Rob’s Finds
More merriment from GITS contributor Rob Fuller. This week Rob goes all literate on us by sourcing a series of interviews with screenwriters of note.
First for all you parents of 9 year-old boys, I’m sure you know that this is the weekend that Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief debuts in movie theaters. Rob rooted around and discovered this interview in “The Latino Review” with the movie’s screenwriter Craig Titley. Two excerpts:
How did you get started writing screenplays?
Titley: Let’s see, I was fresh out of undergrad where I went back in Illinois where I was an English and a business major. I came out here for the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC, thinking that I wanted to be a producer more than a writer. Also, I was incredibly naïve thinking that as soon as you graduated you would get some office space on Wilshire and hang up a sign that said ‘Craig Titley, Producer’ and Tom Cruise would walk in, like, ‘Hey, I hear you’re producing.’ Low and behold that didn’t happen and I became a PA on some films. Then I thought, ‘Well, I have all these ideas. Maybe I can write a draft that will get a real writer excited and then I can be a producer.’ So I kind of started writing from that angle but the first thing that I wrote got me an agent and a manager and actually Chris Columbus, way back, I ended up writing a movie for his production company which is where this relationship sort of began. Then I just kept getting hired to write things and so eventually I was like, ‘I guess I’m a writer and not a producer.’
Did you have to change a lot from the books regarding the Olympians or were the books well written in that regard?
Titley: Well, the biggest change are that the books skew very, very young, even younger than the ‘Harry Potter’ books. The protagonists in the books were like nine years old and they would hurl insults like ‘You seaweed brain.’ So the first thing we decided to do, and this was where we were both completely in sync, was up the age of the characters, making them like seventeen years old. Once that happened the adaptation sort of all fell into place. Then things that needed to change were like you needed to up the intensity of the action scenes which in the book were kind of cute and silly at times. We got to develop deeper characters and character relationships, things like that, just because you’re making them seventeen and they have real world issues as opposed to just kids on the run and having fun.
Next Rob dug up this interview at ComicBookResources.com with Book of Eli screenwriter Gary Whitta . Here’s a taste:
With the Hughes Brothers at the helm and Denzel Washington shepherding the project, the film was allowed to have a certain undercurrent of complexity not generally afforded to major genre productions. “I always prefer if, beyond the initial thrill of the explosions and all the crazy stuff, that beyond that, the movie’s actually about something. There’s some underlying message that, after your ears have stopped ringing from all the awesome on the screen, that the next day or the day after there’s an idea or something that stayed with you that kept you thinking about. It had a life longer than just the two hours it was on the screen,” answered Whitta when asked about genre pictures generally losing something on their way through production. “We always said we wanted to make a thinking man’s action movie.”
Then a two-fer — a pair of interviews with screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. The first one at Maibaap Films:
How do you generally write? Do you use outlines or notecards or just start cranking it out from page one?
I don’t really use notecards. What I do is I try to figure out what the piece is about and link that to the story arc or the character arc. I always think there’s two things going on in any script — there’s the story and then there’s the plot. The plot is the events. If it’s a heist film, it’s how they get in and out. But the story is why we’re there, why we’re watching the events.
It’s what’s going on with the characters. And theme above that. Once I get those things, once I know what the theme is and what it’s about, I can start trying on story beats and plot beats to see if they feel like they’re moving, but they have to relate to the overall theme.
If you look at The Dark Knight, you’ll find before those guys wrote a word of script, they knew exactly what their movie was about. All the themes were in place. Sometimes they had to bend the scenes in The Dark Knight to fit the theme they were trying to get across. It’s clear they didn’t write the scenes and then look for what they were about, they clearly knew where they were headed.
And this one at CulturePulp:
Q. I read that great interview with you in Creative Screenwriting, and I have to say: I was surprised to learn that James L. Brooks has been there for you over the past few years. What do you two discuss?
A. We just talk mostly about the process of writing. He, in his own way, is just as tormented and perfectionistic as anyone. Without sounding pretentious, that’s a quality I share. We’ve gotta get it right.
He said something to me once that I remember very well: “If you’re going to torture yourself so much, why not torture yourself over writing? At least that’s something that seems sort of noble, you know?” Be tortured over something worthwhile — with a result at the end. He and I both go through a process that’s very hard on our selves, and perfectionist to the nth degree.
Now, the surprise — to a lot of readers, probably — is that Joel Silver’s the same way. They seem like such disparate men, James Brooks and Joel Silver, but you’d be surprised at how similar they are. Not just in their desire to make a product that’s as good as it can be, but also in that Joel has an insane amount of knowledge about film and film craft. And his timing — in the editing room, the way he’d tweak a scene to make a joke play — was the same way I’d seen Brooks do it.
