42 Ways To Avoid Writing A Boring Screenplay

because every screen bar I think this is really true ends a script I think it's brilliant that people do it all the time and they usually write to me Chris Krebs a lot of writers hate because they collect but my script is different to them you have some characters sit in a restaurant and someone drinks tomato sauce, what is that? It's a way to put the audience to sleep very, very quickly, the other thing is that what is real is more. I think that a character without an inner life is

boring

and the story continues. be really

boring

and no one is going to be interested and bored to tears every time one thing he told me was he said don't look outside of yourself, look inside and so it is again finding that I divided myself sunny, there was a time when He and I were sitting together and I said, I just find out what business you're in.

I said no, writer. I said you're in the same business as Bradbury and he said yes, that's exactly right and what he saw what he was doing was creating something that didn't. someone else could create and he told me that he spent

writing

every day for ten years before he wrote a single line, a single word that was uniquely his and then one day he sat down and wrote the words the lake and wrote a short story based on when He was a little boy when he was eight, he and a little friend who was seven when they were swimming in Lake Michigan and he got out and she never did, she drowned and his strength made her come back like a ghost and he told me that when he was done As the story unfolded, tears ran down his face and he knew he had written something no one else could have written.

It came specifically from his soul experience and said that he took and took. Another two years of

writing

every day before he could write something that was uniquely his again and they got to the point where he could do it over and over and over again and he became Ray Bradbury because he was determined to do that and then I thought It was a great lesson to say, okay, what are you creating? What can you create? That it is not something that is just an imitation of what others are doing, but that is unique to you, that no one else could have created. , that you create something new in the world, that is truthful and meaningful. and then you know you've done something, what you're doing, that's been a big inspiration to me.

My underlying philosophy of all storytelling, whether you're a novelist or a screenwriter, a filmmaker, a television writer, whatever, is that your primary goal as The Storyteller should provoke emotion. You must create an emotional experience for the audience whether it is a movie or a play for the reader. If you are a screenwriter and you have to get them to read it in order to make the movie. You're a novelist or whatever, so your main goal has to be to create emotion, not that cliché. You know this because I have never written what I quote in quotes.

I know I write fantasy worlds, supernatural stories and all that, but writing. what you feel and write what's in your heart and write something that means something to you and you know. I was a script reader for God for probably a decade and I read seven eight scripts a week and the rare one was the great script and when you found out it was a really exciting day at the office and sometimes the really terrible scripts were funny because they were so horrible, but the ones that became really exhausting and really innovative as a script reader, who is it?

I sat there and they asked me to read a synopsis of the script, write a comment on it, then take another one and read it, and they weren't the ones that you could tell were written by people who were looking at what was the success of last year and trying to imitate that and those were mortal and they were not good they were not bad they were safe and mediocre and any writer any young writer any old writer anyone who is starting to write anything write something you feel write write write write something that comes from the heart and people can Don't think that Beetlejuice is a personal movie, it's an intensely personal movie, it was intensely personal for Michael and I, and you know, I didn't know it had a theme until I had enough work to realize that it had a theme and pretty much everything.

What I've written is about broken families being rebuilt in some strange way, but because I come from a broken family and and what and and then there's a I like to think that my work has a sense of heart, a sense of compassion, and a sense of humanity. , no matter how strange it is, no matter how strange the world becomes, and you have to write something that you feel about something that you are passionate about. because or just why doing it is very difficult, it's just not an easy job and I personally can't imagine saying well this was a success now so I'm going to write my version which is not really what I care about what I'm sorry, but I can imitate him well enough.

I can't imagine spending a year of your life doing that, but people do it all the time and they usually write mediocre stories. Quite a story, it's that old. The characters can be wonderful, the dialogue can be brilliant and even funny, but if the story stays there, flat as a pancake, that story is not going anywhere, it is a weak story. I'm the slowest reader in the world, like it takes me. Six hours to read a script. I don't know why I read it out loud in my head or something, but what happens because of that is that I'm stuck in every moment of that script for a long time.

So I notice very quickly when something takes too long and a quick your reader will probably say, "Oh, here's a page of whatever, now keep reading. I get angry if I'm on a page that doesn't know what." once and I don't know why I'm in that scene right now and I hope this felt really bad but I kind of held the writer personally responsible for wasting my time which really isn't his fault because I'm just I'm a slow reader but at least after reading it I have a very clear idea and I may be completely wrong objectively but I had a very clear idea of ​​where I felt the script worked or didn't work and then I just apply it.

I'm a big, big believer in formulas, al

ways

working in a classical narrative structure like Aristotle's, although I think Robert McKee is a dream. I know a lot of people think it's too formulaic and easy in any case, but I think most of the weaknesses in narratives when they can't hold your attention is because they don't adhere to a certain narrative structure three act structure 5 structure. x whatever it is that's ingrained in us as human beings, you know, I work a lot with question marks, like, in what, in what. moment at this point in the script what are the question marks that I as an audience and burning to have answered that make me turn the page why am I interested in continuing with this and many times you will notice that there is no question mark that people are just drinking coffee right now and you know that's a problem in a perspective of what we were talking about before, which is conflict and what's at stake, drama is conflict and what's at stake, that also means that You don't know what the result of something will be. so there's a kind of internal magnetism and moment-to-moment structure that I think you have, it's very easy to get a good sense of that, I don't get distracted, that's maybe something else, I'm not a very visual person. and I don't see the script in my head, you know, I feel the story, I read the story, I get an idea of ​​the characters, I don't see pictures and I think a lot of other people who do see pictures are kind.

I let myself be seduced by that and I don't necessarily see that the story is weak, you know that the cornerstones of the story are not as powerful as they should be, but since I don't have that image at all to distract me, I'm al

ways

after the moments that don't they reach the full potential of what they're trying to do and that's a very abstract thing that doesn't matter if that happens on a ship or in space or whatever, you know, it's always the Why should the audience be on the edge? from your seat right now?

What are you wondering? What do they want to know? Why do they care? How do you identify with those things? You know, it's almost a mathematical structure that helps me. look because basically it's more or less starting with the same starting point for almost every script, which of course a lot of writers hate because they say they like it, but my script is different from them, that's good, it's different in theme and content, but in the The underlying expectations of the audience and the pace that the audience has when consuming a story is no different, it is good meat that meets the same expectations, so you have to see it through of that lens to know how the audience will react.

It's about creativity and Originality: I think originality comes from curiosity because the more curious you are about something, the more you know about something and therefore the more you can

avoid

copying something correctly. I think people who write clichés write clichés because they don't know it. what's been done before, so they go to them, it's new, so they say, oh, they think it's good, but the people who know it and have seen it hundreds of times because they're curious, I'll say it's a cliché because they've seen it. seen hundreds of times. Sometimes cooking the reader is very important, regardless of what you are writing.

I think you know for me if I really don't feel like a dollar fifty and I'll leave a lot of books, but fifteen hundred pages is a long time and If I don't feel it and you'd be surprised how many books I think really don't work on that level, you might not finish it and, especially when it comes to more commercial genres, it becomes even more important for younger readers. I think it becomes even more important to say that I don't think it's necessary to rush or sacrifice the narrative to make it so engaging in a sense, since I personally wouldn't want to do that, but I think getting into the story right away.

Something exciting happened at the beginning of my book. I chose to write a prologue that showed something like what happened before, when the surface of the earth was destroyed, so I told it from, if you can imagine, the point of view of the president's daughters as they are evacuating. the White House, such a young girl being evacuated and me because I did that and for a couple of reasons, but one was that I wanted something really exciting and really relatable to happen from the beginning because I think that will cook you up and make you want to. to read more, but there are other ways to hook someone, you're like having a great character with a central mystery is something I teach a lot, which doesn't mean it has to be obvious that there is a mystery genre in which everything is elaborated the history. around a mystery, but that said, you can have a story that has smaller mysteries that are revealed at the beginning of a book.

