and spend time thinking about the material is a must for me. My only other X-factor is that I need to walk, to free my mind, and I usually walk to wherever the session is, no matter what the weather and/or circumstances.

Marta: Is screenwriting only about writing or do you use tools that don’t involve only pen and paper?

Marietta: Screenwriting is pre-film. We must find ways to verbalize it, visualize it (and sell it…). Sometimes when people tell me their stories I see it very clearly, so then I try to approach it from that point of view, to come close to how they presented it.

I believe a script CAN convey the film, I really do. I believe in the idea of this. And I also believe that the written material can look VERY different, depending on the location, who is going to direct, shoot, do music, play the parts, etc.

I enjoy working with actors (in the writing process), since it is a speedy way to get to the core of a lot of crucial elements. Character work done or not done is immediately revealed here, and actors are trained to convey feelings, so they search out both the holes and the useful stuff.

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A few personal things I do are to advice writers to go walking in a forest or other “nature” activities for half a day. Or if they are lonely already, to find another person to tell it all to. When we do the workshops on locations it is perfect. Taking another writer along on the beach for a 4-hour walk, discussing each other’s projects. This physical, verbal activity is also really good to release stress about pitching, and in finding ways to identify what the story really is about.

I think film writers can learn a lot from artists: making “books” with ideas, images, sound, clips etc. can help free up the path to seeing and feeling the film.

Also, something I learned from TV is to work graphically, filling walls with post-it notes, and writing on boards, using different colours for different lines, themes or characters, making it flexible and movable, testing impact as you move stuff from one place to another. Seeing the whole film on a wall is a gratifying feeling too. And this way you can choose which part you want to work on which day, picking an area from the wall to focus on, depending on the mood you are in.

Marta: When do you consider your work as an editor to be done? What criteria does a script need to fulfil to be “ready”?

Marietta: Damn, that’s interesting. A script is, technically I guess, ready when (or during) it is being shot. There are so many methods with regard to how you work with rehearsals, changes etc., so this is a sliding definition. And then again, the script is being put together again in the editing room. There is in actuality a strong connection between editor, director, writer and script consultant.

The hard part for the writer can be to know when the script is ready to be read by whom. Testing your script on friends and allies in the business can be a good idea, to get reactions before sending it to producers, funds and other next step platforms.

But to conclude: the development work on a project would be done for me when I see the film.

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CONTRIBUTIONS

BY GUESTS

What do Scripts Sound Like?

What do Scripts Sound Like?

An Introduction.

by Michel Schöpping “The danger of present day cinema is that it can suffocate its subjects by its very ability to represent them: it doesn’t possess the built-in escape valves of ambiguity that painting, music, literature, radio drama and blackand-white silent film automatically have, simply by virtue of their sensory incompleteness - an incompleteness that engages the imagination of the viewer as compensation for what is only evoked by the artist.

By comparison, film seems to be “all there” (it isn’t, but it seems to be), and thus the responsibility of filmmakers is to find ways within that completeness to refrain from achieving it. To that end, the metaphoric use of sound is one of the most fruitful, flexible and inexpensive means: by choosing carefully what to eliminate, and by adding sounds that, upon first hearing them, seem to be somewhat at odds with the accompanying image, the filmmaker can open up a perceptual vacuum into which the mind of the audience must inevitably rush”.

Excerpt from Sound Design: The Dancing Shadow, Projections 4: Filmmakers on Filmmaking. (London, Faber & Faber, 1995; p. 247)

Do we hear sounds as we are writing or reading a scenario or a script?

And how do they sound? Is it possible to start ‘designing’ the contours of the sound - including music - during the development and writing process?

And, most importantly, how will thinking about sound at an early stage of scriptwriting help in the development of the script, the characters and the arrangement of its many elements?

To get an idea of an answer, we must clearly define the different elements of sound, especially those used in film. It is pretty well agreed upon to divide sound in film into ‘The Four Elements’ (ref. Michel Chion): - Dialogue, Speech - (Synchronous) Sounds 135

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- Music - Silence To get an understanding of the use of these sounds, we must first understand how we ‘Listen’. I deliberately use the word ‘listen’ instead of ‘hearing’. Hearing refers to the physical mechanism of not being deaf. It concerns the ear, the hearing nerve and the way the brain receives and handles the neural impulses.

‘Listening’ is about the way we perceive sounds.

It is about attention and psychology.

