Interview (Part 3): Donald Margulies
Donald Margulies, one of America’s most widely-produced playwrights, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends (which was made into a Emmy Award-nominated film for HBO directed by Norman Jewison) and was a finalist twice before for Sight Unseen and Collected Stories. His many other plays, which include The Country House, Shipwrecked! An Entertainment, Brooklyn Boy, the Tony Award-nominated Time Stands Still and the Obie Award-winning The Model Apartment, have been produced on and off-Broadway and in theaters across the United States and around the world. Mr. Margulies has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was the recipient of the 2000 Sidney Kingsley Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Theatre by a playwright. In 2005 he was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with an Award in Literature and by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture with its Award in Literary Arts. He was the 2014 recipient of the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award for an American Playwright in Mid-Career and the 2015 William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater. He has developed numerous screenplays, teleplays and pilots for HBO, Showtime, NBC, CBS, Warner Bros., TriStar, Universal, Paramount, and MGM. He is an adjunct professor of English and Theater Studies at Yale University. The film of his screenplay, The End of the Tour (2013 Black List), directed by James Ponsoldt, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will be released in the fall of 2015.
Donald agreed to respond to some of my questions about writing The End of the Tour as well as his insights into the craft of writing.
Today in Part 3, Donald responds to some questions about the craft of screenwriting:
Scott: Some craft questions, if we could. How do you come up with story ideas?
Donald: Most of the work I’ve done for screen has been adaptation, a process I really enjoy. It employs a different part of my brain than when I’m writing a play, a different skill set. My original ideas tend to take the form of plays. I know I have a play when I find myself curious or troubled by something. A play can start with an image that can be as simple as two people in a room and I begin to ask questions about who they are in relation to one another. My play, Time Stands Still, arose from my imagining a loft and a woman on crutches entering it; when I decided that she was a photojournalist who had been injured covering combat, I had my new play. I use photography as prompts in my playwriting class: Diane Arbus portraits as an exploration of character and voice, Gregory Crewdson photos as an introduction to setting and stage pictures.
Scott: How much time do you spend in prep-writing (i.e., brainstorming, character development, plotting, research, outlining)? Which of the aspects of prep do you tend to devote the most time and focus to?
Donald: Research can be seductive. Writers try to convince themselves that research is writing but the truth is research is research. I love research! When I adapted Edith Wharton’s The Touchstone, for instance, I immersed myself in Whartonia. I spent months reading her novels, her correspondence, biographies, scholarly studies about women at the turn of the twentieth century, you name it! I even paid a visit to The Mount! What fun! But there comes a time when you have to say, “That’s enough research” and confront the beast — the script — and start writing. The danger of research is falling in love with too many details and wanting to use everything. Research is useful as inspiration but it mustn’t become an excuse not to write. You ultimately have to make a story your own and too many neat facts can clutter a script. I find treatment-writing a miserable pursuit; what joy is there in describing what you’re going to write?
Scott: When you finish a first draft, you are faced with the inevitable rewriting process. Are there some keys you have to rewriting your scripts and if so what are they?
Donald: I set the script aside for a few days, once the satisfied glow of finishing a draft has faded. I then print out a pristine copy of the script and proceed to mark it up with pencil, drawing lines between beats, making squiggles alongside dialogue that sounded great three days earlier but now seems self-indulgent. Also, I find it very useful hearing the work read aloud. Put together a reading. You can really get a sense of what’s working, what’s overwritten, what’s said two too many times, where you’re having too much fun at the expense of your story. I find myself increasingly impatient with movies and plays — my own very much included — when I feel that the story isn’t moving fast enough. Cutting can feel very liberating.
Scott: What is your actual writing process?
Donald: I don’t write every day. Well, I write something every day — emails, letters of reference — but I don’t always have a play or screenplay in progress to turn to. I love having a play in production. For me, rehearsal is the social reward for having toiled alone for many months. When I’m on fire with inspiration (which isn’t as often as I’d like) I write for hours a day and find that ideas strike as my head hits the pillow, so I’ll scrawl something brilliant in the dark on the back of a New Yorker at my bedside and find gibberish in the light of day. I don’t hang out in coffee shops with my laptop. I have a lovely office on the third floor of my home. My preferred soundtrack is silence but it’s often punctuated by my dog barking at perceived interlopers. If the phone doesn’t ring (which I have come to prefer), I could go through an entire day without speaking to anyone but my dog, and she’s a dog. I was never cut out for writers’ rooms; I’m much more attuned to my own fragile ego than I am to a roomful of them. I’m not used to saying ideas out loud; I always fear they’re bubbles that will burst once they’re spoken. I start out on a pad or in a notebook writing by hand but mostly doodling. When I hit on something that feels like a lead, I go to the keyboard and see how far that lead can get me.
Scott: What do you love most about writing?
Donald: Having written.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, go here.
Donald is repped by WME and Anonymous Content.