A good example is in The Hunger Games, they talk about the harvest, which is the most important thing that happens right away in The Hunger Games, but they say the word harvest seven or eight times before they finally tell you what it is and you figure it out. pretty early in the story, but you're still reading like, oh, what is this, what's happening, was this big event? so I think it's another way to get someone interested and try to figure out what's going on and I got the script and I was really excited to read it and the first page I opened up and it wasn't even formatted correctly and I read the first page and they weren't writing the right sentences and I had to read this to figure out what they were trying to say and I gave up after a couple of pages because they just abused me, basically.

They had stolen my time, they had wasted me on something that was not a professional product that could never be produced in its current state and maybe if I had forced myself to read the entire script, there would have been a nugget in there that was It's a great idea and , with a little work, you know I could have shaped the script and tried to do something with it, but who has that time and who knows, you could get to the end of this one hundred and twenty page script. It will take you two hours. of a very busy day and you get to the end, everyone could have been shit even though that quote they sent me was a good idea, so you have to be sure and you can't just read it yourself and think it's cool, other people They have to tell you it's cool, so you see this often.

I mean she writes so you get a description of a character. Well, you know, I read this all the time. You know she is beautiful or pretty. You know it's the same house. and he says right, I mean, yeah, that's the same old thing, have you seen it hundreds of times? You know she has to be a massive central character a little bit more creative kids killed more scripts than anything I've ever seen in my life and a story of the week and PASOK. central character they go together they're really going to fit together a passive central character is a hero or heroine you know the leader in the middle who doesn't really do anything and life and the story happens to them nothing happens to them or anyone and that's a way to put your audience to sleep very, very quickly.

The heroes of the audience have to be active. Having an active hero who has a clear desire is definitely something very important that I work with the writers on every strong story that begins. a triggering incident or incidentinciting, as many people are faced, pushes the central character into a powerful dilemma, then the choice that is made in the dilemma is what defines the external role of the story and each obstacle that increases in all isThe lost moments must be linked to that choice and when the objective is not clear, the story does not work because everything must tie together.

There are countless features and television shows where we are in the middle of the story. You have no idea what you have left for a long time, as if you have lost it because the actions and obstacles are not linked to the desire and we lose the sense of what the desire was, so when you do, that story does not work a lot. . Often all writers write a passive, non-acting hero with no inner life. I think he's boring. Know. I think so. I think so. For me. I think that if the character has some inner life that makes sense.

You know if that inner life. life is a subtext or if that inner life is in conflict with his or her public life, you know, that's interesting to me, you know, I don't know, I think it really depends on the type of story it is and you know, you know every I guess you know how to use a comparison with how to prepare a meal. I think every meal is different. You know that each meal requires a different type of ingredient. If there is something about that character that tells me that that person is not telling everything about his or her life or there is something about that person that what he or she is doing in front of people is different from what they are doing behind the scenes to me that's interesting every scene is a power grab, everyone wants to take control of the situation in whatever that means to them and then how are they secretly jockeying for position?

You know, he and I like which one of us. We are all worried. We are worried about which of us seems smarter. See, that's what it means. The whole interview has been the other thing you said about the date, the wishes on the part of the character. He was thinking. I know you said there are a lot more than two, but two more that I would think about as a writer, besides what the two were. you said what does the character do who doesn't know what the two different objectives are yes the vision what I analyzed Michael is what I call the public objective in other words if I asked someone in this room now what are you doing here what?

Do you want what is your goal right now? We could talk about what our public goal is during this interview. Then, beneath that, deep down, is a private purpose that may not even be recognized. Well, yes, that's what maybe subconsciously is driving that character. try to get it right, and from my point of view, it's not exactly the same as a wish: asking what the character is consciously hiding from the other person, what she's hiding from him and what she's hiding from herself, what's the Something that she's not aware of yet that is really driving her and deep down, especially in the first half or 3/4 of the movie, towards the end, you would expect all of that to come to the surface, but the Deception and secrecy are very, very powerful in telling a story because they add a whole new layer of conflict, they get into this inner journey, and yet the more conflict there is in more layers, the more you will engage your audience, that's a good thing. .

I like to hide everything that I didn't see because I liked that, yes, the subconscious or the unconscious or what you don't know, but concealment and deception are secrets, that's good, I'm going to steal, that I can steal that, eh I'm sure I'll get yours. Well, you can still use it. I'll take it forever. It's okay, you want to share it, you don't want to steal. No, I'm not going to sit down as long as we are clear that the Maya gel will look better. I'll give you credit for that, okay, okay, because we know my stated goal is to look smarter.

I think so, I'm trying and I'm trying to help you. I appreciate that I'll help you think you're win here, let's move on, that was great, let's move on. Did you know that, for example, there are only four viable objectives in all narrative screenwriting and the voices are yes when you stop escaping or retrieving? So okay, you have an idea for a character, your hero. or cool heroine, you have an idea and they are fine, now what do they want what do they have to have a goal to pursue well, it has to fall into the category of winds DAF escape or recover now these are big categories and there are many versions of each woman, many permutations of each, so it's not like it's so cut and dried, but to a lot of people it will seem that way to me, but the point is that there are only those four because those four share something in common: all provide a visible three-dimensional physical goal for a film that will result in a physical climax and obligatory scene; it excludes the use of internal objectives and that is one of the things that people have to overcome. goal that's cool and separate from what drives the movie, you need a visible physical goal, each of those four goals has a finish line, a visible finish line and a goal, like well, they want to feel better about themselves and That does not work.

In the movie, it just doesn't work personally. I like to try to get to know the character in my own mind. Knowing the characters enough in my mind to know how they will behave or react to anything I throw at them. For me it's like you can understand the characters and sometimes that's why it's so easy, excuse me, sometimes that's why it's better to base a character on someone you know or on yourself, because you know when you're basing it on your brother, your mother, your best friend or because then you know how that person speaks, how that person is going to react to something and then you don't have to invent everything, otherwise, the burden you have as a writer to invent everything that happens is a lot, whereas if you know who the character is, an example, always use it if someone is walking down the street and a guy jumps up with a knife and says give me your wallet if it's me as a character, I'll probably get on my knees and start crying and you know whatever, if it's Jason Bourne, you know a fight chase ensues, you know what I mean, so knowing the character first I think is helpful and then yeah, I think every writer probably has a character in mind. handful of not everything, a handful of things that are supposed to happen, they're going to drive the story, but I probably prefer, to my detriment, to just think about everything to a certain extent.

I try not to have everything set up and I tried, maybe I have, certainly maybe I have. In the first deck, I know what the inciting things will be, but then I like to let the characters somehow tell me what the next scene is instead of forcing them to do something I've already added. I come out of that and in the moments where I've had a lot of us have an ending in mind, in moments where I've had a definite ending like the reason I wrote the script was because I got the last scene. my head by the time I get there it's inevitably not because the characters have grown and the situation has taken on some kind of life of its own, so by the time that doesn't make sense anymore, it would have been an imposed ending or an artificial ending, so I think Writing can be a lot easier the more real those characters become to you, all of these characters, there are only 14, who help you create a plot that helps move the story forward, and any other characters that the particular writer wants to plot. the plot, you know, I really like this character, you know, he's interesting and happy and energetic and they talk in a funny way and I like it if they don't serve the story if they don't help drive the plot forward get a random axis cut them off, lose them because They have to fulfill a function, the heart and soul of this, it's a really interesting script, it's an action thriller, an invention thriller, but what's at the center of the soul that the audience can latch onto and identify with me feeling is Audiences don't really want to see a big action-adventure movie, but they want me to see it.

You will be excited to see it. One that is well made, but wants to connect with people and what people's journey is and what their struggles are. It's people's epiphanies or disappointments in the transformation of characters, that's what they want, they want to connect with the aspect of that story that relates to their own lives, which can be very subtle, but very, very powerful, But we have to identify that. So, talking to these two writers yesterday, the goal was to find that and then once we can identify that with the writers, then we could eat it.