- - - -

We can describe the Four Ways of Listening as: Causal Listening Semantic Listening Reduced Listening Iconographical Listening

Causal Listening: An invitation to causal listening is often to be found in scripts. By describing sound in a causal way, we know the source. ‘A door creaks’, ‘a car is passing by’, ‘a dog is barking’, etc.. We also often get information about size, distance and gender: ‘a little girl is crying’, ‘the man has a dark voice’, ‘a huge truck is passing’.

Semantic Listening: Semantic listening refers to language or ‘code’ that is carried by the sound.

The most obvious example of semantics in scripts is the dialogue. When we hear dialogue, we automatically give our attention to the meaning of the words and sentences. Semantic and causal listening are most of the time closely connected. We do not only listen to what is being said, but also to how it is said. These causal aspects of dialogue are less to be found in scripts, but will help character development and in the end the actors and DOP a lot.

Reduced Listening: In reduced listening it is not about the meaning or the cause of a sound, but especially about the internal, esthetical and emotional value of a specific sound. It is hard to talk about sound itself; we tend to speak about source and semantic meaning. Strange, because we are listening in a reduced way all day to understand, feel and interpret our world. We immediately feel the difference between ‘a crying baby’ and ‘a weeping baby’.

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We do not speak about ‘these beautiful violins’ but about the ‘touching music’. This kind of listening is too seldom found in scripts.

Iconographical Listening: The iconographical way of listening is always present in film, but not too often in scripts. Sound does not only gets it’s meaning by its cause, semantics or reduced values, but very often by the image, the sign they provoke. Clear examples are ‘a car horn’, ‘an alarm bell’, ‘a car crash’, ‘a fighting couple’ etc.

The Four Elements: Speech, Dialogue: - - - - -

We divide speech into five categories: Dialogue Voice-Over Talking People Voice of the Mind Emanation Speech

Dialogue: Almost every script is loaded with the human voice. The primary use of dialogue seems to be a semantic one. The meaning of the dialogue is ‘coded’ in words, language.

Another use of speech could be indicated as a ‘causal’ use. The meaning of the message is not primarily in the semantic coded meaning, but in the ‘way’ the words are spoken. Most writers use ‘causal’ speech as well.

Indications like ‘shouting’, ‘whispering’, etc.

Voice-Over: Too often reduced to only being good for TV, news items and the like.

That is a pity, because we have so many strong examples of an exciting use of this non-diegetic element in films by for example Coppola, the Coen brothers, Kubrick, Tarantino, Scorsese, and others. It can be a driving force or element from the ‘outside’.

Talking People: Doesn’t need a lot of explanation. It can have semantic aspects, but the real interesting use can be found in its creative power to provoke an atmos137

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phere: a crowded bar, a playground, an office at a newspaper and so on.

Voice of the Mind: Subjective internal sounds; in this way we are able to give information and ‘play’ with time.

Emanation Speech: Is causal speech - there is no (understandable) language. Emanation speech is often used in animation (e.g. La Linea).

(Synchronous) Sounds: These are divided into six groups: - - - - - -

Sound Environment Atmosphere Habitat Species Internal Sound ‘On the air’ Sound

Sound Environment: Examples are: city hum, birds, a sea far away. These sounds try to create a certain feeling in an environment.

Atmosphere: General sounds with small dynamics. Are there without being noticed, but are always felt.

Habitat: The typical sound of a certain place. Very often more specific and strong in order to give an indication about that place. ‘Industrial sounds’ and ‘harbour’ are good examples.

Species: Sounds of people and animals as an indication of ‘being there’; never (or seldom) with a semantic meaning.

Internal Sound: Sounds that are connected to an internal state of a character (physical 138

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and mental), can be divided into: Objective internal, when it is mostly physical sounds without a semantic meaning, like ‘heavy breathing’, ‘heart beat’ etc.

Subjective internal, when it is, for example, ‘internal voices’, ‘internal memories’, telling us something about a state of mind.

‘On the air’ Sound: Every sound that is being ‘broadcasted’, such as telephones, radio, TV and intercom etc.. It is generally used in film in two forms, which tell us something about the source: First source (CD quality) – zoomed in on the source. We don’t hear room acoustics and are confronted directly and closely to the source (e.g. source or pit music developing into score).

Last source (Bad radio) - the acoustical environment is part of the quality. It will give us a feeling of the acoustical and/or emotional space.

