Screenwriting 101: David Hare
“My life was changed by Louis Malle, who asked me to do Damage, which I really, really didn’t want to do. I said, ‘You know, I’m finished with the cinema, I’m just getting worse at it.’ And Louis said, ‘Well, you won’t have to make this one — I’ll make it. All you have to do is write it.’ I said no. Later, I was on holiday, lying on a beach in the south of France. The phone ran and it was Louis. He said, ‘I’m coming down to join you.’ I said no, but he came down and said, ‘I know you’re not going to write it, but, on the other hand, why don’t we just imagine you were going to write it? Let’s talk about how you would write it.’
He had this incredible method which taught me everything about writing movies. Louis would start every day at 8:30 with a cup of coffee, and I would have a croissant. And he would say, ‘Tell me the story of the film.’ And I would say, ‘Well, there’s this conservative politician…’ And within about two sentences he’d say, ‘What sort of person is he? Why is he doing that?’ He’d just ask questions. And so maybe by lunchtime we had go through about six scenes, and it would be really solid. Then the next day, he’d get up and say, ‘Tell me the story of the film.’ And I’d try and pick up where I left off the day before, and he’d say, ‘No, no, you’ve got to go back to the beginning.’ And this went on for about 10 days. By the end of that process, I could tell the story of Damage in about 20 minutes. He said, ‘Well, you’ve done the hard work now — you’ve written the film. Just go and hang some dialogue on it.’ It was an incredible way to write. And writing the dialogue only took me a few weeks, because the story was already completely laid out. It was the most severe way that I’ve ever worked on structure, but it was also the best way ever of writing a film. It does drive you absolutely mad — you just think, ‘Oh, I’m going insane.’ But that’s when I began to realize why my own films were so bad: I’d never subjected them to this narrative test and created such a taut string on which you could just hang the pearls.”
— David Hare (FilmCraft | Screenwriting, PP. 109–110)