We can all ask him. Is it in the script? Is it clear from the script that that is? what is, but first of all you have to feel what is and that's why a lot of times when looking at a script you can feel like it's not there, but instead of trying to cover it up or pretend that it's there or soon that it's there or just insert something. Go back to the writers, go back to the people who had the original idea and figure out what it is and then try to identify it and that's really for a director, that's what's going to guide you through the rest of the process. the movie is about this character who is fighting these struggles, he wasn't fighting these aspects of himself in the world around him and his family or his job or whatever he's fighting and that what is revealed through that process is what this man or this woman is going through is something we can relate to, so you have to place bets early, then the process of rewriting and reexamining the script is how we can get it, how we can make it clear to the audience and also for the actors.

It's really important for the actors to be able to see it. The actors playing the roles will join together to ask questions. The jump is where we, as an audience, jump onto the screen and become protagonists of the story. A good story has some kind of fantasy. so it doesn't have to be a positive fantasy that we want to explore in our life, so we jump in and we're Eliot riding his bike with et and he flies, you know, and that's like one of those moments where if you had to turn on the camera towards the audience and look, look at the audience, everyone would be delighted because we are all Elliott in that scene at that moment and if we are watching a movie, we can become Indiana Jones and do the amazing thing.

It's an adventure and we basically jump from the audience to the screen, which means we need a character to jump to and a good story is about a character fulfilling some kind of dream, some kind of fantasy that the audience has and the reason why. which the movie is. a success is because it ends up hitting the element of fulfilling a lot of people's dreams and so if you can figure out the zeitgeist of what the audience is dreaming of what people are dreaming of right now, that's which will take us to the screen, but it doesn't have to be something positive.

I often made a movie for our class here and film noir often takes us to people doing bad things because sometimes we all secretly want to do bad things but we can't. We all want you to know that there are a lot of movies about professional criminals because sometimes we all want to break the law. There are a lot of movies about people doing terrible, horrible things that kill people that the two horrible bosses that kill their bosses are trying to do. bad things because we have that thing happening inside of us which is the fulfillment of the dream of that story, so a good movie is the fulfillment of the dream for the audience, the audience fantasizes about something that, hopefully, as part of that audience , as members of that audience, we fantasize about something.

Of those things for you, a weird movie is when someone has their dream come true and you wonder what kind of sick weirdo that dream is and you see them sometimes and what's going on here, but a good story is going to take action. It will allow the audience to jump into that character and then take them on an adventure that will be a good adventure, it could be a bad adventure, but we are going to follow that story and that means that there will be There is a big conflict somewhere, that means that a You often know that the things that happen often are someone else's romance of some kind because even if so, you know that ET is an extra dog story, but dogs are aliens and there is no love more unconditional than that of your dog or You know, I don't know that your cat loves you, but your dog loves you no matter what, that's something we can fantasize about, we can get into that story, we can understand that story and jump into Eliot's life with ET and you know. .

He's the guy who brings the kid to bring some of the pets that you know mom doesn't want and he has to hide them in the closet and you know all that stuff, you know, I found a stray dog ​​but stray dogs are an alien and now the hunter Dogs wants the keys from the dog catcher, he's the government guy, so basically it's about taking that story and finding them, you take that story because he could have just been in a dog story, but by making him the alien that now we are counting. the story that we have already heard and tell a story that is new, different, that gives us a different experience than we have had before, the hero is the audience that you build, you builda story so that the hero is that with many flaws and everything is fine, yes, make them human, but they have certain qualities, character and circumstances, they have to be brave, that is absolutely essential, but you can put them in an unfair injury.

We care about people who are being treated unfairly. in a dangerous situation they are funny they have a sense of humor that always helps other people love them there is this kind of list of things you can do to keep the characters interesting that allows us to like them and once we start seeing nature of the main problem of the hero or heroines and the main impossible task before them, hopefully on page six or eight, we, the audience, the audience becomes a person, each of us sitting alone and we project ourselves psychologically. We become the hero and then we go on the journey and if that hero doesn't do anything or doesn't want anything and other people do all these things and all the people that come along, all the supporting characters are funny and witty. urban, you know, talkative and they are that, jokers and fun, they are all fun characters, while basically your central character is more or less wallpaper, he is dead, many things that the story is not and also relates to this idea .

That story is better than the real thing, so one of the things that story is not is that it's not a literal day in the life, it's not just a slow pace through the day, I drink my coffee and I wake up in the morning. and I'm going to work there is something that there is a central action or a central problem that is bigger or better than the real thing that unites it and that can link it to an everyday situation but it's not just those small everyday moments and I and I I just wanted to comment which you know Boyhood was my favorite movie of the year and I think you know it breaks all these rules but the reason it works is because it's not just a day in the life or a retelling but it's also this device of having happened for 12 years makes it so fascinating and that's why there are exceptions to this rule, but in general these are the things that people should

avoid

when approaching their stories, another is random reflections, you know?

It's something that, you know, I find very pretentious, where you have some characters sitting in a restaurant and someone drinks ketchup, what is that, and then the movie just progresses through people saying that and you know it's fun to point out. which people think are deep when they aren't from time to time, but if the whole movie is like ketchup, what does that mean to the audience after about 20 minutes? If it will last that long, what I need to do, I need to do. Being here for this, what is this and does it feel very pretentious, like just fishing?

Well, these are just some people who really had the germ of an idea, but didn't really think about this, it doesn't have any progression. Stories aren't a straight line either, they need to go up and down and turn and there have to be ups and downs and I like it in the same way that it's not a day in the life, it's not just a direct telling of events, you know, another story. It's not a fascinating place or even a really interesting event, which is why we get pitches like this all the time, people like I'm going to write a story about I have a movie about a nuclear submarine that gets stuck at the bottom of the ocean and we say which one it is.

I'm sorry, the story is like nuclear submarines at the bottom of the ocean, it's like that's not a story, a story is when you start telling me and you know what the character's risks are. You already know that, so another one is oh wow, I went to this amazing town in China and you know this is the town where they make you meet the Dragons for the festivals, it's amazing and Mike, my movie is like that town, like that's not a story that's an arena, so we have to constantly help writers distinguish a really interesting arena that you know or a kind of interesting event that you know from being a story that those things are not the stone tower or the 1920s Chicago, you know, cool, cool. sand but you have nothing until your characters do something that will advance your story.

We have a structural tool called BMOC that starts at the middle obstacle at the climax. These are the four points in any great story where the hero is asked to change. and they're in every big story, whether it's Star Wars or The Fault in Our Stars or a fast and furious Tokyo Drift and these four points also work within every scene, they're in every action sequence of this BMOC, so this beat of history is present. In short, a great story, if you don't have good news, bad news, which raises the stakes and the clock ticking on each page of your story, your star will be boring, but almost no one teaches that a B in being aware of how How those tools work is how you start putting them on every page, and by the way, these suspense tools work in drama, they work in romantic comedy, they work in all genres and they also work in television, if you go and look at a script of Tarantino either go and look at a Chris Nolan Script or go and look at Allen's script and you'll see on every page, once they've shown it to you, that every page has clocks ticking, every page has good news, bad news, every page has increasing stakes, many of them have other suspense tools. too, but writers are often not aware of this, consciously, they don't incorporate this into their stories when they write them, so just be aware that this is how and that they are cheap tricks, by the way, that's good news, I give you 20 dollars for a bad one. news I'm slapping you the ticking clock is just a bomb a ticking bomb is a gun pointed at someone these aren't fancy tricks they're simple but the best artists use them in all their best work you've never seen Tarantino script that doesn't he had three or four pointed weapons in almost every scene, it's cheap and works great, it entertains and that's why we see this on TV too.

Breaking Bad is nothing more than a series of unbearable suspense devices, so unbearable that it couldn't be. I don't even get sexy watching it and when you sit down to watch Breaking Bad you often have to stop because it draws so much attention, but that's what makes it great, from the beginning, having a seriously good idea is the most important thing and I came up with some basic ideas to make it work as a basic crime story and that's fine for television, not film, where it's all about the event, it's all about something being big and bigger than light, so my ideas were like too small to start with and I have a series of scripts with great scenes, great characters, but the idea is too small, it's not interesting and attractive enough for people to spend 12 dollars to see it. movie on top of that, no matter what the big popcorn and the giant drink cost, you know, going to the movies is a fortune these days.

I'm trying to come up with an idea or write a script. This is a movie where I would be in the audience and it's interesting that some people I know who write

screenplay

s wouldn't go see the movie it was made in and I wonder why you would write that then if not even the audience for the movie, so I try to write a movie that is not the one I would like to see because what I really want is to see the producer of my last movie whipped in public. I read a movie that is. the kind of movie that I would like to see and would queue up to see, you know, it's an existing kind of movie that I'm sitting in the audience for, they just don't bother to dig deeper, you know what I want?

I mean, you have to be original, I mean, that's another thing, originality is very important, you know, because if you read the same thing over and over again, you're not going to respond, so, really, that's the nightmare of the existence of the writers, especially the screenwriter, to come up with something new, I mean, when you think about that, I think of the second edition of the 101 habits, bill marsilii, one of the screenwriters there talks about making the 20s, so to He likes all that. he thinks of any event, any scene, character, whatever he thinks of, lists 20 different ways to do it, like it's a talk about meet cute, writing a romantic comedy, how people meet each other in a cute way, well , he's going to do it. 20 different thoughts about it, okay, they can be this, I mean, you have to do it, he does 20 because the first two, three or five of them are going to be clichés, they're going to be things that you know you're automatically going to think about because they are the most famous or the ones we have seen hundreds of times, but going deeper and he forces himself to go deeper that is where you get the creativity in the originality and eventually when you get to that beyond 10 or 12 15 although up to 20 you will start to get some really original ways because you try hard and that's where the writer has to do it.

You have to push yourself to dig deep to create some original writing straight from the game. It's advice. he uses a well-known habit of creativity to do the 24 things you know 20 different ways to rob a bank 20 different ways to say I love you 20 different ways to break up with someone get together different ways to kill someone I mean, there are all these things that you've seen hundreds of times and when you watch them over and over again you know they're great, you know because you've seen them hundreds of times and it's really just the movies that reveal the stories.

The stories that break are the ones that are truly original, whenever you come up with a unique angle to that story that we all know best, that's generally where the originality comes and you know it, and it gets harder and harder because you know how many more There are romantic comedies, the harder it is to come up with something new, so you know, my first step in screenwriting is basically coming up with a hundred ideas and choosing the best idea. I have something called the 100 Ideas Theory and it's not like that nationally, it doesn't have to be a hundred ideas, but if I come up with an idea, that's an idea, it could be a terrible idea if I come up with a hundred ideas or sixty ideas. or whatever you can.

I analyze and find the best idea and then take it to the Thunderdome. I take that idea and if I write the script, everyone will say they're going to take it apart, so I'm going to take it apart first. I want to find all the flaws in whatever the idea is and try to overcome those flaws and eliminate them so that the idea is great naturalism it's not naturalism and I'm talking about, for example, a dialogue that has a lot of vocalized pauses, urns and arms and your nose, and I mean, etc., we love those stories more than the real ones because one of the things we've discovered is that the story is a little bit different than real life and I mean, could you talk about that? that for ten years you already know what that means, especially in the phase of you know and the realistic cinema that you know we are seeing especially the Indies, but the truth is that a story is not real life and in some way something is a story in every way that is not real life, so in real life people are mostly mysterious to us, we don't know why they do what they do, we don't have access to their motivations, history isn't like that, we are .

We have access to their motivations, we know what drives them, so when you watch a story you feel a little surge of guilty pleasure because it gives you something that real life can't legitimately give you and that you have no right to want in real life, so If a movie is when If we read a script, it doesn't give that access if it doesn't clarify the character's motives, what they really want and what they need and what drives them is a bad story because that's one of the things that people expect. and history. what they are looking for is access, you know, an emotional access, the problem with the real, there are two problems with it, first of all, it is available on the streets for free, you don't have to buy a ticket and go to the cinema or hire a babysitter drive to the fee to park the car pay the fine to see what's real you can just go out on the street and see what's real the other thing is what's real is more for the most part I could tell you about my day today everything what I could tell you would be true and contemporary and I really knew what I had for breakfast the route I took to get to campus the context of three meetings this is a big meeting day on the first Wednesday of the month so I was a little bit in three meetings today.

I love my colleagues and I thank God every day that God put me in a face like this, if you are aware of where the creativity is happening and I am allowed to do creative work, but these were not very exciting meetings. I could walk you through the agendas of those meetings and you would fall fast asleep, although it is true and now we want boredom back in our lives and we want passion and excitement in our art and otherwise. that story is better than the real one is that the scenarios are more interesting than our daily lives, you know, we don't go to the movies to watch someone you know in the bathroom for an hour getting ready for work, you know, that's our Monday of all the days.

In life we ​​go to the cinema to see beautiful landscapes and beautiful views and to see extravagant worlds and extravagant settings that are more interesting than our everyday world and similarly we take characters from the movies.movies we like because there's something little there. They are like us, but they are a little better than us and that is the quality of a hero: someone who aspires to do the things that we could do when we grow up and that are within reach of what we could do, but do you know that they go a little beyond what we could be doing in everyday life?

Another way stories are better than real ones is that they are structured around a theme. They are structured around some universal truth about human life. And this isn't your real life, is it? You realize if I tell you how you learned you know what a great lesson you learned and you tell me well, I learned that it's important to be honest, I learned this, you know, when I was thirty years old, I wasn't going to lie anymore, it's okay, that means that you probably had a thousand little incidents since you were four years old and you started talking where you started learning when I lie, I get in trouble, you know, and having to juggle storytelling, you know, and all these things and so on. .

Finally at the age of thirty you're going to dig yourself, I'm not going to lie anymore, but it's a cumulative thing, so in a movie or in a story, if it happens in two hours, you take out all the other lessons that people are learning and You say we're just going to see how Luke learned that he needs to rely on the force, you know? In the stars, we're not going to see all of Luke's other problems, the fact that he's lazy or that he has problems with women or that he's, you know, he has jealousy things, no, we're just going to focus on that, so it's an experience structured around a very unnatural theme, so when we read a script that seems to be all over the place we say people, this is not going to work as a story because the audience doesn't understand what we're talking about here. , what it's about and those are important notes that we end up getting all the time that the writer hasn't been able to really say that this story is about this and so I'm going to eliminate everything that's not about that.

You know it's a great idea for the writer, since I've never made that decision, so you walk away from the script and say. I don't know what this boils down to in the end, I don't know what it's really about, so a story is better than real life because it gives us really eliminates everything that is not in your main universal truth and the story also has a resolution unlike real life, where it seems like we're always waiting for our third act to happen. We often don't know what resolutions will happen to us in our everyday world, but in a story it is necessary. resolve and that that resolution must be satisfying and it is the satisfaction that comes from that resolution that makes that story better than what we normally go through in life and on top of that, all the little elements of the story are better than life real, so the dialogue You know, writing a good line of dialogue sometimes takes me three weeks and then ten drafts later.

I'm still modifying that answer. Think about it while you fight with your friend and then sit there in the shower. You repeat that and you keep saying everything you should have said, I joined that line, that's how movies are, the writer has gotten the perfect answer, so you have this perfect art ref back and forth than real life Never has. Anybody, if people in real life talk like they do in movies, they're going to be crazy people, you know, but in movies it's fine, you're expected to know in the narration, so the idea of ​​everything being perfected so that be entertaining, compelling and a feast. it's a story it's a feast instead of just running through the refrigerator, opening the door and grabbing some things that are real life, but a story is a piece and that's what we've seen our writers, you know, you're , you are, what you have.

