Highlights from Spielberg DGA event, Part 1
On June 11, the Director’s Guild of America honored Steven Spielberg with a tribute and conversation with J.J. Abrams and James Cameron. You may see the nearly 2-hour video of the event here. Long time GITS follower Nate Winslow reviewed the entire video and was kind enough to write up this report:
Back in June, the DGA paid tribute to Steven Spielberg as part of their ongoing 75th anniversary celebrations. Overseen by director Michael Apted, they brought Spielberg out along with JJ Abrams and James Cameron, who spoke about the various impacts that Spielberg’s work has had on their careers. The video of the event, almost 2 hours long, was released a few weeks ago and has been making the rounds on the internet. The whole video is filled with a goldmine of advice and thoughts from two legendary directors (and JJ Abrams is no slouch either), so I won’t try to cover every single topic of conversation here. Those of you who are interested in any aspect of filmmaking, I strongly encourage checking out the full video over at the DGA website. I’m going to take a look at a number of quotes and conversation topics that I pulled from the video that struck me as incredibly wise/inspirational/valuable in some way and relate that back to what we study the most here — storytelling and screenwriting.
For the discussion, Abrams and Cameron were both asked to pick a few favorite scenes from Spielberg’s body of work, and they were presented and discussed in ascending order. The two directors chose clips from Jaws, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark (Abrams), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park (Cameron). For the first entry in this series, I’m going to focus on one quote from Spielberg on his work on Jaws. The clip that Abrams chose is the famous “We’re going to need a bigger boat” scene, and his questions for Spielberg about the creation of that scene were mostly concerning the particulars of directing. And while fascinating and definitely worth watching, it wasn’t until about halfway through that topic that storytelling sirens started to go off:
“The thing I enjoy doing more than anything else, is trying to figure out what the audience should be looking at. The reason I don’t do a gazillion angles and I don’t splice together a lot of coverage is because I really respect the fact that the audience sometimes in a two-shot gets to ping pong their vision between Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss. And they get a chance to be their own film editor…And there’s something about that — I think that’s because I go to so many plays and I have all my life…And because of that, I sit in an audience and I’m a film editor — I’m a drama editor or a comedy editor while I’m sitting watching theater. I love discoveries I can make by choosing who to look at.”
“Figure out what the audience should be looking at.” A directorial statement and an editorial statement if I’ve ever seen one, right? Sure. But when I started thinking about that, it reminded me of THIS fantastic article by the late Mystery Man on Film about cinematic story-telling (if you haven’t read that, do so immediately. Scott has also touched on visual writing a lot, as well — here, here and here). Before the director and the editor have to decide what the audience gets to look at, though, the screenwriter gets to decide what the director sees on the page.
“And they get a chance to be their own film editor…” The screenwriter is the first editor a movie ever has, but I don’t think enough writers put themselves in that mindset. Literary editing, sure. Everyone does rewrites. But I’m not talking grammar edits or motivation tweaks or dialogue edits. I’m talking about looking at the way your story is put together as a movie: how is the scene moving across the location it takes place in? How does the build-up to the big reveal work in terms of rhythm? Take a scene you’ve written in one of your own scripts. Read it through paying particular attention to the visual details of the scene, to the things a director or an actor might SEE while they’re reading it.
If it’s an argument taking place in a bedroom between angry newlyweds, is there in-depth description of the state of the room? Lines of description dedicated to the piles of clothing in a particular spot on the floor, the specific paintings hanging on the wall?
What about in a scene that has a mano-y-mano shootout on the roof of a hotel — is the clothing each man is wearing described in detail, two or three lines each for the cut of the guys’ suits and the fabric of their socks?
Why are those there? And what are they telling a director? Those lines ended up in a finished draft of a script, and when a director reads it, he’s going to assume you needed for those things to be there, that you made a conscious decision to put those piles of clothes there, or to highlight the specific texture of someone’s socks.
More than just “details” and “mood” and what we’d like to think of as killer, descriptive writing, those are choices. And, if your luck holds and your script sells and your luck holds again and that script is greenlit, they have the potential to be the most expensive kind of choices: production choices. Each one of those lines tells us about a shot. A director reading your script sees those sentences and sees those shots in his head. He’s going to have to make a choice about how to film those piles of clothes. Are those details really what your story is about?
More importantly, is that really where you want the audience looking/what you want the audience to see? Those lines might flow wonderfully when you’re reading them to yourself on the page and they could be brilliantly written. But they’re also instructions. Every line in a screenplay should be vital — it should have a purpose in being printed permanently on the page. Because of that, when you finish writing that scene that shows up in that final draft, having survived seven re-writes and copious producer notes, those choices that Spielberg was talking about making? He’s basing them off choices you already made.
The screenwriter enjoys the unique privilege of creating an entire movie in their heads. They live and create and inhabit an entire world and translate those images onto paper. In that translation, though, writers should be carrying the burden of both director and editor. Every line in your screenplay is a cue for a director to shape what the audience ends up looking at. The director is going to filter your words through his own personal vision, and he’s going to shoot each line of your screenplay the way that he wants to, but he can only make the choices that you provide him with. Take the classic T-Rex attack on the cars scene in Jurassic Park — here’s a quick excerpt as written by David Koepp:IN THE FRONT CAR
Tim continues to stare out of the back window with the
goggles. He swings his legs — — but suddenly stops. He feels
something. He pulls off the goggles and turns back. He
moves into the back seat with Lex who is tapping her hat, and
reaches forward to still her hand.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
TIM
Did you feel that?
