To Write Better Scenes…
A guest post from screenwriter Tom Benedek (Cocoon):
Scenes are the THE WATER of screenwriting.
The human body is more than 60 percent water. Blood is 92 percent water, the brain and muscles are 75 percent water, and bones are about 22 percent water.
A human can survive for a month or more without eating food, but only a week or so without drinking water.
A movie can survive for a few minutes with great cinematography, fine actors or movie stars, an interesting story. BUT if the scenes don’t work, the film will not play right. Solidly constructed scenes carry films. Great scenes lift them high, make them mighty.
None of us will ever have thought about scene writing too much.
Which brings me to Quentin Tarantino and my upcoming scene writing class. Oscar is not a fan of violent films. However, Quentin Tarantino took home his second career best screenplay Oscar last year. Tarantino is a filmmaker of great skill and audacity. He is also one of us — a wonderful screenwriter who beat the odds through his vision and skill as a storyteller, a writer of original screenplays of high caliber.
Next week, I will be running a very stimulating class — a study of scene writing, exclusively using Tarantino’s recent scripts to define certain characteristics of scene structure — to celebrate, learn and re-learn a few things about writing scenes.
The one week class starts on Monday, March 9. We will be looking exclusively at Tarantino’s uses of conflict, expository, flashback, indirection, subtext, all the rest of it. He speaks to the reader a lot. His movies are sometimes violent but they are also highly emotional — romantic in the way that old Hollywood action movies often are. I think it is going to be a fun and instructive class. There will be four lectures. Class members can each post a scene for feedback and a quick revision perhaps. I hope class members will also present their favorite Tarantino scenes for discussion — so we can break them down and see how and why they tick so well so often. We all may have a little bit of Tarantino in us to unchain as we write script pages.
Consider joining me for what should be a very interesting class.
As I say, “Screenwriting is scene-writing”. The combination of Tom’s expertise as a writer with over three decades experience working in Hollywood and insights gleamed from the scripts of Quentin Tarantino, this class promises to be a deeply rewarding experience.
For more information, go here.