John August

Search Results for: characters

How much research does it take?

QandA, Writing Process

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.

The essentials of adaptation

Adaptation, QandA

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.

Writer control

Producers, QandA

When working on a big budget remake, does the writer have complete control
over how the characters behave and talk? It must be difficult to shape the
main characters when people all around you have their own personal ideas about
them.

–RBC

Once the script has left the writer’s hands, he never has complete control
over anything. That’s the first and possibly the most frustrating truth about
screenwriting.

In order to be filmed, your perfect vision has to be mucked up by directors,
actors, editors and cinematographers, each of whom will change it to greater
and lesser degrees. The hope is that each step of the way, they’ll make it
better. Surprisingly, sometimes they do.

Your question is about remakes, where there’s a general familiarity with the
characters and the concept, and your instincts are right. Since everyone involved
on the project knows the underlying material, they all have strong opinions
about how to proceed.

The writer’s job, in this case, is to try to capture as much as possible of
what’s beloved about the original, and yet still make a movie that can stand
on its own.

In the case of CHARLIE’S ANGELS, the producers and I had long talks about
the tone and characters, independent of the plot. Rather than mocking the original
series, we wanted the movie to be a giant hug around it. We wanted the angels
to be super-competent on the job, and approachably dorky in their off-time.
Despite all the action, this would be fundamentally a comedy, and cool people
just aren’t funny.

All of this seems pretty obvious watching the final movie, but getting everyone
to agree to this approach was easily half of my job. It would have been easier
to make a straight-out spoof (like SCARY MOVIE), or a full-on action movie
(like James Bond), but I don’t think either would have been as successful.

Worried about copyrights

QandA, Rights and Copyright

My movie has main characters who love movies and, at last count, reference
over fifty films and watch nearly a dozen. You addressed the need to get permission
during filming and encouraged us the aspiring to just go wild during the writing
process, but what about in the copyrighting process?
Should I get the permission of the producers of, for
instance, THE OPPOSITE OF SEX, if I write that it’s playing in the background
of the scene or of PHOENIX if my characters refer to it in conversation,
even though they refer to it in a nice, non-slanderous way.

–Josh M. Nileski

I fall back on my standard advice of Just Don’t Worry About It.

If you’re excerpting whole scenes of THE OPPOSITE OF SEX, then
there would obviously be legal issues, since you can’t copyright something
that’s already copyrighted. But it’s not like there’s somebody at the Library
of Congress who’s going to read your script and press the emergency copyright
infringement alarm.

As far as referring to other movies, Josh, this is America. If you want your
characters to say that TOWN AND COUNTRY was a boring, unfunny disaster, they
can. (By the way, it was. I like and respect pretty much everyone involved
in that movie, but what the hell happened?)