Interview: Stephen Belber

Today’s interview is with playwright and screenwriter Stephen Belber. Belber’s writing credits include Tape (2001), The Laramie Project (2002), and Management which has just been released this weekend:

Now Belber’s enjoying another first with his directorial debut Management, an off-kilter romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn about a chance meeting between two characters at a roadside Arizona motel. He recalls his sudden submersion into the screenwriting craft as a remarkably smooth one. “It was kind of perfect timing because I’d just had a child and needed to make more money,” he explains. “But really it was a pretty cool segue thanks to Richard. We both agreed in our first conversation that we should just keep the play as it was, so it was fairly seamless. I didn’t feel at all like I was selling out or having to adhere to a form that I wasn’t comfortable with.”

Here’s a money quote from the interview which can be found at WGA.org:

What advice would you give to the unproduced screenwriter out there right now?

I’m very hesitant to give any advice because I feel like I’m the one who needs it. But I would say that Management was completely a side project for me. It was something I thought and wrote about apart from trying to write a spec script or trying to get a studio job or trying to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. It really was a pet project on the side that I would scribble notes about. I think that because of that, it’s the one that got made. I just had fun, wrote from the heart and wrote these characters that I felt I knew.

It was a great lesson to me. Not that you should just write from the heart and never do research, but that if you create characters that are imbued with a sense of being, good actors will gravitate toward them and that will help get it made.

It’s funny. I seem to see quotes like this — just have fun and follow your instincts — and quotes of the precise opposite approach — know what’s selling and write to that — but hardly ever anything in the middle: I sorta picked something I thought would be commercial and that I could sorta have fun with. 

What do you think: Go with your instincts or go with commercial sensibilities?

Comment Archive