Music: Sound is emotion, and music is a sublimation of this emotion. Walther Murch referred to music as the anabolic steroid of film. It is not a very common practise to write, or describe music in the script, especially not the pit or non-diegetic film music. Screen music should be part of the script to let it be part of the scene. Music can be composed for film, to fit the needs of the film. Using existing music can be interesting as well, because of its iconographical aspects. Here are three categories of music: - Pit Music (film music/non-diegetic) - Screen Music (source music, set music/diegetic) - Over Borders (diegetic/non-diegetic): - Pit Music (film music/non-diegetic): All pit music is non-diegetic, never recognisable by the characters. It is a manipulation of the viewer by the director. It can help a lot in plot - and character development to have at least indications of pit music in the script.

- Screen Music (source music, set music/diegetic): Screen music could be everything that is being played in the space of the action: musicians or actors playing music on or off-screen, radio, TV or a cd playing. To make it part of the scene (dramaturgy, decoupage, tempo, 139

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rhythm, acting etc.), it is very advisable to include clear indications of screen music in the script.

- Over Borders (diegetic/non-diegetic): Music can easily cross the diegetic-non-diegetic borders. An actor sings in sync with the film music (Punch Drunk Love); screen-music transforms into film music (Apocalypse Now). Music can freely move between the diegetic and non-diegetic space and thus invoke great emotional and dramatic effects. To make use of this effect, the music should be in the script in a very distinctive manner.

Silence: Since the existence of ‘film sound’, silence must be considered as a sound element, which can have a huge dramatic impact. We experience silence as something that ‘should be there’, since it is in our world all the time. The silent film was in fact ‘deaf’ (ref. Michel Chion). It had no ears for the emotions of the character. The image of someone crying loud had no meaning at all. With the introduction of sound, we can listen to the emotions of the characters.

Leaving obvious sound out of the sound track, will give meaning to the image. There are three different types of silences: - Natural Silence - Unnatural Silence - Technical Silence Natural Silence: A quiet environment will give a natural silent background for an intimate conversation.

Unnatural Silence: Taking away the sound of a busy environment will give an extra dramatic impact to the silence. It can give us the opportunity to ‘enter into the head and thoughts’ of our film character.

Technical Silence: Taking all sound out will create a technical silence. Sound equipment nowadays is so good that we can really experience the complete silence.

It will invoke a direct confrontation of the viewer with herself.

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The Use of These Elements in Film: All these elements can be used in different ways. In film, visible space is ‘bordered’ by the well-chosen frame-borders. These borders do not give any limitation to the sound. In contrary, they will give extra dramatic and emotional opportunities to the filmmaker in creating and manipulating an emotional and dramatic sound environment. It is wise to include this ‘there and now’ space in the script, because it will enhance the dramatic value of the scene and will be of help to crew and cast. Three ‘appearances’ of sound can be distinguished, more or less directly connected to the image: - In the Frame/Onscreen (here and now) - Outside the Frame/Off-screen (there and now) - Non-diegetic (somewhere and ‘ever’) In the Frame/Onscreen (here and now): Elements onscreen can be heard. They move and make sound and will give us a feeling of synchronicity. It will help to make us feel the scene as being ‘real’ or ‘true’.

Outside the Frame/Off-screen (there and now): The only difference between onscreen and off-screen sound is the visibility. When we close our eyes everything seems to be in one space and strongly connected. Together with the image off-screen sounds can help the dramaturgy, attract attention, make us curious (to the source of the sound) or just create an atmosphere.

Non-diegetic (somewhere and ‘ever’): Film is, as we know, a play with space and time. In general, the image will define the space, simply by framing it. Sound is time. It can only exist through motion in time, in the fictive world of cinema. It can easily cross the borders of the film-reality to another universe, that of cinema. Both worlds can easily become synchronous in an emotional and dramatic way.

Film music is an easy to understand example of this use of sound. The non-diegetic use of sound can help a lot in creating the fictional world with the illusion of (an at least emotional) reality. Lynch, Haneke, van Sant and others are known for their creative use of all forms of sound.

Sound in the Script and the Sound Concept: (Almost) every film will make use of realistic sounds. The way they appear in the final mix and the emotional and dramatic impact they have will 141

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differ a lot. The only way the sound-mixer and boom-operator can collect these sounds in an effective way is to understand the script really well. The only way to get to really understanding the script is to include sound. When sound is very well implemented in the script it will be extremely helpful for the DOP, the sound dept., actors, the set designer, the editor and everyone involved in transforming the script into images and sound: because sound defines ‘time’ in a script better, and adds ‘space’, deepening and widening the visual and framed world of the universe about to be created.

