The movie was written by Linda Woolverton. I never read the script, and haven’t seen a frame beyond the trailers and commercials. I’ll get to see the film for the first time on Monday, and really look forward to it.

With that clarification out of the way, let me explain a strange fact of my career: I’ve not written Alice in Wonderland three times. It’s a recurring motif.

1995

The story that became Go was originally envisioned as a retelling of Alice, substituting the underground rave scene for Wonderland. As it developed, I pretty thoroughly scotched those ambitions, but you can still see vestigial elements in the first section of the film:

• Ronna, like Alice, charges boldly into unknown territory, and proves unexpectedly brave in the face of strange events.
• She visits a smoking psychedelicist who talks in riddles but ultimately helps her.
• Poorly labeled drugs are consumed with unanticipated consequences.
• A talking (telepathic) cat offers advice.

Other than the cat, these are all extremely tenuous connections. I would never claim that Go is remotely an adaptation of Alice. Rather, I had Alice bumping around in my head during Go’s genesis, and some Alice DNA worked its way into the genotype. For example, the yellow Miata was for a long time a white Volkwagen Rabbit.

2000

Shortly after the release of Go, producer Paul Rosenberg brought me to E3 to introduce me to American McGee, who was working on a videogame adaptation of Alice. The world he had come up with was dark and spectacular. American and I hit it off so well that two hours later we were pitching a movie version to director Wes Craven.

Craven said yes, and Miramax bought it the next day. They wanted the movie out within a year.

But I was already committed to writing three other projects. So we reached a compromise: rather than writing the script, I would write a detailed treatment laying out the characters, story and world. So I did. The document was 21 single-spaced pages. American McGee liked it, as did the producers. Wes Craven didn’t. And thus began a series of writers and re-imaginings that as far as I know may continue to this day. It’s been in turnaround several times.

I left the project having a friendly relationship with American McGee, who later introduced me to fellow game designer Jordan Mechner. Which begat the movie version of Prince of Persia and several other collaborations.

2007

While standing in the registration line for the Sundance Film Festival, where The Nines was about to premiere, I got a call asking if I would be interested in writing an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for director Sam Mendes at Dreamworks. I said yes as I was trying on my official Sundance parka.

I met with Sam in New York and pitched my take, which blended a lot of Lewis Carroll’s biography into the story. As before, I was backed up on other projects (including the release of The Nines), so it would be six months before I could get started. I got about 40 pages written before the WGA strike began, at which point I had to stop working.

During the strike, Disney’s Woolverton-scripted Alice roared to life when Tim Burton signed on to direct it. I’d always been aware of it as a potentially-competing project, but now my Alice would be going up against the guy who had directed my last three films. It didn’t matter that our takes were wildly different; the world didn’t need or want two pricey Alice in Wonderland movies.

The day the strike ended, I called Sam Mendes, the studio, the producer, and my agent. Tim Burton’s movie was already in preproduction. It was pointless for me to keep writing something that couldn’t and shouldn’t get made. After a few days of discussion, we reached an agreement. I wrote a check back to Dreamworks and the project was killed.

This adaption of Alice was the closest of any of mine to becoming real. I love what I wrote, so it’s disappointing and frustrating that it won’t end up on screen. But that reality is a big part of any working screenwriter’s life. Much more important than this half-written movie was maintaining relationships with studios and filmmakers I hope to keep working with for the next few decades.

I left Alice to write a different movie for Sam Mendes and two more projects for Tim Burton. So, as before, my failed Alice had a curious number of upsides.

2025

Considering it’s been 15 years to this point, I suspect it may be another 15 before I finally write an Alice in Wonderland. That’s okay. Writers aren’t Olympic athletes; we can have very long careers.

Whatever the future looks like, Alice in Wonderland will still be relevant. Depending on your approach, the story can be silly, scary, ominous or charming. Is it a dark parable of computerized dystopia? Sure. Candy-colored comedy of manners? Perfect.

Alice has become one of our fundamental myths, an ur-story that thrives through perpetual reinvention. I’m looking forward to seeing this year’s Alice, and all the ones thereafter.

Tonight’s director is Jason Reitman, joined by cinematographer Eric Steelberg, editor Dana E. Glauberman and composer Rolfe Kent. We’ll be talking about Up In The Air, Juno and Thank You For Smoking.

Next Wednesday’s director guest will be announced tonight. We’ll be talking about casting and working with actors.

Word from the organizers is that it’s almost sold out, but “a limited number of passes” will still be available at the door if you want to try. It’s at the Landmark Theaters in West LA, beginning at 7:30pm.

Film Independent is recording these panels, so if you’re living outside Los Angeles, don’t despair: I’ll pass along the info when I have it. In preparation for the series, they shot a bunch of short interview pieces with me, which you can see up on YouTube.

The Twitter hashtag for the series is #DCU2010. If you have questions for anyone on the panel tonight, tweet it (@johnaugust) and I’ll try to ask.

When I turned 43, three years ago, I took a crash course (three months) on film production. I think my motivation was really to explore my heritage some. Well, I got the bug then. I wrote, produced and directed my first short. It cost me like $2500. The story sucked like a hover, but the production value and the casting got good reviews. So I started going to lots of workshops on all aspects of the film business. I really would like to evolve to a producer/director type.

Recently I finished my second short film. My first short had eight cast and crew, this last project had over forty with some people from the industry helping out. I spent ten grand, and the short came out a ton better and I learned a ton more. I handled lots of set ups, producing, casting, and other things just fine. But AGAIN, the story was weak and thus although the film is a huge step forward –I’m not getting the story locked down. Doing films means more to me that anything I have ever done. I do ok as a business consultant, I make a decent living. But my little films, with all their flaws, mean so much more to me then anything I have ever done. I want to get good at the story part of this.

I will never be a great screenwriter, I suspect. I got some really good feedback from the industry people that felt very strongly I should stick with the directing and producing, though. I considered just optioning, and even started reading scripts. But that will not work for me. My brain needs to understand at an intimate level, the driving forces of cinematic storytelling — for me to establish my POV more solidly as a director, to be there for my talent as a fully prepared professional, and to know how to collaborate on scripts in development.

What would you recommend for a director/producer type that eventually, just wants to make really good films from really good scripts someone else writes. How do I learn to really master the driving forces of cinematic storytelling? I would GREATLY appreciate your counsel. I don’t want to give this up, as it means so much to me. But I have to get the story part to this equation on much more solid ground.

– Bob

Film is a hundred different skills and disciplines, and no one person is going to be great at all of them. ¹

Fortunately, film is also a collaborative medium, which means you get to bring in people who are excellent at the things you don’t do as well. You have cinematographers, production designers, costumers and gaffers who make your vision possible in ways you simply couldn’t.

You’re not good at story. And while you may be able to get a little better with experience, the truth is you will probably never be great at it. So you need to find a collaborator who is. You need a writer.

I’d like to convince you to get over your reluctance to simply option someone else’s material. The vast majority of scripts written are never shot, and some not-insignificant percentage of those are pretty damn good. Find a script that won an award at a festival and convince the writer to let you shoot it.

If I can’t get you to simply sign on to someone else’s project, then let me encourage you to find a writer with whom you can collaborate. Many producers and directors have writers they go back to again and again. Most of the Merchant/Ivory films were written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. I’m working on my fifth Tim Burton movie. That’s all good.

The best filmmakers recognize their strengths and weaknesses. But rather than flailing themselves over their deficiencies, they enlist talented people to help. You’re a business consultant, so on some level you must understand that putting together a strong team doesn’t make the boss any less central to the success.

1. Well, sure: James Cameron. But I’ve heard he can’t cut hair for shit.

What exactly does this mean? It’s a high-concept comedy idea, easy to sum up in a logline. So what makes one high-concept idea more execution-dependent than another? Or is this a euphemism for “not high-concept enough”?

I’m planning to spec it out anyway, but I’d love to get a handle on what makes an idea more or less execution-proof. I’ve read your (excellent) answer about the family of robots, but that seemed to be about high concept and low concept, while this is something about the idea itself.

