How a producer determines if a script is ready
Producer Ted Hope, who has dozens of producing credits in the indie film world including American Splendor, 21 Grams, and Adventureland, was recently in Australia for a 2-day workshop on film producing. Here are some of his thoughts about how a producer can determine if a script is ready:
- You’ve cut that extra 10%.
- In hindsight, you see the intent of every action and every word is understandable and explainable.
- You now what the characters are truly feeling throughout, and especially at the end.
- All action is influenced by action that has occurred before it or by their psychological makeup.
- There is specificity on the page throughout the process. You are world-building when you make a movie, so have you as the scriptwriter determined what makes up the world, and done so with brevity and poetry, making it a good read?
In addition, this excerpt from a report about the event:
Hope emphasised the need for the producer to totally be across the script, because that is part of what he described as building a sense of inevitability around the film. “Before go out and raise money for your film, before you start to submit it, really try to drill down and understand your personal emotional connection to the characters, to the themes, the way it’s being told, what the directors wants to accomplish — know it better than you think anyone else can know it. That is how you communicate the inevitability of that movie being made,” said Hope.
For more of Hope’s presentation: