“How To Write An Awesome Movie, According To Some Of Hollywood’s Best Writers”

Buzzfeed with a nice collection of quotes:

Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise trilogy, Dazed and Confused); Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks, Bridesmaids, The Heat); Diablo Cody (Juno, Young Adult); Richard Curtis (Love Actually, About Time, Four Weddings and a Funeral); Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said, Please Give); Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter (500 Days of Summer, The Spectacular Now); David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer, Role Models); Rian Johnson (Looper, Brick); Jeff Nichols (Mud, Take Shelter); Lake Bell (In A World); David Gordon Green (Prince Avalanche, Pineapple Express); Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha); Mark and Jay Duplass (Jeff Who Lives At Home, Cyrus); Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Descendants, The Way, Way Back); and Brian Koppelman (Rounders, Oceans Thirteen).

A few examples:

Mark and Jay Duplass: We have lots of story ideas. We keep an ongoing document full of story ideas, over 100 of them at this point. We don’t have very many half-written scripts because we usually don’t start writing something until we know exactly where it’s going and what all the story beats are. The actual “writing” of our scripts is a quick spring once we’ve figured out the entire structure (which can take a long time).

Diablo Cody: I know it’s a real idea when I turn into a crazy person and have to immediately lock myself in a room and write and ruminate for hours. It’s like A Beautiful Mind, but with bad dialogue instead of equations. My husband knows when I have a story going because I get really quiet. It’s all I think about until I’ve regurgitated every detail and shaped it into a draft.

Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter: There’s always crucial information that requires an elegant layering into the story. How to do that — and where to do that — that’s what the outline is for. In terms of jokes, well, here’s our dirty little secret: We’re not funny. We think we have a good handle on character and hopefully, we understand story. After that stuff is working, we can usually generate some comedy. But it never starts with gags or jokey callbacks.

Nicole Holofcener: I have no rules. People who don’t like my movies would probably be like, “That’s right, she needs some.” I mean I think that having written as many screenplays as I have at this point in my life as I have, I feel it’s intuitive that I write something with conflict. When I was in college or whatever, I’d write two girls sitting around talking and thought it was so ingenious, and now I know better — to some degree — that there has to be some conflict, at least between the two people talking, or what they’re talking about.

Paul Feig: You have to trust that your audience is generally way ahead of you. They’re smart and they know the language of film. They can guess who’s going to fall in love with whom and who works where and what they want. If you start telling them things they already figured out, they’ll start to hate you for treating them like idiots.

Lake Bell: Once I have a draft down, that’s when I start to get pretty obsessive about hitting the right beats. But initially, I write without judgment, without adhering to any rules. My first draft is always very free, and the draft later, once I’ve written “the end,” then I start to be a little more hard on myself and start adhering to the satisfying beats in a film that you want to have, even if you derail a little bit.

For the rest of the article, go here.

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