Written Interview: Frank Cottrell Boyce

Screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Hillary and Jackie, Millions) at a BAFTA appearance. An excerpt:

I love rewriting. Writers complain a lot about rewriting. To me rewriting always seems like a fantastic privilege, a fantastic thing that you can get it right; you get the time to get it right. I think that’s a wonderful thing. Anybody else in any field of human endeavour would give… what would Torres give to say, ‘You know that thing with the open goal? It didn’t really work for me, let’s go back and see how it works if I actually score’?

You can rewrite too much. I won’t give you an example from my own work because it’s so dreary, but I’ll give you a story about one of my children. One of my daughters told a knock knock joke. Knock knock…

Audience: Who’s there?

FCB: Kenya.

Audience: Kenya who?

FCB: Kenya let me in it’s cold out here. Right? It’s okay, it’s fine. But she would end that knock knock joke by saying, ‘Do you get it? It’s because Kenya’s a really hot country, so you wouldn’t be cold out there.’ Okay. I should have said this before, she’s quite little, she’s one of my smaller daughters. This meant a lot to her because her brother was working in Kenya at the time, and Kenya was on her mind and Africa was on her mind.

So she rewrote the joke, so that people would get it, because people didn’t get it and she had to explain it to them, like Kenya was hot. They weren’t getting that. She thought Kenya was too obscure, so she changed it to knock knock…

Audience: Who’s there?

FCB: Africa.

Audience: Africa who?

FCB: Africa let me in, because it’s cold out here. So now it’s obvious. I don’t know how many times I’ve been in the process with a script editor or a commissioning editor, who has seen very clearly what people weren’t getting — which is the ‘Africaness’ — and has changed the script or the idea so that people will get it because they’ve had their idea about it — and it’s the wrong idea. It’s sweet and touching, but it is the wrong idea, and when you follow those rewrites you kind of end up in the wrong place.

Okay, so that’s a protracted process. We talked about more than ten years and rewrites and humiliation and all those things, and what I kind of wanted to talk about tonight is how you keep faith through all that, how you endure that process, how you enjoy that process. How do you keep your movie in your head? Because for most of its life, even a quick turnaround movie is going to take years. For most of its life your movie isn’t moving. For most of its life your movie is a set of meetings and phone calls and rewrites, and appointments and recces and hassle, and it’s only in your head that it’s a movie. How do you do that? How do you keep that thing alive for possibly more than ten years?

To read an entire transcript of Boyce’s presentation and watch a video clip, go here.

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