Video interview: Guillermo Arriaga

Screenwriter Guillearmo Arriaga has distinguished himself with two movies in particular 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006), Grams because of its non-linear plot and Babel because of how it interlocks stories involving four different families. We featured Arriaga’s approach to screenwriting here. An excerpt:

“I never outline the story, never. I once went to a seminar of one of these gurus of the screen and this person said you must know everything about your character. I thought, Fuck, there’s no way! I want to have dark parts of my characters’ history so they can surprise me. Also I cannot have an ending because when I don’t know the characters, they can show me the ending as I get to know them. That’s why I don’t like to do research of any kind. I like for the characters to grow up inside of me.

And yet for all the seeming spontaneity, Arriaga spends an enormous amount of time “cutting the movie in my head,” as he admits in this interview excerpt from the great “Writers on Writing, Anatomy of a Script” series from the WGA Foundation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PHTdSn_w-Q