“The Real McKee: Lessons of a Screenwriting Guru”

One of my students from an online class I’m currently teaching is attending the Robert McKee seminar this weekend. She mentioned having read a New Yorker article a few years back about McKee and I remembered reading it as well. So I dug through the Internet and found it:

Robert McKee, the screenwriting instructor, was having lunch the other day at the back of a dark Irish bar on Lexington Avenue. He had just told two hundred people in a Hunter College lecture hall that there were five elements without which a thriller was probably not a thriller: cheap surprise; a false ending; the protagonist shown to be a victim; a speech made in praise of the villain; and a hero-at-the-mercy-of-the-villain scene. Then, announcing a one-hour break, he had walked out into a light rain, followed by a number of students whose desire for a little extracurricular McKee outstripped their fear that he might somehow humiliate them, as he has been known to do. They waylaid him on the sidewalk, the way Nicolas Cage, playing the troubled screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, waylaid Brian Cox, playing Robert McKee, in Spike Jonze’s 2002 film, “Adaptation.” (Kaufman introduces himself as “the guy you yelled at this morning.” McKee responds, “I need more.”)

 — —

“You don’t have a story,” McKee said in a smoker’s growl. “You have a subject matter: this bizarre post-Nazi cult world. But who cares?”

“Well, the facts . . .”

“No, no, the truth of the matter is: Who cares? What you’ve got is a setting, and a piece of history. You’ve got to ask big questions. ‘Why am I attracted to this material? Because I’m Jewish and I want to get at those Nazis one more time?’ My advice is stop focussing on this one guy. I don’t think there’s anything at the end of that road. ”

The article is probably the best one I’ve read about McKee. And speaking of Adaptation, here’s a scene with McKee’s character, played by Brian Cox:

And here’s an interview with the real McKee: