Robert McKee interview: Part 4

Interesting 7-part interview between a young entrepreneur Sramrana Mitra and screenwriting guru Robert McKee. The questions have a business slant to them and yet McKee always pulls through them the commerce side of things and back to his central focus: Story.

Here is an excerpt from Part 4:

SM: Let me give another example to illustrate the business opportunity I am trying to get at. “Slumdog Millionaire” turned out to be a huge commercial success in a mainstream Hollywood way. It is a film made by an Englishman who knows very sophisticated filmmaking.

RM: I lectured in Singapore. The government would love to be able to develop a Singapore film industry. They would love to have that presence in the world. I have seen their films and of course in many ways they are amateur. I saw a couple of very good films that portray Singaporean society as a nightmare. These films were made by somebody who is personally very wealthy and could afford to spend a million dollars to make those films.

I asked the Singapore government if I were to teach people to make films of that quality, would they support it? Of course the answer was no. Hollywood, as an industry and business, is based upon the myth that everything will turn out for the best, that good triumphs evil, that hard work and perseverance will pay off, and that everyone has a soul mate. Hollywood as an industry is based upon a lie. All popular culture is based upon a lie that life is not what it seems to be, that it is full of hope and optimism.

Do we seriously want to encourage film cultures around the world to continue telling that lie?

SM: Bollywood is a perfect example of that.

RM: And everybody is happy with that. The kind of film industry that you would like to see transplanted elsewhere in the world will only reach the mass market if they are prepared to lie.

SM: Interesting.

RM: “Slumdog Millionaire” is a hideous lie. When you get artists in countries such as Japan who are serious and sophisticated, they won’t lie. The business model that you are proposing is based on the ability to lie. That is how you reach the mass audience. The reason that Hollywood as a business model does not work in these other cultures is that in these other cultures the filmmakers want to be artists.

Argentinian films have occasionally been brilliant over the years. I will do my best to teach storytelling skills, but I know how they think in South America. They want to make the commercial art movie. They want to make “Pan’s Labyrinth” or “Babel”.

Hm. McKee criticizes Hollywood for selling a lie that is based on simplistic view of the world — “everything will turn out for the best, that good triumphs evil, that hard work and perseverance will pay off, and that everyone has a soul mate.” But isn’t his dissection of the world of cinema — one side telling and retelling the lie to reach a mass audience vs. the other side which is “serious and sophisticated, artists who “won’t lie,” presumably concerned with reaching a smaller, more savvy audience — just as simplistic? Commerce vs. art?

Why split this narrative in two? Yes, there are people who desire to see movies by “serious and sophisticated” artists that challenge our assumptions, cause us to question the very basis of our world views, and so on. But people also have a psychological need to see movies that reinforce a belief in that, yes, in fact good can prevail, hard work and perseverance can pay off, that things can turn out for the best, and that we can find a soul mate. And there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to see movies that convey those themes.

Perhaps McKee’s criticism here is that all Hollywood movies nowadays convey a ‘positive’ message, that there is no room for other messages, and it is the exclusivity of this upbeat theme that translates into Hollywood selling a lie. If so, that has more traction as far as I’m concerned. In decades past, Hollywood did seem to have more room for movies that decried social policy, put a face on the downtrodden and forgotten, and told stories that ended tragically, sometimes mortality tales, other times simply stories which were meant to be sad. Plus the business of making movies today does seem to be so much about playing it safe (i.e., remakes, sequels, pre-branded brands).

But that does not negate the importance nor the cultural value of movies that have a ‘positive’ message and leave the viewer with an emotional uplift at the end. Nor does it mean that one can not aspire to art in writing stories which do that. 

Let me round out this post with an odd bit of synchronicity: As it turns out, yesterday in my screenwriting class at UNC, we analyzed the movie Adaptation which, of course, features a fictionalized version of Robert McKee in a brilliant turn by actor Brian cox playing the famous screenwriting guru. Here’s a subplot in that movie broken down here into three beats.

Within the first five minutes of the movie, Kaufman is having lunch with Valerie, a movie development executive, who has optioned the film rights to the book “The Orchid Thief,” written by Susan Orlean. Kaufman has just read the book and tells Valerie something of his vision for how he would adapt the book into a screenplay:

KAUFMAN
It’s just, I don’t want to ruin it by making it
a Hollywood product. Like, an orchid heist
movie or something. Or changing the orchids
into poppies and turning it into a movie about
drug running. Y’know? Why can’t there be a
movie simply about flowers? That’s all?

KAUFMAN
Like, I don’t want to cram in sex, or car
chases, or guns. Or characters learning
profound life lessons. Or growing or
coming to like each other or overcoming
obstacles to succeed in the end. Y’know?
The book isn’t like that. Life isn’t like
that. It just isn’t. I feel very strongly’
about this.

This represents Kaufman’s starting point: He wants to do something new, he wants to write a movie that doesn’t fall prey to the Hollywood “lie” McKee — in the interview — alludes to. Why? “The book isn’t like that. Life isn’t like that.”

So what happens? For the rest of Act One and virtually all of Act Two, Kaufman’s character gets swallowed up in trying to find the story. He moves from character to character in terms of the story’s narrative point of attack — first Laroche (the orchid hunter), then orchids, then Orlean, and finally himself. Kaufman gets so utterly lost, he does something he would have never considered doing at the beginning of the story — he attends a Robert McKee seminar, someone he decried to his twin brother Donald over and over again.

After McKee rips Kaufman a new asshole at the seminar, Kaufman reaches out to McKee one last time for help. At a bar after Kaufman confesses about the current state of his script that, “I’ve got pages of false starts and wrong approaches. I’m way past my deadline. I can’t go back,” McKee says this:

MCKEE
Tell you a secret. The last act makes
the film. You can have an uninvolving,
tedious movie, but wow them at the end,
and you’ve got a hit. Find an ending.
But don’t cheat. Don’t you dare bring in
a deus ex machina. Your characters must
change and their change must come from
them. Do that and you’ll be fine.

So what happens? In Act Three of the movie, Kaufman and his brother Donald go to Florida to spy on Orlean and Laroche, only Donald gets discovered — which leads to a madcap story ending which involves virtually every single bit of business Kaufman said he did not want to write when he first started on the project: Illegal orchids, drugs, sex, a car chase, guns, hell, he even throws in an alligator attack. And in the end, Kaufman’s character learns a profound life lesson — one laid on him by Donald as he lay dying. In fact, the denouement suggests that Kaufman has overcome his huge, crippling, lifelong obstacle — his inability to get outside his head — and he connects finally with Amelia, his Attractor character.

Does that mean Adaptation is a lie? Not at all. In fact, in my way of looking at it, Kaufman, the actual screenwriter, seems to have it both ways with his everything-but-the-kitchen-sink third act ending: He manages to make fun of typical movie conventions and show that you can make a movie work by “wowing them at the end.” The movie both pokes fun at the commercialism of Hwood movies and acknowledges that they can work really well as a story.

In essence, Adaptation stands as a metaphor that declines to separate the world into two parts — commerce versus art — but rather embraces the possibility of another paradigm: commerce and art.

What do you think? Is Hwood based on a lie? Is the world of movies justifiably divided into two spheres — commercial movies vs. “serious and sophisticated” films? And if so, where the hell do you fit Charlie Kaufman into that universe?

For more of Part 4 of the McKee interview, go here.

For Part 3, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

For Part 1, go here.

Tomorrow in Part 5, McKee synthesizes his philosophy of storytelling.

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