She don’t answer. Tim leans over to the front passenger seat
and looks at the two plastic cups of water that sit in the
recessed holes on the dashboard. As he watches, the water in
the glasses vibrates, making concentric circles — — — — then
it stops — -
- — and then it vibrates again. Rhythmically. Like from
footsteps.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.This scene in its entirety is one of my favorite moments in any film, but I took this chunk out of it because it has that fantastic bit with the vibrations in the cup of water. To me, and I doubt I’m alone in this, that moment is one of the things I most remember about this entire sequence. That faint, low rumble of the footsteps, the expanding ripples in the glass letting you know that something — something huge is coming — is a wonderful bit of writing. Inventive, memorable and most importantly, cinematic. You immediately picture that in your head: Steven Spielberg did too. Compare that scene to a version of that scene that spent a paragraph establishing the leather finish on the glove box, and impressive design highlights on the steering wheel. Then imagine that description translated into shots in the finished film and imagine how quickly that sequence is ruined by lingering angles on a glove box and the steering wheel. Not quite as thrilling, huh?
The whole scene — as written — is an exercise in economy. Koepp filled the excerpt with nothing but simple, necessary details. Movements. Actions. Images. It’s not breathtaking writing. It’s not beautiful writing, either. But it paints a clear image. It crafts the groundwork for a piece of a movie. When Steven Spielberg read that, he had a very clear set-up in front of him: this kid, slowly hearing something, clambering over to the glass, watching the ripples announce the arrival of a t-rex. David Koepp had made an unbelievable amount of choices already in the creation of that scene. What he ended up putting on the page was a great piece of cinematic writing: something that tells a story while understanding drama, pacing, tension and editing. From that base, Spielberg made his own choices, and the result is one of the most memorable set piece sequences in modern film.
Without David Koepp thinking about what the audience is going to see, without him making editorial decisions on the page, that scene dies in its infancy. If he makes a different set of bland, boring choices, Spielberg doesn’t get to make that scene. In fact, Spielberg probably doesn’t make the movie to begin with: if the big set pieces show a lacking in cinematic understanding, it’s probably not reaching off the page and grabbing the director and screaming “YOU HAVE TO MAKE ME!!” and if that’s the case, its chances of getting made start vanishing terrifyingly quickly.
It’s easy to write a screenplay in a filmmaking vacuum. What Spielberg said to JJ Abrams about choosing where the audience looks is a great reminder that screenwriting is so much more than just a story. It’s a cinematic blueprint. It’s a first cut of a film. Its success depends on the screenwriter’s knowledge of how a scene gets cut together just as much as their knowledge of plot and character. And the more conscious a screenwriter is of all aspects of the filmmaking craft, the more cinematic their script becomes, and the closer it gets to not just being a story on the page, but a movie up on a big screen.
Every line in your screenplay is a cue for a director to shape what the audience ends up looking at.
A screenwriting lesson if there ever was one. Conventional wisdom and current screenplay style drills this message deep into the lizard part of our screenwriting brains: “Don’t direct the script.” Specifically don’t use directing language (e.g., CLOSE UP, ZOOM IN, PAN ACROSS, TILT UP, SMASH CUT TO, REVERSE ANGLE). And that is true.
But in fact we do direct the movie, at least as it appears on the printed page, even without all that directing jargon. How? With the choice of every line of scene description. With the choices we make on how we approach and craft every scene. With what we choose to show and what we choose to omit.
What Nate articulates — “Every line in your screenplay is a cue for a director to shape what the audience ends up looking at” — is a great way of thinking about this aspect of screenwriting.
How we convey what we see of that movie in our heads onto the page is our take on what the audience will see. Every noun, every verb, every descriptor, every slug line and shot, all those choices should not only create a coherent narrative, but also a scene-by-scene set of visual cues. Hopefully the director is so caught up in the job we do as cinematic storytellers, s/he uses our cues to inform their approach to shooting the movie.
Whether they do or don’t, the fact remains we have first crack at ‘directing’ the movie, the first cut. We get to choose what the ‘audience’ (i.e., the people who read the screenplay) sees that first time around.
All the more reason to think and write visually when you approach every single line of your script.
A side note: Nate took the initiative to view that DGA video. Took the initiative to contact me about providing some analysis of it for GITS readers. Now he’s taking the initiative to follow his dreams of breaking into the movie business and hopefully become a producer by relocating to LA.
This is the kind of initiative that leads to success.
So if any GITS reader has ties to the business, needs an assistant, or is looking for a ‘go-getter,’ Nate is your guy. Young, smart, passionate about movies, and motivated.
If you’re interested, email me for contact info.
And thanks, Nate, for that analysis. You extracted a really important point from that video. I encourage everyone to watch the entire video here.
