Interview: Roberto Bentivegna (2012 Black List) — Part 4

Roberto Bentivegna’s original screenplay “The Eel” landed the writer on the 2012 Black List. Combining elements of noir and dark humor, the script offers an entertaining tale featuring compelling characters in the quirky subculture of a town on the border of Texas and Mexico.

Roberto was kind enough to agree to an interview and we had a wide-ranging hour-long conversation in which we covered a lot of territory related to screenwriting and movies. I will be posting the whole interview over the course of this week.

Today in Part 4, Roberto delves into his approach to the craft of screenwriting:

Scott: How much time do you spend on prep-writing… brainstorming, character development, plotting?

Roberto: I love treatments. I don’t know a lot of people that love writing treatments, but for me it’s where things really come out because I’m telling the story. I’m just writing it out as though I were telling someone. Paul Schrader said in an interview once that before he writes a script he sits down with somebody, usually at a bar or something, and he tells that person the whole movie, like “Once upon a time there was a guy. He was a taxi driver.” He just tells the whole thing. If the person gets bored or if they order another drink or if they don’t respond to something in that session, then he knows what to cut out and whether it’s worth pursuing.

My variation on that is basically the treatment. I write a 10 to 20 page treatment. A lot of it is going to be character. A lot of it will be describing the situation, but it’s a pretty good map of what’s going to happen.

After that I start plotting. I come up with a decent outline which is usually beats, although I tend to get carried away. I think that’s my biggest problem, I get carried away. Beat number one — “he walks into the hotel” will end up being four pages long. Then it’s like, “Oh shit, if I keep going with this I’ll have a 300 page thing.” I have to really be very, very disciplined.

By the time I get to the writing of the script itself it usually doesn’t take very long. I would say about six weeks for a solid first draft. I know where I’m going when I’m writing a script. I have a pretty good idea of what’s happening and everything.

Scott: Is your outline literally a scene by scene type of thing?

Roberto: It depends. I give myself big signposts for the main beats in the story. Although I actually tend to fluctuate between different methods. One method I was looking at a lot was the sequence method. You break the story down into eight pieces and build each one as mini movies, with arcs and everything, which I think can work really well when you have a single protagonist and he’s pursuing a simple goal. That is perfect for that. But if you try to do something that is a little less black-and-white, then you run into trouble.

I think different methods work differently for different types of stories. It’s actually really healthy to apply them depending on what you’re trying to write as opposed to trying to really force a paradigm onto a story that doesn’t necessarily work with that paradigm.

Scott: That’s a really important point. I tell people there’s no right way to write a story.

Roberto: I was just going to say, the main thing is either something works or it doesn’t. I think students probably don’t want to hear that, but if it works, it just works. It can go against the grain. It can go against the rules. But if something works, it just does. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. One guy can follow all the rules in the world and have something that’s really boring and lifeless, and then another guy just walks in with pages of great dialog that maybe are not so structurally sound, but the dialog is great. And you’re smiling, and you’re grooving with it.

Scott: I really enjoyed your characters in your script “The Eel.” How do you go about developing them?

Roberto: I usually write bios for them. I don’t go crazy about it. I don’t do the Lajos Egri thing where he breaks characters down and he has all sorts of questions that you have to answer about a character. I did that for one, and they felt like dead pages. It seems like you’re not going to use that stuff in the script. You’re never going to refer to how big the protagonist’s shoes are unless they play a part in the story or in the way he walks. Then again, maybe it works subconsciously to give you a better idea of who the guy is.

For me it’s about knowing my characters’ overall physicality, their speech pattern, what their story has been until now, what ticks them off, what kind of people are they like to be around. It’s like if you asked me to describe my dinner last night with three friends and I told you in detail who they are, what they do and I repeated a story they told us at dinner about themselves. A story that they feel represents them in some sort of way.

Character work is just a basic understanding of why people act the way that they do, what their agenda is. Observing people in public, for example- without giving away that you’re doing it, otherwise you’re probably going to get your ass kicked. [laughs]

Some characters come to life more easily than others. I try to match them with people in my life- either intentionally or not. Usually they have traits that I can connect to people in my life that I’ve come across.

Scott: How about dialog? Is that something that you think a writer is just born with, or can it be developed? If so, what techniques would they use to do that?

Roberto: I don’t think you’re born with it. I think you develop it. I think it’s like any craft, it’s like practicing musical scales. The more you do it, the better you become at it. Get behind who the characters are and what the situations are, let yourself go, and just write, even if you think you’re overwriting, just let them speak, just let them go off. A lot of the time, that dialogue is going to sound better when it’s spoken than dialogue you’ve rewritten 50,000 times, because people don’t rewrite their own lines.

Scott: It’s interesting to hear you talk about embracing this idea of theme up front in your process. I know that a lot of writers I talk to say that’s something that they don’t even think about or it doesn’t come out until much later in the process. They would prefer to muck around in the story for awhile until themes start to emerge. What I’m getting from you is that the theme actually energizes the process and helps you develop your stories.

Roberto: It depends on how strong and how big of a theme it is. In this case, it was very simple… escapism or redemption. Those are big themes- they’re basically genres, really. Redemption is a genre in itself. For me it was easy. I had an easy one. But I think where you can trip yourself up is when you make it your mission to know what the theme is before you’re writing. You come up with something extremely specific. And then you freeze and you start to worry that you’re betraying whatever specific theme you’ve set out to write if things don’t fall exactly into place.

You have to let yourself open different doors and walk through them. Even if they’re the wrong ones, at least you’ve done it.

For example, “Goodfellas,” what’s the theme in “Goodfellas”? Gangsters fuck each other over? “Crime doesn’t pay”. OK, let’s go with “crime doesn’t pay.” That’s such a big theme, lots of wiggle room there. If the movie had been about something else, something very specific, the movie probably would have lost a lot of its freedom and its vibrancy. It would have had an obligation to stick to the road, to the ultra-specific theme, and might have ended up being too moralistic. Instead it’s about people dealing with their temptations, betrayals, career aspirations- people who happen to be gangsters. There are so many movies that perhaps have a clearer theme than “Goodfellas”, but are half as interesting. So theme is just a signpost- it is not a set of directions that you absolutely have to follow from beginning to end.

You pick a simple theme, you run with it, if it sticks in the end, great. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you had it all figured out from the beginning. It’s a push-and-pull.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Roberto digs further into his approach to the craft.

Please stop by comments to thank Roberto for taking the time for the interview and post any follow-up questions you may have.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, go here.

Part 3, go here.

Roberto is repped by CAA and Madhouse Entertainment.