What's done here just isn't festive enough, it's just not better enough than people's real lives and you know, we always quote this line when the cinema verité movement was going through the '50s, everyone was trying to do some realism, realism, realism that came mainly from Europe. Because they don't have money, but Hitchcock the Grandmaster said, "You know, some people want movies to be a part of life. I want two movies to be a slice of cake. You know?", and there it is now that one movie is better than the other. real and it's a piece of cake and and if it is, we don't see it on the newspaper screen because you're trying too hard to be brave and real, so it's like why would anyone want to do this? and then the last thing I would also say is that your movie has to be at least as good as the real thing, but it has to be better than the real thing, so in other words, it can't be such that people watch this movie and stay surprised I don't talk like that, that would never happen or this is so far away and it's like they're right, you know, those are signs that the script isn't working, that your movie is as good as the real thing, so you got a ten. you have to get to the real and then you have to try hard and be better than the real, everything is there to hear its own story and there is a bit of truth in it, but I must say that if I speak from experience and from listening to the stories of people who want to write movies, I would say that about 90% of them are not that interesting, only the writers themselves think it is interesting.

I don't think it's interesting and the audience doesn't think it's interesting, so they have to learn that day that's why comments come in if the comments are okay, you know, I mean, I always bring up the Hitchcock quote about, you know , the drama is real life with all the boring parts removed, so a lot of people feel that just because I've had some interesting experiences, they may be unique and it warns them that they should make a movie out of them. They may be right, but often they are not. They are attentive to emotions. Anger, sadness, joy and fear.

You haven't heard that, yeah. again, there they are, you know, there's a lot of variations or demands, it makes me happy and it scares me, there's a lot of permutations and dimensions there, but the way they're useful is like that if you're building, if you're outlining something, a particular section. section here a sequence of objectives or a particular scene, the question is how do you guarantee that there will be conflict and change in it and change is one of the most important is to talk about it in a minute to change is the power that makes Scripts either work or they don't, you have to quantify it, but it can be done beautifully.

If the hero, the main character walks, steps, jumps, falls in a scene and is angry, sad, happy or scared at the end of the scene, he has to be. one of the others, if they are angry when they appear, they have to be scared when they go away or if they are afraid when they appear, they have to be happy when they go away because that guarantees a dramatic change within the scene and it is a way of checking it for ourselves because we read a a lot of scenes that are just conversations and are the same, everything is the same at the end as it was at the beginning and that is not a viable scene for visual storytelling. you must take into account human dynamics, you know the psychology, the emotions, the relationships between the characters, which you should be well versed in.

Now, lucky is the writer who has had an incredible life experience and has had all those experiences that he can write about, that makes it easier, but it's not. Necessary if you are a very curious person. I mean, you know you could be a great writer who has had a very mediocre life. Know? I mean, I don't believe in the Hemingway thing. Do you know if you want? he writes about adventure, you get the chance, be adventurous and stuff. I mean, maybe you'll see there's some truth to it, but I think it really depends on your mind and your curiosity.

You know, and I think we can all figure it out. You know what it's about. your imagination if you have it if you are very imaginative you can write about anything, whether you experience it or you don't know if you write science fiction you know that George Lucas did not experience the trip on a ship to be able to write well about it or James Cameron, you know? Do you think he would think about all those things about Pandora and Avatar that he experienced in his own life? No, it's all imagination, so that's what you need, you need, you need to know yourself.

Obviously, you have to have a lot of imagination, but then you have to know how to be well versed in character relationships, so yes, if you've experienced recurring relationships, that's great in character conflicts, but if you haven't, you can always learn it. and if you're really curious, you know, I mean, I have a degree in psychology, so I wouldn't be a writer. I would be a psychologist because that is what fascinates me. I am fascinated by human interactions given psychology and especially the reason why people do what they do. which is what characters make stories, so you really know that works for me, but my life story, as much as it was, I considered very unique and different from most people's life stories.

I have no desire to write about her, so that's not it. It doesn't affect me at all in that sense, and that's something that the writers have to do is scream, the owners have to figure out how to get out into the world, how to get out of there, for many reasons, they have to figure out how to get out of their house and from their comfort zone because one of the things that happens is that as we shrink our world, we reduce what we can write and we end up writing stories, you know, like my two years in my apartment.

After we sold the script, we were like smaller and smaller stories because I wasn't going out into the world or being a part of the world and it's one of those things where you know that life experience is the raw material for your life. scripts and the more life experience you have, whatever it is, you know, broken hearts, you know, that's all part of what makes you who you are, so you write the script, but also, if you don't see the world, people are often online. that people will ask questions research questions and they go well, how do I know this? and my answer is: you find the person who does it for a living and you ask them, you don't ask me, I'm a writer, what is the Hell, I know, but if you want to know about things, you go out and ask those people because part of it is you get out of your comfort zone and into the world, but you also get the real answers, so I get a script called remember.

It was about the auto industry and I went to when there was the GM plant in Van Nuys and across the street there was a bar and I went into that bar and I bought pitchers of beer and I asked the guys who worked on the line assembly only to be told I told about their lives and I got all kinds of stuff that I could never get from Google, I never got from, you know, going to the library, it was all material from their real life and one of the things that came to my script was this guy.

That was talking about how his hands were so calloused that he was afraid to touch his wife and I. It was a really heartbreaking story, it's like one of those things you don't think about when you think about guys working on an assembly line. I think there will be something that will affect your romantic emotional life and that is the stories, the big story for conflict, you don't need to have an antagonist for the conflict. I mean, most comedy characters are conflicted anyway. they're conflicted because they're in conflict with their coworkers or their jerks and so they're in conflict with the world around them or they're like George and Seinfeld, you know, always nice. of oppressed, you know, II or like they're in conflict with the world and so the best comedies create characters that are intentionally in conflict with other people or with the world or with themselves, what you don't need is that You don't need an antagonist, you can have an antagonist, but it's not necessary.

In Groundhog Day there's no antagonist, there's no villain that's trying to thwart him, he's just some idiot who, you know, everyone rolls their eyes at and then he gets stuck in this time warp. I do not know how it happened? Nobody knows how I get out of this. No one can help him, so that's the conflict of the premise that actually introduces conflict into the catalyst's company, and you usually want to create that conflict in the protagonist afterwards. you have successfully outlined the normal world. no, don't start, you know it's not an action movie, don't start or you might mean there's no, you know there's no rule that can't be broken, but you know, don't start. with something crazy happening before you know who this person is what their normal world is what's the problem with them what's the problem with how they live and then you can create something that threatens that normal world again big time there's a whole scene of him, his relationship with his best friend, his desire to be with the girl and then with the cat, you know it's the conflict, but now he's a 30-year-old man, what did he want to do?

What do you do on Groundhog Day? It is living. the same day over and over again and splash you fall in love with a mermaid but before that you want to take the time to tell me what this boy would be like what the world would be like if that didn't happen take that you know, and it's that two pages five pages ten pages It has to be what you need to create the foundations of a real world before the crazy world starts again because the better your foundations are, the better we are going to believe things.crazy things that are happening in the third act, they teach you in film school or in any writing book, you know that conflict is the source of all drama, if everyone, if all your characters just get along, then nothing , you know, I look at, how tall are you?, so I mean, I think there's a trend, it's one reason why most movies in the last 20 years have adopted the James Bond opening, which is just starting with conflict from box 1 so you can grab everyone's attention.

No, that's a good question. You're probably saying that you know that delaying the conflict too much or not presenting what the central conflict is going to be can be a problem, like for example, I made a movie, I made a short recently, it was like a 40 minute short and shorts are harder because I think You know, because you have less time to establish the character and the movie I'm making is a thriller called Where's Roman? Which I'm really very, very happy with. a surreal thriller and 3/4 of the movie is actually this character venturing into this very disturbingly strange hotel and meeting all these characters and all these terrible things that happen to him, but I wanted you to care about this character before for all this madness to happen.

I deliberately wrote a five or six minute scene in a bar, where you meet this main character through another character and there's virtually no conflict, it's really just two guys who like strangers meeting Rangers just having a conversation. about things and it was a way to let you know who this guy was and what the situation was and who he was before all this happened and I think half the audience or the people who watched it half for a little over half Really. I appreciated that and then was rude. I met another filmmaker who's been around for years and years and I told him that he really loved the movie.

He would have cut that conversation off at the beginning, meaning he was saying, you know, get to the end. getting to the conflict getting to the conflict I think the hardest thing for good is trying to establish a character even through action and at the same time moving the plot forward, which tends to be when conflict arises. is established, so the only danger of starting a conflict too early is that you have to somehow maintain this level of drama and that if it stops, people will get used to a certain tension or a certain thing and when it stops they smell the roses and you can lose everyone, but you know, I don't know, that's what I was thinking.

One of the key skills, in addition to creative integration, is that you build the right, compelling conflict, and compelling conflict is what you need. great characters and dialogue that just makes it pop off the page, it's hard to explain that you have the whole visceral experience when you read, you can read, look, you read some things that are just bad and then you read some things and it's I have some great moments and some cool dialogue characters, but nothing really happens, then you read some stuff and it's cool that stuff is happening and that's interesting, but then you read something and it just jumps off the page and you can tell it was a study. reader and I could tell on a page if someone knew what they were doing, if it came off the page or not, now that a page was great, I don't know if they could write a whole script, I have to keep reading, but if that page didn't appeared.

I knew they couldn't do it and yeah, if you had a class of like 20 people, it was usually two people and they were writing, they just came off the page more than others, they didn't know why. necessarily, but everyone realized it and I think they realized that they often didn't say anything. It's like in a writing group there's usually one person who just writes better than everyone else. I learn in an MFA program, but maybe people don't know why. but what I've learned is that it's because they write and create conflict and I find that about 5% of the writers who come to work with me do it naturally, I don't have to teach them, it just has that effect. off the page and about 5% to do that and the other 90% is anywhere they need some work today they suck they just suck but you can teach people how to do it so a great example is Neil Simon , the playwright, has a book called Rewrites, which is his autobiography, which he talks about year after year, when he was younger, he would write these plays and he loved the characters and everyone thought they were terribly funny, but something was just missing. it just didn't hold together, this wasn't interesting enough and over time it's like, I know there's something missing, but I don't know what it is and I know a lot of writers who feel that way, it's a really terrible feeling, eventually it did the same thing.

One thing he never wanted to do is he went to his older brother, who was a very successful writer, and his older brother read his stuff and said, "You're not writing a compelling conflict," and Neil Simon asks him, "What are you about?" talking? What is this? he said my older brother taught me what it was and then the light bulb went on and then he said I would just structure my compelling conflict and then put in all the character and comedy and that's how David Mamet made his career and that's how it was on my site web or you can search online, he did a memo about a decade ago to the unit writers of his TV show and basically said: you will learn to write in a compelling conflict or you will be on the unemployment line. or the bread line and a lot of f-bombs in this memo, but he's basically saying this isn't a natural skill set for most people, you'll learn to do this or you won't survive any story, you can talk about an epic poem , you can talk. about a myth, you can talk about a fairy tale or a children's book, they are all based on the desire and conflict of the characters.

Every story I can think of almost without exception if it is a narrative story that has a beginning in the middle, Emma and just continues. be about a character who wants something desperately and something gets in the way of him. Too little conflict in any story or too little tension and the story will be really boring and no one will be interested. I think it's necessary to have conflict and tension in almost, if not every scene in your book, virtually every scene, even things that are character-driven. I always think you want to look for how you can increase the tension in that, even if it's just an exchange of dialogue, you try to have moments that escalate. it builds up the tension, so a good example of that is something like at the beginning of the movie Shining.

I also loved the book of the movie, there's a scene where it's the mom talking to Child Protective Services, so you're learning information about the event. that the father may have been abusive to the son but it's just a dialogue scene but the whole time she's smoking a cigarette and the ash gets longer and longer and you're like oh my god, ash from your cigarette, you get so tense for her You're like that's going to fall on you and she doesn't and in some ways it's a great way to keep tension so there are always little things you can look at in a scene to keep tension and then, obviously.

There are big conflict scenes where there's a fight or something important or a major obstacle actually happens, but I think throughout the story that's what keeps you reading and people will say, "Oh, it's getting worse, it's getting worse." getting a lot worse for these characters and you know, or even like in a book series like Game of Thrones, you're like, oh my God, things keep happening and happening, but it's like that's what keeps the story going You know. , a story about conflict is a really boring story. I think Ravana is famous for saying they are great characters and then making bad things happen to them.

One exercise we do with our clients is to ask them to make a list of all the possible conflicts. that could happen to his character and then, you know, we try to think of 20 things and then we say Well, now create 10 more and then create 10 more and now put them, put it all in your script and see how much conflict you can add to your script. . That's a very common mistake for beginners: there simply aren't enough conflicts. in the story and there's a lot at stake there's a lot of conflict that's what drives a story so you know something should happen on page 1 yeah or conflict is just like nature to me that's the mistake of so many Hollywood studio films today that conflict is. all external conflict, you know, or the world is ending, the world is ending, yeah, you know, so we need the superheroes to come in and, you know, stop with that guy, but you have to know that there are all kinds of different levels of conflict, you know, among human beings there is a psychological oscillation between you and the gods or the destiny that you know and therefore the idea is what is the nature of the conflict in your script if you only have an external conflict It comes to your character, a type of you that you know, literally, like someone's. everyone is throwing stones at them, so then it's a boring movie, you need to have all the different types of conflicts, you need to see a physical, emotional, spiritual, every type of yes, so the story is not something without conflict, you know stories about conflicts and the essential.

By the way, conflict in a story is the conflict between what a character wants and what he needs, so you know, the character says: I want to be an astronaut, he needs to be someone who can be dependent, you know, interdependent with other people. , that's how the movie ends. the story ends when those two things meet, when what they want becomes their true need, then their desire begins to transform, it is as if it is not about being an astronaut that they should want, it is this as soon as the character wants what I should really want. the story is over, but that kind of trying to make those two things converge, what they want and what they need, that's the fundamental conflict in a lot of music and when a main character gets what they need, it's usually a happy ending when the main character gets what he wants.

That is usually a tragedy, the problem is that there is no adversary or there is no powerful adversary. The adversary is so critical that people need to work on their adversary until he is critical. The opponent must be the strongest person in history and you know when he was rising. Do they have to be the same? They have to be equal in power to the hero. No, they have to be much more powerful than the hero. It has to be seen for most of the movie. It has to look like the hero has no damn way to do it. defeat this adversary or overcome the problems that this adversary presents, but they do it, they jingle them and they test them and they drive them and they can make it happen and that is a story with a great conflict with a hero who is doing things that absorb us emotionally to that we can travel happily along the journey and that's how the good ones work, what roger ebert used to call the idiotic plot, where the thing is that if two characters would just say what they know, the movie would be over in five seconds or so and basically what it is is that you have a character that is being forced by the writer, not by no, in real life and in real life, they would say something, but if the writer realizes it, if they say it, the movie ends.

In five minutes or now this is going in a different direction, so they don't say those things, they keep them to themselves, which plays false. Instead, what we want to do is want to have the and this is what people often say. They are afraid to create the conflict because the conflict gets into complicated things and so they hold back the conflict when we need to get into that conflict, there is one thing and another screenwriting problem is delaying things because we know that conflict will actually happen. it can't happen until this point or this point psychic camera this point in the movie when we're at this point well what usually happens is they delay until they get to that conflict when instead what they should do is have that conflict happen happened here. and then things continue to get worse, so what you see here instead of being the beginning of the conflict, instead, it's when the conflict is much, much worse, they don't escalate the conflict enough, escalating conflict is important. again, it's dialogue, it would seem fake if that character didn't say there's a problem and this is what it is or you know I have a problem with you and they need to have that problem, it should be, it should start here.