Then the Pièce de résistance — this 53,00 word Q&A conducted by Dan Schneider with screenwriter Lem Dobbs (The Limey, Dark City:
DS: Re: the actual writing, you’ve expressed being bored with grammatical rules. So did I, as a student. But, to be a good writer, I think you must learn all the rules until you’ve inculcated. Once that’s done, you have to seriously unlearn them to be truly creative. Creativity is one of those things that you either have or do not have. There’s no teaching it. Thoughts?
LD: Well, I have tried teaching it and in exactly those terms. Somerset Maugham said if you can write a play, it’s as easy as falling off a log, and if you can’t, no one can teach you. I tell students right away that Picasso didn’t just reinvent the human form right off the bat. First he learned to draw better than anyone else alive. Buñuel could be surreal because he could also be real. Sometimes both in the same movie. My father was among the last generation who went to art school when going to art school meant learning how to draw. From life. Day in, day out, sitting looking at a model. Then the Sixties came along and Do Your Own Thing became the norm. Let the students express themselves, that’s what being “creative” is. If they want to hang a toilet seat around their neck and chant while splashing paint on a wall, let them. Who’s to say what Art is? And that was the beginning of the end. That’s how we came to this pass — one man’s heaven, another’s personal hell — where “quirky” now equals quality and we have SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK and LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and JUNO instead of STAGECOACH and OUT OF THE PAST and SERPICO. There was always an insufferable subgenre of the kooky — movies purporting to show that “nonconformists” lead more authentic lives — A THOUSAND CLOWNS and A FINE MADNESS and anything with Liza Minnelli — but it wasn’t the defining barometer of critical taste.
It’s why every jackass in the world now writes screenplays — that and the money they started hearing about. Everyone thinks movies are accessible to them, you see, everyone has spent their life going to movies, watching movies on television, renting movies … They didn’t grow up performing appendectomies. No one seems to realize that the people at the very top, the ones everyone else would like to be — Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino — they know more about movies than you do, they’ve seen more. Thousands more. Movies are in their blood. It’s incredible when you read the bad screenplays of amateurs and aspirants, not only do they not resemble real life or human behavior, they don’t resemble movies. “Creativity” is promoted now like it’s a civil right. But to mention the sordid subject of talent is unseemly and elitist and muddies the playing field. After all, America’s got talent.
The fools who write those unreadable HOW TO WRITE A SCREENPLAY books don’t seem to have any knowledge of movies beyond a superficial understanding of the same handful of classics or modern hits that everyone knows. Some director recently announced his attachment to some project and said, “I seem to be attracted to reluctant hero stories.” Does he really not realize those are the only stories Hollywood has ever made? You have to inculcate movies, not “screenwriting.” There are shapes and patterns and a certain commercial contract made with the audience at the dawn of time. Then if you want to break that contract and go off and make Cassavetes or Antonioni films, fine — or fine. Cassavetes, at any rate, had to do one to subsidize the other.
But to prove that he hasn’t gone off the rails weird-wise, Rob unearthed this treasure trove: “366 Weird Movies. Here are the 45 “certified weird” movies:
Archangel (1990) — Surreal, nearly silent meditation on forgetfulness set in an icy Russian city just after World War I
Begotten (1991) — Legendary experimental film, featuring God disemboweling himself and other metaphysical atrocities
Blood Diner (1987) — Severely out-of-whack horror-comedy with (possibly unconscious) fascist undertones
Carnival of Souls (1962) — Low-budget creepfest is a minor miracle on film
The City of Lost Children [La cité des enfants perdus] (1995) — Visionary steampunk fairytale from Jeunet & Caro
A Clockwork Orange (1971) — Kubrick weirds it up in this disturbing moral fable
Cowards Bend the Knee, or, the Blue Hands (2003) — Typically surreal modern silent from the inimitable Guy Maddin mixing melodrama, Greek tragedy, psychosexual guilt, and hockey highlights
The Dark Backward (1991) — The world’s worst comic nearly becomes an overnight success when he grows a third arm out of his back in this grotesque show business satire
Delicatessen (1991) — Jeunet & Caro’s first film is a bizarre but oddly sweet black comedy involving cannibalism in post-apocalyptic Paris
Donnie Darko (2001)- Angsty, apocalyptic, fantastical drama about a screwed-up teen is an irresistibly lovable mess
Don’t Look Now (1973) — Classic psychological horror with a weird twist
El Topo (1970) — Mystical and surreal Spaghetti Western from Alejandro Jodorowsky
