Creative Screenwriting Magazine Podcast
Oh, you’re not a screenwriter, you say. Not so fast! The great thing about Jeff Goldsmith’s Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcast is that the weekly interviews are inspiring to anyone who needs to be creative and original on a daily basis.
These guys (they are, sadly, almost all guys) are at the top of their game and they’ve gotten there by establishing a regular routine - a process - that allows them to turn on the creativity every day, over the course of months and even year.
The process
So what’s their secret, you ask? Well, that’s what Goldsmith wants to know too. What I find most striking as I listen to the interviews is how little agreement there is on what the magic formula is.
Listen to George Lucas:
“I work 8 hours a day. I don’t write for 8 hours - I sit at desk 8 hours a day. I usually write 5 pages a day. Some days it comes pretty quick and sometimes I can’t but inevitably it always happens in the last hour. Hour #8 is when it all gets written. Everything up to that is figuring out how not to write it. Francis Coppola, who my mentor, said the only way to write is to simply write it as fast as you can and never go back and look at what you’ve done until you finished. And I end up with lots and lots of rewrites and that’s the only way to do it. In a few weeks you write a whole draft and it’s horrible and then you start fixing it.”
And then the Cohen brothers tell us they write “from 10 to 5. We have long lunches.” And like Lucas, they start at the begin and just go: “If the author doesn’t know where the story is going, the audience can’t possibly know.” They’ll often write the first 30 or 40 pages until they get to a creative impasse. Then they’ll put the script aside and work on a different project every couple weeks until the solution appears.
But then Sarah Polley finds:
“I wake up at 5:30 in the morning… and I sit down and I write for about an hour and then my day is done at 6:30 am. And then I wander around panicking for the rest of the day panicking because I can’t write anything else. But in that hour I can write 15 pages.”
(As an aside, I think the Polley method is one that many of us could use to carve out that personal creative time in our day. I hate waking up that early but when I have done it for writing and filming it has been extremely productive. No phone calls, no kids, no TV. Just coffee and your art.)
What they all have in common is that they treat it like a job: they sit down at the same time every day to write. Not when they feel like or when they have inspiration - they all write every day.
Creative collaboration
Another thread that runs through many of the interviews is how different writers see collaborative writing. Some like Lucas and Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, 21 Grams, Amores Perros) seem to approach their work as a very personal narrative. But many others, such as Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien) and Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg (Superbad, Da Ali G Show) clearly consider this a team sport.
Finishing each other’s sentences like my parents do, Rogen & Goldberg explain:
“We do everything together when we can. Eight to ten hours a day, every single day… but we wait until the last possible second to start writing each day. We play a lot Gears of War in between.”
And Alfonso Cuaron adds:
“I like to work with a writing partner, just to bounce ideas… First, it’s trying to start and that takes many hours in the morning, trying to wake up and focus on the script… and once we get going… in serious writing mode… it can go all day long with no breaks and then we go to sleep still thinking about it and we wake up the next morning and try to wake up again to start the process again.”
Unsurprisingly, the teams have a hard time getting focused but once they get cooking, they’re extremely productive And they are enjoying the process which you don’t necessarily feel when you listen to the lone writers. Personally, this kind of collaborative creativity has been the most fulfilling and productive work that I’ve experienced too: pushing each other and jamming on a common purpose, day after day.
“The way it was written”
Even if you just consider yourself a movie fan, these conversations are deliciously fun. The director and the stars are usually the media darlings and we often overlook the invisible genius of an original story and crackling dialogue. Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, 21 Grams, Amores Perros) tells us, “When I did 21 Grams I was hurt when someone said ‘Great editing’ because I wrote it that way! The way you saw it was the way it was written!”
The Marvel Method
One of my favorite episodes was recorded at the 2008 Comic-Con and features a round-table with Hulk screenwriter, Zak Penn; Iron Man co-writer, Mark Fergus; and the godfather of comics, Stan Lee. Together they discuss the process of taking comics and graphic novels to the big (and little) screen. It’s a must-listen hour if you are now or have ever been a comics fan or an action-movie fan. (Lee has the voice that I always imagined for J. Jonah Jameson.)
One topic I found particularly interesting is Lee’s discussion of “The Marvel Method”:
“Years ago, I was writing almost everything at Marvel and we had a number of freelance artists. So I might be writing a script for Jack Kirby for the Fantastic Four but Steve Ditko needed his script for Spider-Man. Now they were freelancers which meant they weren’t getting paid a salary, so if they weren’t drawing they weren’t making any money. So I would say, ‘Look Steve, I’m busy on the script for Jack. Let me tell you the story I have in mind. You go ahead and draw it any way you want. Forget the script. This is the hero, this is the villain, this is the problem, this is how I’d like it to end. You go ahead and do it, I’ll put the dialogue in later.’ After a while I was doing that with every artist and these guys were good… They wrote with pictures… and in a way we got even better stories… I would look at the drawings and they would inspire me to write just the right dialogue to go with those drawings. To my mind, it was the perfect collaboration. The artist was trying to do what he did best and I was trying not to screw it up too much.”
And Zak Penn points out:
“It’s not that dissimilar to the methods used on the big comic book movies. On X-Men 3, we pitched out ideas to story board artists and they came back to us with boards and we re-wrote to them. It happens in movies too when movies are run well.”
I’d be curious what others think of how to apply the Marvel Method to other collaborative media. It’s not that far from the 37 Signals Get Real approach. Start with a loose outline and problem that needs solving, get it in the hands of an interface designer (preferably a front-end developer) and then write the copy and the back-end code based on the front-end experience. Sounds obvious but you’d be amazed how few sites and applications get built that way.
It’s worth noting that none of these interviews lose their shelf life. I keep my iPod stocked with five or six episodes just for walking around town or washing dishes after the kids are in bed. I haven’t found one yet that didn’t immediately have me daydreaming about pounding out the next Sundance winner. The amazing thing about these guys is that they actually do it. Over and over again. And thanks to Goldsmith we get to hear how they do it.
If your job is to “be creative” (and these days that applies to more and more of us) there’s a lot of lessons and inspiration to be taken from these masters.
Not-to-miss episodes:
Guillermo Arriaga (Babel)
Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men)
Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg (Superbad)
Comic-Con 2008 (The Incredible Hulk & Iron Man)
Paul Haggis (In the Valley of Elah, Crash, Flags of our Fathers, Million Dollar Baby)
Sarah Polley (Away From Her)
Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson’s War, The West Wing, A Few Good Men)
Diablo Cody & Jason Reitman (Juno)
Underwhelming:
David Wain & Ken Marino (Role Models)
Where to start:
You can browse the full archive of interviews on the magazine’s blog or you can subscribe via iTunes. (Note that iTunes only keeps the last 100 interviews in the store and there’s lots more audio on the blog.)