How much research does it take?
1. When you are working on characters or bits of plot, how
much do you research them? For example, if a character’s profession
played a major
role, would you feel compelled to learn everything you can about profession?
2. How far should a writer try to flesh out a character? I feel like in order for my characters to be real (at least to me), I need whole life stories on them. Is that necessary or even useful?
–Andrea Hammond
Your questions are very timely, because I’m currently deciding whether to take on a project set in a very dangerous part of Africa. I love the idea of the movie and the filmmakers involved, so the focus of my decision process is whether I feel I could write the movie without physically going to the region. I would classify myself as moderately adventurous, but I have no interest in catching malaria or being shot in the head, both of which would be (remote) possibilities if I were to travel there. And yet I love to write on location, so I would probably go if given the chance.
On one hand, the idea of first-hand experience is a little silly. George Lucas has never been in space, and even though James Cameron became an expert on the Titanic, his movie was much more concerned with the love story he invented.
But there’s a lot to be said for research in pursuit of verisimilitude. Imagine if Dr. Carter on E.R. referred to "that tube thing-y." Most of the show’s writers aren’t medical doctors, just as the "Sopranos" writers aren’t Mafia, but they’ve all learned enough of the appropriate lingo so that we believe the characters really know what they’re talking about.
When fleshing out your characters, that level of detail should be your goal. You don’t need to know everything, just enough to firmly place them in the world.
Ratio of pages to screen time
How do you (roughly) calculate the ratio of script length to screen time? Would you use a different calculation for different genres?
–Rebecca
The very general rule is that a page in the script should equal a minute of screen time, which is one reason the industry has standardized around 12-point Courier for the font. Since most screenplays are around 120 pages, the movie should work out to be 120 minutes, or two hours, assuming every scene in the script makes it into the movie.
Of course, a page full of action would likely take longer than a minute, just as a page of rapid-fire dialogue would be a lot faster. That’s why before a movie goes into production, the script is often "timed" to estimate how long the movie will be, so the director and producers can plan accordingly.
A "script timer" is a professional reader who estimates how long each scene will play, and thus, the length of the overall movie. Generally, the script timer will take into account the director’s vision and style when timing the scenes; the David Lynch version of a scene would tend to run longer than the Michael Bay version. Many script timers are in fact the script supervisors, who will be set during the entire production helping the director, actors and editors maintain continuity and catch mistakes. From the screenwriter’s perspective, this is one of the most important people on the set, since he or she always has the director’s ear, and will be the person correcting actors who mangle their lines.
Writer on-set
If you sell a screenplay and it goes into production, is there any way to get on-set to watch your movie being filmed, even if it has been re-written?
–Matt
One of the issues that came up in the latest negotiation between the Writers Guild and the studios was whether screenwriters should have guaranteed access to the set. Surprisingly, the biggest opponent to the idea was the Directors Guild, perhaps concerned that having writers on the set might diminish the director’s power and control.
In the end, allowing writers to visit the set was added to a new list of "preferred practices." It’s a compromise, but certainly a step in the right direction.
Even without the latest ruling, in my experience the level of the writer’s involvement during production has everything to do with his relationship with the director and producers. On GO, I was there for every frame shot. On CHARLIE’S ANGELS, I trekked down to the soundstages occasionally. MINORITY REPORT, just once. (And that was mostly just to see the sets, which were the most elaborate things I’ve ever seen.)
What few writers understand before visting a set is just how boring they are. Shooting a movie is like running through mud, and if you don’t have a job on the set, it gets old incredibly fast. For my money, a writer’s time is better spent in the editing room, helping to find the best movie in the footage that was shot. You don’t get to hobnob with big stars, but you’re more likely to actually improve the movie.
The essentials of adaptation
From the perspective of a screenwriter, what is essential in creating an adapted script? Is it possible to keep the true essence and theme of a piece of literature when translated to film? Can literary techniques be directly transformed into cinematic terms? Should the two even be compared?
–Jeremy Vandiver
Sure. Books and movies should be compared, if only to understand what each does well.