– Andrew
Brooklyn

“Execution dependent” means that the best version of the movie is a hit, while a mediocre incarnation is worth vastly less. It’s not a diss. Most films that win Academy Awards are execution dependent, as are many blockbusters.

For example, Slumdog Millionaire is completely execution dependent. If it didn’t fire on all cylinders, you would never have heard of it. It would have been another ambitious indie failure.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is also extremely execution dependent. There have been countless movies with adventurers seeking treasure, but the combination of elements in Raiders just clicked. If Raiders were twenty percent less awesome, it wouldn’t have a place in film history.

Other examples I can think of: Juno, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Dark Knight, The Piano, Titanic, Silence of the Lambs, Babe, Fargo, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Usual Suspects, Sling Blade, Se7en. Some of these are high concept, others aren’t. But in each case, the film’s relative success is largely a factor of how well-made it was.

Here’s a good test for whether a project is execution dependent: How many different directors could you imagine making it?

If there are five or fewer directors on your list, that’s a highly execution dependent project. And that can be a stumbling block. For Big Fish, the studio was willing to make it with Steven Spielberg or Tim Burton. Get one of them, and the studio will make the movie. Otherwise, it’s turnaround.

Many films are much less execution dependent. Consider Paul Blart: Mall Cop, or Obsessed. I haven’t seen either movie, but instinct tells me that the list of possible directors for each was much longer. Neither film needed to be perfect in order to succeed. Rather, they needed to be marketable. Both were, much to their credit.

From a studio’s perspective, there is some safety in picking movies that “anyone could direct.” You’re less likely to hit a home run creatively, but you’re also more likely put runners on base.

When a studio or producer trots out the phrase “execution dependent,” that may be a euphemism for a couple of things they’re not saying:

1. “I like it, but it would have to be perfect, and we mess up movies right and left.”
2. “I can’t think of five directors who could do it.”
3. “I can imagine getting fired over this movie.”
4. “I might buy it as a spec.”
5. “I hate the idea and I’m just trying to be nice.”

I hope it’s not the last one. Good luck with the spec.

Is this okay and considered “fair”, to talk/discuss/rant about a person like Michael Bay (or Uwe Boll, or Nicholas Cage etc.)? Do you need permission from them?

– James

Feel free to have your characters discuss Michael Bay. Say good things; say bad things; say what you want. It’s pretty hard to cross into libel territory when you just have dialogue about somebody famous like Mr. Bay. Consider what South Park or Family Guy get away with every week.

Is it “fair?” I’d say that as long as it’s funny, you’re fine. When it stops being funny and is simply mean-spirited, you risk alienating your reader. Go and The Nines refer to some real people, not always in a flattering way, and I’ve gotten no objections.

Where you get into trouble is when you take potshots at someone who is not a public figure, like that weird girl in health class. Not only is it legally unwise to call out Millie Walker by name, it’s also unconscionably lame. So don’t do that.

Back to Mr. Bay for a sec: Keep in mind that there’s a difference between referring to a real person in a movie and making a movie about that person.

If you were writing a bio-pic of Michael Bay (Born in Slow Motion: The Michael Bay Story), you would need either his cooperation or significant legal reassurance that whatever protections you were counting on (public record, parody, whatever) could really hold up in court.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to screenwriting. When it comes to making a film, the screenwriter’s craft is probably the most direct and transparent. What did you do? You wrote the script, the 120-or-so pages of Courier around which everything else revolves. Your work is front-and-center.

Cinematographers, production designers and editors can’t point to a product which is “theirs.” In the finished film, the light is lovely; the world is stunning; the pacing is tight. All wonderful accomplishments, but inextricably bound to the work of others. That wonderful light would go unnoticed if it didn’t highlight the sets, and the sets would be meaningless if the editor favored close-ups. And the contribution of directors, who marshall all these forces in addition to actors’ performances, is probably the most difficult to judge.

As a concise, pre-existing document, the screenplay is probably the only thing that can be judged independently of the finished film. Put another way, the screenwriter shows his work.

But the irony is, after the film is made, no one asks to see his work.

Indeed, we award “best screenplay” based on a viewing of the finished film. If the movie was good, we figure the screenplay was probably pretty good. We guess. Even though we don’t need to guess, because the screenplays for “award contender” movies are commonly available. But frankly, it would be a lot of work to read all those screenplays, so we don’t make that a requirement, even for the WGA Awards. The more honest award would be titled, “Best Film based on a Screenplay which was Probably Good, and Presumably Didn’t Get Messed Up by the Director or Others.”

Worse, we also presume that a bad movie came from a bad screenplay. At some point, I’ll fund a comprehensive study of film reviews from the past 10 years, tracking exactly how many times the film’s screenwriter’s name is mentioned. My gut tells me that the writer’s name is three-to-four times more likely to be mentioned in a negative review than a positive one. But I’d love to see data.

In the meantime, screenwriting will continue to be the most transparent and opaque part of moviemaking.

I haven’t read the .pdf transcript — in fact, it’s hosted on one of those sketchy providers that I wouldn’t link to — but MMoF’s long post gives you ample excerpts and a lot of thoughtful commentary.

LUCAS: What I’m saying is that character just would not fit in a college classroom or even as an archeologist. He’s too much of a scruffy character to settle down. A playboy, or however you want to do it. He’s too much of a wise-guy, maybe that’s a better way to say it, to actually be a college professor. He really loves the stuff, but he became too cynical, he’s too much of a wise guy to fit into an academic situation, or even an archeological situation. He’s really too much of an adventurer at heart. He just loves it. So he obviously took this whole bent that was different because it’s just more fun. He just can’t settle down. It’s a nice contrast. It’s like the James Bond thing. Instead of being a martini drinking cultured kind of sophisticate, he’s the sort of intellectual college professor James Bond. He’s a superagent.

I’ve never worked with Lucas, but the snippets with Spielberg feel very accurate based on my interactions with him on JP3, Minority Report and Big Fish. He’s always looking for the little moments that click:

SPIELBERG: …it would be funny if, as they’re talking about this and the olives are between them, you see a hairy little paw is pulling olives off the plate, coming in and out of frame. Finally the paw comes up to grab an olive and begins slipping, like palsy. You use a little mechanical paw. And then you hear a thump.

The screenwriter’s role in marathon meetings like this is to listen and refocus the ideas. You’re trying to capture not just the plot points, but the enthusiasm. Fast forward a few drafts, and there will likely be torturous meetings in which every decision is micro-analyzed. But at this first step, the only goal should be mapping out the territory you want to explore.

Thinking about director Kim Manners, I wanted to share a scene of his I really loved from the 2003 pilot for Alaska. Kim loved a gunfight, and I felt lucky to watch him put it together.

As a wrap present, Kim gave me Connie’s crayon drawing, nicely framed. It’s hanging in my office, over my TV.

– Lewis

It’s not uncommon. I was on and off both Charlie’s Angels movies several times, and I can think of at least half a dozen other cases where the original writers came back in before (or during) production.

In order to understand why the original writers are sometimes rehired, you have to understand why they leave projects. Sometimes, it’s simple availability: at a crucial moment during development of the first Charlie’s Angels, I was shooting a series in Toronto, so someone else got the gig (a long string of someone elses, as it turned out). In other cases, a new element (director, producer, star) wants to take the script in a new direction, which generally means a new writer — often someone they’ve worked with before.

You’re not always fired, and it’s not always acrimonious. That’s important to understand. The screenwriter wants the movie made, and wants to maintain relationships with the filmmakers and the studio. So it behooves everyone to make sure the original writer is at least peripherally involved, even if he’s no longer the active writer on the project.

The original writer might get asked back for several reasons. The simplest is cost: she may be willing to do a lot of piece work essentially for free because it’s her movie. But more often there is something about the original writer’s voice or vision that remains important despite subsequent revisions, and the producers (or director, or stars) recognize this. So she comes back in to make the new stuff feel like her stuff, and let it read like one movie rather than a patchwork.

