“Shane Black Confronts Your Fears”
Recently Billy Mernit has been celebrating the 10th anniversary of his wonderful screenwriting and movie blog Living the Romantic Comedy. Yesterday’s post was a gem: “Shane Black Confronts Your Fears”. I asked Billy if I could feature it and he agreed. Here are some excerpts:
I had the great good fortune to have screenwriter/director Shane Black visit my Writing the Character-Driven Screenplay class as guest speaker this past week. Creator of the Lethal Weapon franchise, he wrote The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and the beloved cult fave Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Revered by those of us who know how hard it is to write good, character-driven action fare, he also became infamous, back in the day, for having committed the crime of being one of the most highly paid scribes in Hollywood history.
Shane turned out to be an uncommonly generous, vulnerable, honest mensch of a guy. I got to play James Lipton and ask the questions, and Shane gave us over an hour and half’s worth of enlightening answers re: creating memorable characters and crafting effective big screen stories. A few times in our conversation we talked about digging into one’s dark places and dealing with one’s fears in the writing process. The last question of the night came from a student who wanted to know how Shane dealt with such fears — where the fear came from and what it was about.
Shane Black, Billy Mernit
Billy provides a transcript of Shane’s comments and it is absolutely worth reading in its entirety, but here is the key takeaway:
“It came down to this. I had a piece of paper in a typewriter and my finger poised to hit one key and I couldn’t do it, I didn’t want to do it all. All I wanted to do was stop. And I hit the key. And now I have a career. So that’s the leap of faith.
“I walked through the fear. You can walk through anything. That’s the fabulous truth that I’ve discovered, is that fear never goes away. But it doesn’t stop you from putting one foot in front of the other. And, the most important realization of all, it can’t stop you from being creative. It can impede you, but it will not stop you from having great ideas. Fear will do everything except shut you down, mentally. It can’t do that.”
It’s a great read which you should soak up in its entirety which you can do here. And while you visit Billy’s site, drop him a comment congratulating him on 10 years of providing insight for the online screenwriting community.