Dispatch From The Quest: Paul Wie

Over the course of the 24 weeks I am working with the writers in The Quest, each will write a weekly dispatch to share with the GITS community. There are several reasons for doing this, the main one educational: Hopefully you will learn something of value for your own understanding of the craft from the experiences of the Questers. I should also add they are a great group of people, so I expect you will enjoy getting to know them.

Today: Paul Wie talks about his connection to character-based screenwriting:

I can mark milestones in my life by the works I’ve made or scripts I’ve written; each one telling me who I was at that given time — how I lived, who I loved, what I feared, what movies I watched and books I read — everything and anything that fueled my passions, colored my thoughts, and inspired me to create. So, whether I meant to or not, screenwriting has always been a journey into my own fascinations and struggles. It’s been a way of telling me things about myself.

So given my disposition to self-probe, I’m happy to discover how much the Quest focuses on our stories’ characters and meaning. During our first teleconference, Scott mentioned a phrase that really resonated with me: “Become who you are.” This quote by Nietzsche suggests that everyone has a destiny, an ultimate self that we aspire to become, and “who you are” can only come to life when we strip away everything that is false and inessential, and embrace what is truly unique and authentic within ourselves.

I love how the Quest champions this as the foundation of a great story. Because it’s true. The movies I cherish the most are always about a person going through an unexpected, life-changing experience that transforms him or her into a more complete human being. I adore high-stakes stories, I love charm, humor, and beauty, I enjoy being taken into fascinating, new worlds, but if these elements are not grounded in a deep, honest portrait of a character who changes, then I don’t care.

That’s why I connect to the Quest’s character-based principles of screenwriting — it’s about telling entertaining AND meaningful stories — it’s about creating complex characters we care about and relate to — it’s about making movies that matter to people.

And that’s my hope and goal for the next six months: to tell a story worthy of my time, worthy of Scott’s time, worthy of my fellow Questers’ time, and most of all, worthy of millions of moviegoers’ time if they were to one day watch my screenplay on a big screen. I want to give the world an awesome, beautiful, emotional experience as so many great storytellers in the past have done for me. Because this is why I write. This is why I go to the movies.

Thanks, Paul, for sharing with us the passion you have for movies. That is so important. While we, as screenwriters, have a myriad of goals when we write a script, a primary one has to be this: To make the reader feel something. This is an especially challenging task with professional Hollywood types who after having slogged through hundreds of crappy scripts may tend to be somewhat jaundiced. To write something that provokes a positive emotional response, whether it’s laughter, gasps, shrieks or tears, is one key to crafting a good read.

And how to create an emotional connection with the reader? Most obviously through the characters. Those are the personal agents in a script who have feelings themselves, who experience joy and sorrow, courage and fear, and we live vicariously through them in that story universe. So if we want to provide an “emotional experience” for a script reader, it just makes sense to ground the story-development and crafting process with characters.

Better yet, create characters who we can imbue with our own feelings in order to transmit that to readers.

Which provides a great segue for next week’s Core subject matter: Character.

About Paul: Director + Writer. Loves Spielberg, Truffaut, Abrams, Kurosawa, Attack the Block, cinematic stories beautifully told. @paulhwie