What causes emotional catharsis in a movie?

What sort of components (lighting, sound, dialogue,…) have the most emotional effect on the viewers, and do you have any examples?

What techniques are used to produce emotions within the viewer of a movie?

What are some things that you have specifically done (relating to the screenplays that you have written) in order to produce emotions in a movie?

– Danielle
Fairview High School

Danielle is attending my former high school, so I feel some duty to steer her in the right direction, if not exactly answer her questions. But for readers who didn’t grow up in Boulder, Colorado, a little background is in order.

Boulder is a medium-sized (100,000) city tucked right into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It has a much bigger national reputation than it should, largely because of its university (CU) and its reputation as a bastion for all things New Age-y. Mork and Mindy was set there, and quite believably; a man claiming to be an alien would not raise the slightest suspicion on its snowy streets.

There are two rival high schools in the city: Boulder High and Fairview. Except that Boulder High doesn’t really consider it a rivalry, because they’re too cool to give a shit. For example, Josh Friedman went to Boulder High, and would never need to answer a question from a student there, unless it was why his Terminator show glorifies violence at a time when G8 countries should be focusing on global debt relief.

It’s an accepted truth that schools are falling apart and today’s youth aren’t getting nearly the education older generations did, but by all accounts Fairview is actually a much more academically rigorous school now than when I attended. I took three AP classes, which would now be openly mocked by students like Danielle. I never wrote an extended essay about emotion in film. But if I did, I’d probably reach the following conclusions.

1. Emotional catharsis is a direct function of how much the audience identifies with the character(s). Catharsis is a journey through dark territory, and you don’t go on that trek unless you can put yourself in a given character’s place, and feel like you’re living that experience.

2. The triumvirate responsible for creating emotion are The Writer, who creates the character and lays out the obstacles; The Actor, who gives the character weight and breath; and The Director, who coordinates the technical elements (such as lighting, editing, and music) to achieve the emotional reaction desired.

3. An example from my own work: Will telling Edward the final story in Big Fish.

GIANT SPOILER WARNING if you haven’t seen the movie.

On a writing level, the moment wouldn’t work if we hadn’t invested time in seeing their dilemma from both sides: the frustrated son, the slippery father. The script sets up a lot of elements and characters for recalls: Karl the Giant, the shoes, the Girl in the River.

The performances are strong, with actors continuing threads established earlier. In particular, Billy Crudup tends to get overlooked here: because he’s so prickly earlier on, it’s particularly affecting to see him struggle to hold on.

Finally, Tim Burton directs the elements calmly. From visuals to music, he’s careful not to push too hard or too fast, letting the emotion kindle.

Good luck with the essay.

Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they’re not, in situations and settings which are completely illusory. Day for night, dry for wet, Vancouver for New York, potato shavings for snow. The building is a thin-walled set, the sunlight is a xenon, and the traffic noise is supplied by the sound designers. It’s all illusion, but the prize goes to those who make the fantasy the most real, the most visceral, the most involving. This sensation of truthfulness is vastly enhanced by the stereoscopic illusion…

When you see a scene in 3-D, that sense of reality is supercharged. The visual cortex is being cued, at a subliminal but pervasive level, that what is being seen is real.

Seeing U2:3D last month, I agree: the best thing about 3-D is not that it makes things look cool. It’s that it makes things look more real. My favorite shots in the movie are when the cameras look out over the crowd, because you really feel each individual person. Not only are you there, you have permission to stare.

On “Avatar,” I have not consciously composed my shots differently for 3-D. I am just using the same style I always do. In fact, after the first couple of weeks, I stopped looking at the shots in 3-D while I was working, even though the digital cameras allow real-time stereo viewing.

Of course, most directors aren’t James Cameron, who helped invent the technology and can trust his instinct on all of this. But we should trust someone’s instincts, because the result is paralysis. One of pitfalls of adding new technology to film production is that the director moves further and further from the action (and the actors) to a Den of Experts, often in a dark tent, who make decisions around monitors. In most cases, you’re better served by having a d.p. you trust.