I know that the fuse not only has to light but then it has to explode and that explosion has to start a chain reaction of other explosions, so it's like an act to solve the problem, often writers try not to stop everything until the second act, when you need to start, you know, with something exciting happening, the first thing you should do before you start writing the words of the scene you want to step back from and, as usual, my suggested vices are questions, In other words, first of all, you should have already asked. He wonders who my hero is, what the hero's wound is, what he cares about.They fear, what is the visible objective they are pursuing and where structurally the scene occurs, because depending on how advanced the character is in that inner journey, that will affect. how would they react in the situation after you found out those things, so the next question you want to ask is what does my character want in this scene and that desire is that desire that goes towards ooh, they believe that it will get them closer to their goal or at least overcome an obstacle to achieving your goal if the answer to that question is no then the scene should be discarded, it does not serve the story because each scene has to bring the character closer to their visible goal or force them to face an obstacle. or anticipate an obstacle that they didn't know they were going to face previously, so let's say the answer is yes, even though you know that this is going to contribute to the goal and you figure out what they want to achieve within the scene.

Where do they want to be or what do they want to happen at the end of the scene? So what are they going to do to try to do that thing that will constitute the action of the scene? The dialogue you just put aside until all these other things are resolved because the dialogue is really just to reveal in some way how you feel about the situation or your dialogue where you are trying to persuade someone to do something or outdo someone else, take control of the situation, etc., but first you have to see what the character wants. in the scene and then what is the obstacle that they have to face in the scene to achieve it, because the movement of a film and the emotion of any scene will arise mainly from the conflict if it is not the conflict that is faced at that moment, it is the conflict that they are anticipating or occasionally that the audience is anticipating in the thriller, we may know that the killer is in the next room and all the hero wants to do is go to the kitchen to make a sandwich, but it is still about of what to do. they want and what we anticipate will get in their way and then when it comes to dialogue, especially if you're having a hard time getting dialogue, get something, you should write down anything to start with, just to make it look like you're working with instead of a blank page, but if you don't know what the correct dialogue should be, dialogue where the character simply says how he feels and what he wants is what is known as direct dialogue, it is terrible dialogue, but at least now you have a scene you have action you have character you have dialogue and now you can ask the last question there would be my suggestion that's good now I know what they want they are going through this action how can I? make it harder for them in the first place, but also instead of making them announce their feelings or desires, can they do it without saying anything?

Or if in a conversation, how can they hide their true desires or feelings and cover them with a more superficial surface? subtextual language and that's what you're going for and those are the rhythms of going through it, so it's a matter of just going through that process over and over again with each successive draft, but that's going to get you somewhere if you're looking at that blank page to begin with, so that's good, Michael, oh, thanks, you're welcome, uh, I'm going to write that down. I want to watch a movie for myself, it's constantly interesting. I was totally involved in the imitation game from the beginning.

In closing, you were able to comment on some very, very important and difficult topics without being preachy or intellectual about it. The Nazis with the submarines are about to sink this convoy and we can save all the lives of the people in the convoy that way, but that will also tell the Nazis that we know their code and that will tell them. We will change the code and we will no longer be able to read them and that will cost more. These are very interesting questions and their answer in a dramatic context without ever becoming a lecture on principles or protocols or anything like that.

Now there is nothing wrong. with lectures on principles and protocols but the film is not the place for that to write this is to return to that assumption that we were talking about before with which we dealt a lot and I rewrite your life I tell you a story about a traumatic experience that I had is, for example, a personal experience and I am going to assume that if I tell you everything that happened you will have the same emotional reaction as me, that is a huge assumption, you may not be a writer. You can write a script, it can be true, it can be personal, it can be totally fiction, but the right to write that script and all those characters is to have an emotional experience as he or she creates it with these characters, how they relate to each other, all the turns. and it goes to the story and they say oh that's great, that's great, assuming that anyone else who reads it will have the same reaction, that may not be true, so the writer's assumption is a problem, it may be a problem, the best way to deal with it. that's very simple you tell the writer that's your problem you wrote that scene and you're very moved by it I read the scene I don't understand it well what you mean is great I don't understand it and other people Aren't you assuming that I would go in because you're very identified with those characters in that situation?

Okay, no problem, let's see how we can make it clearer so the audience understands it and that's my job as a director. That's my job as a directing consultant or writing consultant: to help writers get to that point where the scene is clear and notice one thing that we don't need to talk much about, but one thing is a script that talks about screenwriter and writer. Initially, a script to become a movie has to appeal to the reader and, as you know, the reader very often is not the person who is going to produce it, the reader is someone further down the line at some production company, whatever. whatever it does to you in others. words, that script by itself, by itself, those 120 pages have to impact the reader, so the first thing is to make sure that the reader understands it, the reader who just takes another script and the reading understands it, that's really crucial so forget me the director and forget all the other people we got it we have to make sure the script is strong enough for it to work and if it doesn't then it won't get made and the writer can deal with your frustration like why can?

Don't you understand? Don't go there, don't go, why can't they understand it? Let's get back to how good this is. What a lot of people like Michael Haig and Chris logo and all those people teach how to write scripts and how to work with writers. A lot of times it's not about what the story is, how these scenes and characters are crafted, and certainly whether the writer understands it and, eventually, all the other people who are going to work on it. I'm just going to do this. Until I had this fight with cancer and I fought cancer together, it stole a year of my life, but now I am a cancer survivor.

I could tell you and you should be horrified by what happened because I didn't freak out and someone could tell me I'm going OK, it's not like that, it's not going to impact me the way you think, it's just because you, when you say it, we reset the filter of assumption, the assumption filter of a writer, even writing fiction. I created this big moment in the scene and no one really understands it and we have to keep working on it. I understand what you are looking for. I understand what you want them to get. You haven't crafted it in a way that they get it, so it's also understanding that they don't. just from a writer's point of view, not just understanding your layer or barrier of assumption and because every rod on the screen I think this is actually true ends the script thinks it's brilliant, I wish they did it, why, of the opposite, why they do it and that is also an assumption, but you also have to realize that every reader has barriers against certain things that you have to go through, you have to break, you have to surprise them, you have to find a way around them. barriers and obstacles that the reader has within them, so yes, you have. to understand yourself and you have to understand you can't say why you don't understand that you have to understand they don't understand it for a reason I teach I'm the home of TMI I come in and throw up everything that's going on in my life be a good, bad , tragic, happy, I am, I am an open book, if I am completely honest, because it is a free therapy and I have a captive audience of 20 people, but it is also because I heard here when I went to one of the great sages and of all time and with a vision of the human condition Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin said he said I never want to be respectable I always want to be responsible and I love that quote and I hope that after the first class that people take with I they know that they are not going to become respectable absolutely.

Can. I will do that. I'll do it again. I will tell too much and there is a bit of method in my madness because I don't want to because I know writers and directors. and they put themselves on that pedestal because they've had this degree of success and they feel like they have to come in and be very secretive and way above the people that they're talking to, that we're talking down to. Don't know. look at it like this at all I'll tell you about my bad night my hangover my whatever but but and part of this again is like free therapy but part of this is also this is my life and it ends where and sometimes it's not terribly respectable but I'm responsible because I'm responsible because I'm going to put my butt on my computer and not worry about being perfect, but that's a debt I wish I could say my success rate was one hundred percent with that, but again, most people never They will finish their scripts because that feeling that they need to be perfect oh, I'm being boring oh, this is not going to work, it will take over and crush their creativity and it's a very sad thing, witness.

I try to get people over it. I'm trying to say, look, it's a first draft. I'm telling you, no, don't worry so much, but that's the hardest job anyone teaching any kind of creativity has. convince people to get out of their own way and my way of doing it again is to say today students I'm a disaster but I wrote but I wrote for four hours you just don't know it I know it I-I I have touched wicker I have earned the life in this for thirty years I mean, it's crazy sometimes great sometimes skating sometimes whatever but it hasn't come from being perfect, believe me, but it comes from having enough discipline to write.

