Interview with Daniel Tysdal Faculty adviser of Screenwriting at Victoria College By Vikram Nijhawan1,2,3 1 Department of English, 2Department of History, 3Department of Classics 3 Third-year undergraduate of Trinity College, University of Toronto Daniel Scott Tysdal is an award-winning Canadian poet and filmmaker. Originally from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, he earned a B.A. from the University of Regina, followed by two M.A.s – one in English from the University of Acadia, followed by another in creative writing at UofT, where he now teaches at the Scarborough campus. Daniel also holds the special position of Faculty Advisor for Screenwriting at Victoria College. This year, he will be teaching the course VIC276, “Writing for the Stage and Screen”. Daniel won the Re-Lit Award for Poetry in 2007. He is best known for his publications The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems (2013), and his collection Fauxccasional Poems (2015). “You are most widely recognized as a poet, but not as much for your filmmaking or screenwriting endeavours. When and how did you first become interested in this field?” My first love as a wee human being was movies. I started making movies when I was thirteen, two years before I started writing poetry regularly, and my teenage dream was to make B-grade, heck, even Z-grade, horror movies. When I started my undergraduate degree at the University of Regina in 1996, I intended to study film. However, mental health problems that had started during high school totally swallowed me. It was poetry and a loving and supportive family that helped me endure and manage my illness, and, eight years after starting my undergraduate degree, I finally finished it. By that point, I had fully committed to literature, poetry and short fiction in particular, so that was the path I followed. After I was hired to teach Creative Writing at UTSC in 2009, I returned to film. I started taking classes, writing traditional and experimental shorts, and then I actually attended film school and started making short films. I now split my creative time 50/50 between film projects and literature projects. “On the surface, poetry and film appear to be two completely different creative media. How would you compare the process of writing poetry to writing a film? Are there some surprising similarities between these two artistic modes?” Form-wise, poetry and screenwriting are deeply linked by the need for concision and for specific, striking images. As for the processes themselves, they are, of course, united by the need to revise and work effectively with feedback. So often with a poem and a script, the work is to streamline, combine, pare down, and cut. As for filmmaking itself, maybe this should not have come as a surprise to me, but one connection that really did surprise me was the relationship between rhythm in poetry and rhythm in editing a film. As poets, we work with rhythm in so many ways: from the rhythm of the music of language to the rhythm of imagery to the rhythm of a poem’s developmental arc. I found these poetry composition skills directly translated into editing movies, to working artfully with the order, type, length, etc. of shots. On this topic, I do have to send a shout-out to my film school friend Brenton Richards. Without his one-on-one help learning the software, I never would’ve discovered I had those talents.
Screenwriters’ Perspectives Vol. 2 No. 1 2021
8