At times it seems hard to ‘write sound’. There are some handles to it, however: - - - - - -

Give your characters ears Give your characters minds, emotions and memories Give your characters sound (shoes, clothes, wooden leg etc.)

Try to think of a (sound) environment where ‘something can happen’ Try to think of off-screen sounds that your characters can react on Try to create ‘Space for Sound’, since sound needs time to tell its story, provoke the emotion - Try to create ‘Space for Sound’ in the minds of your characters. Continuous dialogue, conversation or other semantic or causal sounds will make it difficult to get into the characters’ head or mind Try to remember that you “- can open up a perceptual vacuum into which the mind of the audience must inevitably rush.”

Listen carefully. Together with the image and the editing, you will be creating cinema.

Used and interesting literature to explore the world of sound further: Reader, Dutch Film Academy, first year, Ben Zijlstra, 2008 Audio Vision, Michel Chion, 1994 The Voice of Cinema, Michel Chion, 1999 Music & the Mind, Paul Robertson, 1996 The Conversations, Ondaatje / Walter Murch, 2004 In the Blink of an Eye, Walter Murch, 2003 Sound Design, David Sonnenschein, 2002 Silent Film Sound, Rick Altman, 2004 142

The Dawn of the Independent Producer?

The Dawn of the Independent Producer?

by Thomas Mai Introduction by the editor: For the past couple of years the notion of writers thinking and becoming more entrepreneurial in way of behaving as or even being their own producers, thus keeping a bigger or a full share of the rights to their material, has gained strength.

For example at the 4-year old Screenwriter’s Festival (SWF) in Cheltenham, UK, where this ‘idea’ is promoted strongly by its director, David Pearson, who in an article during this year’s Cannes-festival said: “As the digital revolution impacts on distribution and traditional production funding models break down, writers’ true value could be recognised both for a new-found spirit of enterprise and for their ability to be lightning rods for the audience’s psyche”. And William Nicholson, screenwriter and SWF regular, is (even more) optimistic: “It could be a period of creative development, maybe a new golden age for scripts”.1 This is indeed worth bringing some attention to and as much as insights on script writing and editing are important and inspiring, the real world surrounding our stories, the world in which they are to be realized, is equally so. One especially exciting area is the concrete link to the audience: the distribution, which represents the windows through which the audience will be able to experience our films.

These windows are crumbling, expanding, changing and the limitations of when you are allowed to present your film in which window (theatrical, DVD, pay-tv, online/VoD etc.) are being challenged, not only by the growing number of VoD-platforms, but also by filmmakers, distributors and sales agents who try new ways to reach the audience.

We see more and more examples of films premiering on more than one platform, paving the way towards a broader choice of sales - and distribu1

published in Screen, May 14th 2009, David Pearson: Screenwriters who are helping themselves.

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tion strategies for individual projects and their specific needs. As the first essay in this edition states: “Telling a story means to tell it to someone� and therefore we have asked experienced sales agent Thomas Mai to write about this new audience landscape - albeit from a producer’s perspective, his insights are aimed equally at writers and directors: The Dawn of the Independent Producer?

With online digital distribution, cinema on demand and disc on demand, the whole way of doing film business has changed dramatically and the winner is the independent producer.

The Internet has removed the need for expensive middlemen in all other businesses on the planet. For the film business that means that film producers can get one step closer to the consumers in terms of financing, marketing, sales and feedback, removing an expensive link in the food chain.

Gone are exclusivity, territories and bad accounting, say hello to nonexclusivity, global market and transparent accounting.

In my 14 years of selling hundreds of feature films around the world I have seen the film business change dramatically. About 10 years ago during the Neue Market in Germany you would have more buyers than films, resulting in higher prices, bidding wars and lots of pre-sales. Today the festivals are filled with loads of films (58 world premieres in Toronto alone), 5000 films submitted to Berlin, but very few buyers. 10 years ago it was easy to sell an average film, today it is hard to sell a good film. 10 years ago you would have 8 Korean companies visit your booth in MIFED competing to buy your film, today you should be thrilled if any buyers show up to your screening. So what happened?

DVD-sales, which has always been the backbone for distributors, is disappearing.

TV-sales, which used to be a major financial factor for distributors, is also declining. Why? There are more and more TV channels, which normally should result in more competition, but because each TV channel is catering to a smaller and smaller segment in the marketplace their budgets are getting smaller and smaller as well. Pay TV is in steady decline as consumers are looking to the net for their entertainment needs, leaving fewer subscribers to pay for the bill and therefore fewer money to buy films for.