It is not always necessary to be respectable, always be receptive to pain, any salary, wow, thank you. Go back to Sean Ryan, the one who was so promising and got a job on a sitcom as soon as he arrived in Los Angeles and then didn't. I didn't work for six years and what he did was write and I think he wrote about 14 spec scripts and what happened is his scripts were all good but nothing was getting him traction and he asked his manager, he told his manager to tell me sent an example of a script that he's getting someone to work on and his manager sent him the script that had the most buzz at the time and Sean compared it page by page and said he would let him know three things on one page that were really good, but This is one of the ones that caught the attention, each rhythm was perfect and when he realized that he had not hit the mark, he started writing and hit the target and in not long time he was hired for the program and that program took him to Another program and then developed the shield, so you just have to keep working.

You know, I suspect that was about four or five years in, so he was just writing the next level of scripting for a couple of years. I don't know the exact dates, but I know that story, and how do you test a script? It is tested by having people sit around a table or at least half of them sitting around the table reading parts and the other half sitting around. the table drinking wine it is important to eat eat a little cheese and listen and not put the actors together do not rehearse them that would be death what you want is an experience yes yes sick is the Latin word for such as you only want to hear the script as such it's without trying to improve it because if something works on the page in your mouth, you know, maybe it's just another writer, not another trained actor, you know it's alive and if something doesn't work, then you know something's wrong and and then, The difficult task is not to wake up in the coma that writers get when they hear their script read aloud and try to do what needs to be done to fix it.

From start to finish the least we want is not to get bored, I mean I go to the cinema and see projections scandalously I go to the cinema less and less and I look at more and more projectors Before I felt guilty for not going to the cinema now I feel guilty for not screening the participants and the reason is that I'm usually bored. I think most art is pretty bad, most paintings, most sculptures, most literature, most music is terrible, that can also seem kind of cynical and dark. but it's the opposite of that, the truth is that things that are contemporary, many of them will be quite bad, some of them will be brilliant, what happens is that the bad things disappear, you say.

I was in New York, not too. a long time ago and I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art one of my favorite museums and I didn't see a single painting there that wasn't timeless and eternal that didn't deserve to be there and could be obtainedThe impression that comes from that is that paintings are somehow valuable all the time, well, you don't realize, a lot of people don't realize that for every painting that hangs in the Met there are 10,000 stupid, useless paintings. of amateurs, now there is nothing wrong, I think. is one of the other people who tried to paint and tried to be creative and tried, but it's unusual that it's worth bothering someone else about, that is, there's something about the work that deserves the attention and consideration of a person's time.

The audience is an observer in cinema because it's contemporary, even more so in television because it's in our face, now there hasn't been a chance for bad things to go away so we think it's exceptionally bad when it's not, it's the same of bad. Bad as another as another art, fortunately, a little bit of really good stuff is enough to change your life and make it all worth participating in so that you can see the good things. There are people who say why not. Do they make good movies now like they used to in the '30s and '40s?

Did they make good films in the '30s and the way they did them? There were a lot of really good ones, but there were also many, many lousy movies, we just don't remember them. I think in 50 or 60 years they will say why they don't make good movies like they did at the beginning of the new millennium, because people will have forgotten - The Hunger Games I'm not a big fan of things that I think people will forget , but they will remember the imitation game that we like today. I guess that's the last thing we want when I say.

Don't be boring, I say that's the least I want from a work of art, now we're talking about dramatic narratives, you know, I was in the Louvre in Paris and saw the Mona Lisa, among others, how long? Did I spend a minute with him? If I had spent 3 minutes with him, it would have been a long time if I had sat in silence now for just a few seconds. You would feel how, how heavy time is Keith, no, I'm just waiting. to see if I come in for two seconds you get nervous in return and I don't blame you that's my that's my point I say I'm sorry uh no no not at all that's help yourself you're helping me but the The most we want from that is the least we want.

I have a deal with my wife, which is that if I start nodding off during the movie, she's supposed to let me do it, unless some people snore and breathe and spray everyone around us and then bring shame and disrepute. The humiliation upon us depends on the movie to keep me awake and the fact that the important thing is that I liked fighting it. If I started to stray during the movie, I would fight her like you know she hates, so what, I have the breath and China. you know, requests now, if I start to get sidetracked, that's it, I'm going to fall asleep on this one, it's just not worth watching, you know, I've gone into movies where I was very tired, I hadn't slept very well, but That's how it went. a good movie and it woke me up, so that's the least we want, don't be boring and if that's what you do, it's an incredible achievement, but again, that's the bottom, that's the top and that's the top It's just that I want my life to change completely.

Great art, I want it upside down and transformed. I want to be transported and that's what Breaking Bad did to me. That's what the Sopranos did to me. My life is just different and you constantly know it because of my exposure to it. art and that's what great art should do at the top end it should change your life forever how do you know if you have hot stuff? Your phone is ringing People want to meet you They want to take you to lunch They want to take you to dinner They want you to come to the barbecue They want to buy your equipment or hire you to work on their projects There are rumors about you in the city If you don't have representation agents and managers There's a knock on your door, door, everyone kisses your ass and says how fabulous you are and you feel really fabulous, that's hot stuff when you get traction, that's how you know it's scorching hot and there are people who aren't there. in Los Angeles, they're not in the business and they feel like I could write a fantastic script, say, and it'll never get into the hands of the right person if I'm never discovered, if you have hot material that will actually do it, and even if you know someone who know someone who knows. someone being able to hand your script to someone is like six degrees of separation, if that material is very popular it will absolutely be discovered and what happens is if your material has been on the market for three or four months and nothing happens you can cheat him. yourself saying you know what you just don't understand, you didn't get to the right person, but the truth is you're probably not ready yet, it's time to go back to the drawing board and you wouldn't be the first person that had to happen. because that happens to most people because you don't come out of the parachute being perfect.

I think those are misconceptions of many people, especially screenwriters. It is the first thing that will be sold. It's going to be great again. There's Mickey. The Fisher phenomenon happens occasionally, but that's very rare, it's very rare, to write a really amazing script and put it in front of someone and have the first page be so good that they have to keep reading until page five and have the first five pages are so good that they have to keep reading until page 10 and doing the first 10 pages is so good that they never stop until they get to the last page and they have to pick up the phone and call you as soon as they finish.

That's how good your script has to be and it can't be so good that you can't think it's that good. All your friends have to read it and think holy. This is the best I've ever read. Can I say that? Your Yippee, we're on the Internet, right? Please, proper little hands for them, okay, and then your friends have to show it to their friends and people who don't even know that you have to read this and think it's the coolest thing. I've ever read I Can't Wait to See This on TV or in the movies and when you have a script that gets that kind of reaction from your friends, you can walk through someone's door and say this is what I can do. read this and you will hire me and you will have the confidence to walk into the room and exude that and if you have that confidence people will read that first page if you walk into someone's office and you feel that way about your material and you.

I know without a doubt that this is a great script that reaches people and they will read your first page, but if your first page is written in an amateurish way, they will stop right there without fear of being boring because I will just jump off creative cliffs and Sometimes I'll land really hard and break my neck and sometimes I'll land exactly where I need to land, but boring is not a problem for me and it's interesting because I've been in this for a long time and I feel more unborn. never. I feel like I feel creatively unleashed.

Part of it is that I have nothing to prove. I have some cool posters and a couple of classics and all that, but I'm not. I never worry about boring. I'm concerned about the good and that's something different and the good is going to resonate and and and people are going to feel it and that's something different. No, but not being boring, but being good worries me every day. when I write and I'm very I'm my toughest critic and sometimes that gets in my way a little bit. I wish I could go to bed without analyzing and reanalyzing what I wrote that day, but maybe that goes with the territory, but yeah, I always wanted, I want to be better than good and I wasn't, you know, and again it's a little bit silly and maybe arrogant as it sounds and like when I was starting out with Beatle just with Michael, let's Write a classic.

I want everything I do to be great and you don't always do that. I don't even pretend you always do that, but good is never good enough for me and boring doesn't come into it now. just have sensual fun, sure, but you know what you're doing, so you say, okay, now it's time to light candles. Important line and let's have fun, but no, you're not stuck anywhere in particular.