Highlights from Spielberg DGA event, Part 3

A few weeks back, I posted this excellent analysis by Nate Winslow of a recent event at the DGA featuring J.J. Abrams and James Cameron feting Steven Spielberg. Nate has been culling through the lengthy video extrapolating highlights with an eye toward insight for screenwriters. Today Part 3 of Nate’s analysis:

Week 3 welcomes you! First off, I’d like to apologize for the absurd delay in getting this installment out — in between entries 2 and 3, I moved myself down to LA and started trying to find myself a job, which apparently is really time consuming and stressful. Who knew, right??

In the second column, I discussed the idea of tone in screenplays and how important it is to the potential success of a script. As one of the biggest ways to give your story a clear, consistent read, tone is an incredibly valuable tool in your screenwriting arsenal. Anything that establishes what kind of story your reader or viewer is about to embark on as early as page 1 is only going to improve your script.

At the end of the article last week, I noted that one of Spielberg’s most important screenplay attributes — tone — had nothing to do with structure or plot. It’s something firmly rooted in emotion, in feelings and story, and in this day and age of The Multitude of Screenwriting Gurus, structure tends to overshadow almost everything else. Rightly so: screenplays, after all, are structure. But great movies, classics that endure, are remembered that way because of their STORIES, because of the way they made people feel. And that’s what I’m going to talk about this week: emotional storytelling.

All three of the men speaking in this video have no delusions when it comes to the importance of structure — Spielberg and Cameron especially. Looking at their body of work is direct evidence of that. That being said, I do think that the importance of a strong, compelling emotional drive in our screenplays is something that’s definitely under-discussed (outside of this blog: Scott is a major believer in the power and importance of emotional storytelling as seen here and here), hence the focus of this column. Don’t take my word for it, though, take theirs.

On my first viewing of the DGA video, James Cameron said something that caught my ear, and on repeated viewings, I realized it was the first mention of a definite theme. When asked about how he chose his particular clip, Cameron said that he just wanted to “…pick a clip that just actually affected me.”

The deciding criterion to pick one clip out of potential thousands from Spielberg’s filmography was choosing something that actually affected him. Cameron goes on to say that he had any number of scenes in mind from almost any one of Spielberg’s films. The ones that eventually got chosen, though? Not moments of delicious structural wizardry, or a moment of particular plot movement, but a moment of emotional affect.

Which tells you something: James Cameron has probably seen thousands of movies, and he’s certainly seen all of Spielberg’s. Memory space for all of these movies is probably at a premium in his white-haired head, right? The major factor in him remembering a scene that he first saw decades ago was if it emotionally impacted him. The way you’re going to get people to remember your story long after they’ve left the theater is going to be measured by emotion.

Both Spielberg and Cameron have made some of the biggest mainstream science fiction films of the past 40 years, and a lot of the discussion revolved around that particular genre. One the biggest challenges you face as a science fiction screenwriter is figuring out a way to let audiences relate to a (sometimes) epic, sweeping story that takes place in an alien environment. Cameron agrees, and these quotes chart an incredibly important evolution in his filmmaking style that shows you just how important he considers emotion to be (and how many billions of dollars in box office rewards it helped reaped).

In addressing the lessons he learned from seeing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Cameron says:

“I sort of realized that the doorway into science fiction for the average person is through family bonds — parent and child — and bonds of friendship and so on. And if you didn’t have that human part of the story, the wondrous part of it, it wouldn’t work…No matter how spectacular the images are, you always have to ground it in some way.”

He’s realized that there has to be something that makes an audience care about the massive spectacle he might be throwing on to the screen. Having just described how the technical artistry of 2001: A Space Odyssey affected him so profoundly…

“…I wasn’t thinking about telling stories about people. And then I saw what [Spielberg] does, whether it was Close Encounters, Jaws…and they were films that had the spectacle, had the craft…but they were human stories…So for me, as a nascent filmmaker starting Terminator, it was ‘How do I tell this fantastic, almost absurd story…in human terms?’ You can go on a journey ANYWHERE, to the ends of the universe, to any fantastic place, if you care about the people. You’ll go with them…So for me, the evolution was from Kubrick to Spielberg. It was the humanization of that imaginative process.”

Think about the movies James Cameron biggest movies: most of them are painted on a pretty epic canvas, right? Terminator 2, Aliens, True Lies, Titanic, Avatar…they’re all big movies, and two of them are the biggest movies of all time. But if you think about the plots of the movies I just listed, is there not a deeply human story at the center of each one of them? Sure, all of them have massive set pieces and explosive action (and I’m sure a lot of people would call them incredibly simplistic stories/un-original stories), but they’re all driven by a human story. They’re all firmly rooted in emotion.

Imagine Terminator 2 without the central story revolving around a mother and her son. Imagine Aliens without Ripley and her quest to banish her personal demons and be able to save a little girl. Imagine Titanic without that love story. Suddenly not as compelling for some odd reason…Strip away the human emotion that Spielberg and Cameron inject into their best films and you have a Michael Bay film: sound and fury without any heart.

James Cameron has made the two biggest movies ever made, and say what you will about his dialogue or his characterizations, but every single one of his movies obviously have resonated with a HUGE audience across the world. They all back up the eye-melting spectacle on display with an emotional story, and that is absolutely no accident.

So how do you take all this and make it happen in your screenplay? There’s no quick and dirty answer to that one, unfortunately, or we’d all be more successful. Like Scott is fond of saying, there’s no one way to write. There’s no magic formula for inserting an emotional throughline into your story that’s guaranteed to resonate with audiences around the world, either. It depends on your movie, too. There are some movies that don’t need a finely drawn human story to make their mark: Blazing Saddles isn’t dependent on the nuance of emotional impact the same way that Schindler’s List is.

From a writing standpoint, there are a lot of tools at your disposal to help your script get through to a reader or an exec. An engaging style, a unique voice, or like we discussed last week, an easily defined tone. What trumps any of those is the ability to make an executive feel something when they’re reading your story. That’s what we’re looking for when we go to the movies, right? Entertainment, escapism, sure. Mindless action or a good laugh? Sure once again.

I’d argue that you can take any one of the film traits I just mentioned and add a dose of solid, honest emotion and — when done right — immediately make that film a much more satisfying experience than the film without it. Because we’re emotional creatures! We thrive on it, we relate to each other through it and we don’t connect as strongly to material without it.

Movies that affect an audience — that make them feel — are the ones that get remembered. Those are the ones people can playback entire scenes and sequences from in their heads years after seeing them — those are the ones that can get you up in front of the DGA getting honored by some of the greatest living filmmakers of your generation. They inspire new generations of filmmakers. They win Academy Awards. They’re the reason blogs like this one exist and they’re the reasons hundreds of thousands of kids dream about making movies someday. They’re the movies that when someone asks you what you thought about it, you don’t say “I liked it,” you say “I loved it.”

I can’t affirm the point Nate draws from the Spielberg event enough. What is the nature of the human resonance with the story? What are its points of emotional connection? In this analysis I did about Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I made this precise point. And when I finally get around to doing Part 2 of my comparison with Cowboys & Aliens, I will suggest that the failure of the latter to connect at the box office is in some way because the movie did not have much in the way of emotional resonance.

This does not mean you have to write something which makes people weep, it’s not about getting readers ‘emotional’ in that sense of the word. Rather no matter the genre, a writer has to create key characters with whom a reader can identify and find compelling, can feel what they feel. That not only sustains the reader’s interest throughout the read, but also shrinks the distance between the reader and the story universe, even pulling them into it.

Thanks, Nate, for this. And please join Nate in comments with your own thoughts

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