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The local distributor is in other words in trouble and therefore they are paying less. The bad news is that the distributor still wants the same 10 - 15 year exclusivity for all rights but for a next to nothing MG. Today you are getting offered 10% of the MG that you were offered 10 years ago for a similar film. I completely understand the distributor, but from a sales point of view it doesn’t make any financial sense to give away exclusivity and all rights in today’s world.

The alternative is to do it yourself as a producer or go to someone who can help you take the film out in the world digitally. The net is filled with hundreds of online platforms that can sell your film directly to the consumer bypassing a traditional distributor (to name but a few iTunes, Amazon, Jaman etc.; by the end of 2007, 258 VOD-platforms existed in over 40 countries and the market evolves rapidly).

The good news is that once your film is up, it stays up 24/7/365 and unlike the theater and your local DVD store the film will not be removed because it doesn’t perform. You are removed after the first weekend at the box office if the numbers are not ok and the average local DVD store only has 1000 films on their shelves leaving no shelf space for the smaller films.

Online there is no age for a film. When I was at TrustNordisk we uploaded Danish films that were 15 years old and they did really well and there was no way you were able to find the film in any video store.

Today, due to social media tools like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. it is possible to advertise your films to millions of consumers directly, not to mention the more than thousands of trailer/video places online. YouTube streams 1 billion videos a day, yes a day. These numbers are staggering. iTunes has - by their own estimates - 100 million costumers with credit cards in their iTunes store. In 5 years they have sold 8 billion songs and are now the biggest music seller in the world. An iTunes store for film is available in a few countries like the US and UK, but will soon open in the rest of the world.

Amazon has developed a complete cost effective way of selling DVDs through their CreateSpace/disc on demand concept. Amazon takes a digital file of your film and when a consumer buys the film they burn the DVD from the film, label it and ship it the same day eliminating traditional inventory/storage. The good news is that it doesn’t matter if you are selling 2 films a month or 10.000 a month, the model still works. These options were not available just 5 years ago for the independent producer.

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So how much money can you make online? That of course depends on the film, language, cast, theme, story and territorial availability, but on average, if done right, you should make about $125 a month on each digital platform online. While this number is very small if you only go to 2 platforms, it can become serious money if you go to 100 platforms. That is a cool $12.500 a month every month. Over time this can become serious money.

Yes, it does take a lot of time and effort to get the film out on 100 platforms and yes, there are also middlemen that take a cut. There are even middlemen who sell it to other middlemen leaving less for producers. There are aggregators, sales agents, platforms, set-up boxes, advertised VoD, transaction VoD and so much more.

Yes, it is a whole new world, but none the less a very exciting world, a world where a producer can retain all ownership rights to their own films and still make money selling them online. Are there problems, concerns and things to look out for? Yes, but look at the possibilities as opposed to the limitations!

In the old world of selling we would rarely get a report from a distributor.

In 90% of the cases we would get no report at all, leaving us to second guess how a film was doing in a certain territory, but that was ok, because we would get a nice MG up front. In the online world accounting is much more transparent because the producer is paid a share (between 50% - 70%) of the first dollar. All costs are taken from the platform’s share. These are the best splits a producer has ever seen and there is nothing to deduct. In the old world we could never check if the distributor had really printed 300 posters or if the marketing campaign truly cost what they told it cost and what about that discount they got from the ad company? It was a matter of faith and then the nice MG of course helped us believe in the project.

This article is not meant to bash distributors, some of my best friends are distributors, but it is important to highlight the major shift in the business to understand the options available.

Being an old producer myself with 4 titles under my belt I truly believe this is the best time to be a producer. The Internet has democratized the options for everyone. There are no more gatekeepers. In the old day if the 8 buyers in one territory said no, there was nothing that you could do. Today you don’t need a No for an answer, you can just go straight to the consumers through the Internet.

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Cost efficiency is the key for online distribution. In the old world it was too expensive to take a film to Germany if there were only 5.000 potential consumers, but online it all adds up. In the old world you made most of your money from a few sources, today you will make a little money, but from a lot of different sources.

Below a few random links to some of the available VoD-platforms: - http://www.theauteurs.com/ - http://indieflix.com/ - http://www.jaman.com/ - http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/start - http://www.netflix.com/Default - http://www.artevod.com/Accueil.html

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