We all see the world in 3-D. The difference between really being witness to an event vs. seeing it as a stereo image is that when you’re really there, your eye can adjust its convergence as it roves over subjects at different distances…In a filmed image, the convergence was baked in at the moment of photography, so you can’t adjust it.

In order to cut naturally and rapidly from one subject to another, it’s necessary for the filmmaker (actually his/her camera team) to put the convergence at the place in the shot where the audience is most likely to look. This sounds complicated but in fact we do it all the time, in every shot, and have since the beginning of cinema. It’s called focus. We focus where we think people are most likely to look.

Cameron is slaving convergence to focus, even pulling it as necessary throughout a scene. This makes sense, but I’d never heard it explained so clearly.

The new cameras allow complete control over the stereospace. You should think of interocular like volume. You can turn the 3-D up or down, and do it smoothly on the fly during a shot. So if you know you’re in a scene which will require very fast cuts, you turn the stereo down (reduce the interocular distance) and you can cut fast and smoothly. The point here is that just because you’re making a stereo movie doesn’t mean that stereo is the most important thing in every shot or sequence. If you choose to do rapid cutting, then the motion of the subject from shot to shot to shot is more important than the perception of stereospace at that moment in the film. So sacrifice the stereospace and enjoy the fast cutting.

In front of U2:3D, there was a 3-D trailer for Journey to the Center of The Earth 3D, which I’m sad to say looked like ass. Actually, it kind of looked like nothing, because it was blurry in a way I can’t describe, like my eyes didn’t know how to process it.

I think this is exactly what Cameron is talking about. The 3-D shots in the Journey 3D trailer were probably composed for the movie, where they play much longer. But cut into a conventional trailer, it just didn’t work. (link )

You don’t need to be in 3-D at every step of the way. And as long as your work will be viewed in 2-D as well as 3-D, whether in a hybrid theatrical release or later on DVD, it is probably healthy to do a lot of the work in 2-D along the way. I cut on a normal Avid, and only when the scene is fine-cut do we output left and right eye video tracks to the server in the screening room and check the cut for stereo. Nine times out of 10 we don’t change anything for 3-D.

I spoke with a writer-director during the strike who had the opposite experience. To get the cutting to work right in 3-D, he and his editor were constantly checking the “deep version.” And that’s a not newbie predilection — for Zodiac, David Fincher cut in HD with a giant screen.

No matter how advanced the technology gets, while you’re in the editing room, you’re still working with a rough approximation of what the final film will look and sound like. Just as with color timing, music and FX, anticipating the depth effect is something you’ll need to remember and forget while cutting.

For three-fourths of a century of 2-D cinema, we have grown accustomed to the strobing effect produced by the 24 frame per second display rate. When we see the same thing in 3-D, it stands out more, not because it is intrinsically worse, but because all other things have gotten better. Suddenly the image looks so real it’s like you’re standing there in the room with the characters, but when the camera pans, there is this strange motion artifact. It’s like you never saw it before, when in fact it’s been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

[P]eople have been asking the wrong question for years. They have been so focused on resolution, and counting pixels and lines, that they have forgotten about frame rate. Perceived resolution = pixels x replacement rate. A 2K image at 48 frames per second looks as sharp as a 4K image at 24 frames per second … with one fundamental difference: the 4K/24 image will judder miserably during a panning shot, and the 2K/48 won’t. Higher pixel counts only preserve motion artifacts like strobing with greater fidelity. They don’t solve them at all.

An example of why James Cameron is the Steve Jobs of filmmakers: he understands that what matters is the user experience, not the hard numbers. He also sees how important it is to control the entire process, from shooting through exhibition. The best camera technology is worthless if you can’t get the results you want in a theater.

The good news is that the next generation of moviegoers seems ready to forget that 24fps is how movies are “supposed to” look. And changes within a digital delivery system should be much less painful than the switchover from our current, analog system.

I know it seems like I’ve quoted a lot here, but the interview is long, and there’s a lot more in it about other aspects of the technology which will be interesting to anyone geeky enough to click through.