Using words alone, a good book manages to evoke images and emotions in the reader that add up to a coherent story. The best writing makes a reader feel like he’s seeing, hearing and touching what the character experiences, putting you "in his shoes." Of all the literary tools available to the writer, the most valuable may be insight. The novelist can choose to tell the reader what the character is thinking, or fill in extra details, or sketch out relationships, that have nothing to do with the current scene. In fact, the novel doesn’t need to have "scenes" at all. Moments and observations can float freely in space and time, arranged in whatever order best suits the story.
A movie — and by movie I mean what’s actually projected on the big screen
— has basically the same goals as a novel. It wants to transport the viewer
into a different place and time, making him feel like what he’s seeing and
hearing is real. A movie has many advantages over a novel. Not only are there
concrete visuals, but you hear the characters speak and watch them fight.
It’s an exaggeration to say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it
would be very hard to capture the essence of THE MATRIX’s bullet-time on paper
without having seen if first, or the feeling of a John Williams soundtrack.
But this efficiency comes at a cost. With rare, art-house exceptions, movies
have scenes. The viewer is seeing and
hearing something that is taking place at a specific time and location. Movies
move relentlessly forward at 32-frames
per second, and the viewer cannot choose to stop and think about something,
or flip back a few pages to catch something he missed.
Most importantly, movies lack insight. Aside from an occasional voice-over or narrator intrusion (done recently, and effectively, by AMELIE and Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN), a movie can’t communicate anything to the viewer beyond what is seen and heard. Since a movie can’t flat-out tell you what the hero is thinking, it has to be very specific with its images and sounds to let you know what’s going on inside a character’s head.
Now for the terrifying truth: a screenplay is the worst of both worlds. It’s a work of literature that has to conform to all the limitations of a movie, yet without any of cinema’s special abilities. That above all else is why screenwriting is so hard.
In terms of adaptation, the screenwriter has to look for ways to take ideas that "float" in a novel and tie them down to specific moments, locations and times. Sometimes this means simply repurposing internal thoughts as dialogue, but more often it involves a fundamental rethinking of the structure, storyline and characters to achieve the goal.
I think one reason that many adaptations rely on voice-over is that the filmmakers never found a way to externalize the essence of the novel they were adapting. Instead of making a movie that could stand on its own, they created the cinematic equivalent of a book-on-tape. To me, these movies always "feel" written, a huge limitation.
Finding the structure
I’m a 28-year old writer with a very old problem. I do my best work when I’m not consciously structuring a screenplay. I’ve found trying to shuffle scenes around on note cards about as useful as trying to construct a meaningful sentence out of syllables. So I’m reluctant to embrace a fully plotted mode of writing.
–Zackery West
First off, apologies to Zackery for editing his question down so much. The original was filled with a lot of other good observations and side-questions, but ran longer than my whole weekly column. And in cutting it down, I was doing exactly the kind of work Zackery is struggling against.
Structure isn’t really about tacking notecards on a wall. It’s about organizing ideas — sequences, scenes, and beats within those scenes — so that they can have the most possible impact. You don’t just create structure before you write. It happens inevitably with every character who walks in the door, or takes an action that spins the story in a different direction.
I doubt there are any working screenwriters who would say they’ve adopted a "fully plotted mode of writing." Whatever plan you’ve made for the movie, be it notecards, an outline or just an idea in your head, it’s always subject to change based on discoveries you make while you’re writing.
You’re beating yourself up over not plotting out your whole script beat-for-beat. Guess what? You don’t have to. For now, just write the best scenes you can, keeping in mind that they may need to be changed or cut to service the movie as a whole.
The best thing about fighting with yourself is that when you give up, you win.
To google google
I saw your
answer about "treatments" and did a search, as suggested, for "James
Cameron treatment," on Google. The first two results were links to a SPIDERMAN
treatment. The third: a link to the IMDB page where you suggested searching
for "James Cameron treatment." Stupid, but amusing.
–Patrick A. Bowman
I’m waiting for the day a Google search refers back to itself.
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