Eraserhead (1977) — The ultimate nightmare experience, about horror at procreation and loathing for one’s own offspring
Evil Dead II (1987) — The frenetic, fantastic and crowd-pleasing movie about a man trapped in a cabin menaced by evil spirits, mixing equal parts horror and absurd slapstick comedy
Eyes Without a Face [Le Yeux sans Visage] (1965)- Georges Franjou’s influential, poetic horror film
Funky Forest: The First Contact (2005) — Selection of surreal, interwoven sketches from three Japanese directors is uneven, as you would expect, but contains some of the weirdest sequences you’re likely to come across
Greaser’s Palace (1972) — a zoot-suited Jesus visits a Western town to enact a series of absurd parables
Gummo (1997) — Indisputably weird but ceaselessly unpleasant portrait of hopeless white trash
Help! Help! The Globolinks [Hilfe! Hilfe! Die Globolinks] (1969) — The world’s only psychedelic children’s opera about an alien invasion
The Horrors of Spider Island [Ein Toter hing im Netz] (1960) — A bad misogynist fever dream involving poorly dubbed buxom women, and some spiders, on an island
I Can See You (2008) — This “psychedelic campfire tale” is slow to start, but climaxes in a 20 minute freakout
I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK [Saibogujiman Kwenchana] (2006) — Romantic comedy set in a mental asylum is likely to remain the weirdest example of its genre
Ink (2009) — Visually impressive low-budget fantasy about a mysterious figure who snatches a sleeping girl into a world of dreams
Jacob’s Ladder (1990) — big-budget cult mindtrip movie with unforgettable demonic hallucinations
Johnny Got His Gun (1971) — antiwar classic about a limbless, blind and deaf casualty of the first World War, trapped inside his own head where he lives out a mixture of dreams and fantasies
Kung Fu Hustle (2004) — totally off-it’s-rocker kung fu comedy/fantasy that became a smash international hit
The Lair of the White Worm (1988) — Ken Russell’s ultra-fun, tongue-in-cheek horror movie filled with phallic symbols and impaled nuns
Malpertuis (1972) — Harry Kümel’s big weird dark house tale was confusing and a flop despite the presence of Orson Welles, but drips with surreal atmosphere nonetheless
The Milky Way [La Voie Lactee] (1969) — A dry and cerebral, but very weird, story by surrealist master Luis Buñuel about two tramps meet various Biblical characters and embodiments of Catholic heresies while traveling on a pilgrimage
Naked Lunch (1991) — David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the unadaptable William S. Burroughs novel features film’s scariest typewriters
Nostalghia (1983) — Andrei Tarkovsky’s slow, beautiful, dreamlike spiritual parable about a homesick Russian poet in Italy
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) — Guillermo del Toro’s beautiful fairytale; a girl completes quests at a faun’s behest, while her “real” world Fascist stepfather is a monster beyond all fantasy
Phantasm (1979) — Crazy, nightmarish, obstinately illogical drive-in horror flick about a kid and a sinister funeral home, featuring the terrifying “Tall Man”
Pi (1998) — amazing black and white photography and a pulsing electronica soundtrack drive this intellectual thriller about a mad math genius seeking a mystical number
The Reflecting Skin (1990) — Uneven but sometimes powerful flick teeming with symbolism about a kid who thinks his widow neighbor is a vampire, among other strangenesses
Repulsion (1965)- Disturbing Roman Polanski peek inside Catherine Deneuve’s disintegrating mind
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) — Even without its bizarre cult following, this naughty musical b-movie spoof would have earned a place on the list
Silent Hill (2006) — Sloppy scripting and apocalyptic imagery combine to create a truly weird experience
Stalker (1979): Andrei Tarkovsky’s slow, mystifying, beautiful science fiction parable about three men’s journey to a room which can grant there innermost wishes
Steppenwolf (1974) — The psychedelic effects in this faithful adaptation of Herman Hesse’s novel have dated badly
Synecdoche, New York (2008) — Charlie Kaufman working without a net in this absurdist, recursive, and dreamlike story of a sad-sack theater director who builds a replica of New York City inside a warehouse
Tideland (2005) — Terry Gilliam’s dark and controversial riff on Alice in Wonderland
Time Bandits (1981) — Time-traveling, thieving dwarfs feature heavily in this weird kiddie film mixing fantasy, comedy and theology
Tromeo & Juliet (1996) — The creators of The Toxic Avenger remake the Bard’s tale as an obscene punk epic, with predictably bizarre results
Waking Life (2001) — The story of a young man who finds he’s dreaming and can’t wake up, with serious philosophical monologues and dialogues interspersed, painstakingly animated by over thirty artists in differing styles
The Wicker Man (1973) — Horrifying and intelligent tale of a devout detective’s search for a missing girl on a Scottish island where the residents have adopted an ancient pagan religion
Since dude included A Clockwork Orange on his list, let’s end with this find from Rob:
Thanks, Rob!
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