Written Interview: Lem Dobbs
This is one of the best interviews I’ve ever read with a screenwriter, an extensive Q&A with Lem Dobbs whose writing credits include Romancing the Stone (uncredited), Dark City, The Limey, and The Score. Here is an excerpt of Dobbs’ conversation with Dan Schneider:
DS: Re: the actual writing, you’ve expressed being bored with grammatical rules. So did I, as a student. But, to be a good writer, I think you must learn all the rules until you’ve inculcated. Once that’s done, you have to seriously unlearn them to be truly creative. Creativity is one of those things that you either have or do not have. There’s no teaching it. Thoughts?
LD: Well, I have tried teaching it and in exactly those terms. Somerset Maugham said if you can write a play, it’s as easy as falling off a log, and if you can’t, no one can teach you. I tell students right away that Picasso didn’t just reinvent the human form right off the bat. First he learned to draw better than anyone else alive. Buñuel could be surreal because he could also be real. Sometimes both in the same movie. My father was among the last generation who went to art school when going to art school meant learning how to draw. From life. Day in, day out, sitting looking at a model. Then the Sixties came along and Do Your Own Thing became the norm. Let the students express themselves, that’s what being “creative” is. If they want to hang a toilet seat around their neck and chant while splashing paint on a wall, let them. Who’s to say what Art is? And that was the beginning of the end. That’s how we came to this pass — one man’s heaven, another’s personal hell — where “quirky” now equals quality and we have SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK and LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and JUNO instead of STAGECOACH and OUT OF THE PAST and SERPICO. There was always an insufferable subgenre of the kooky — movies purporting to show that “nonconformists” lead more authentic lives — A THOUSAND CLOWNS and A FINE MADNESS and anything with Liza Minnelli — but it wasn’t the defining barometer of critical taste.
It’s why every jackass in the world now writes screenplays — that and the money they started hearing about. Everyone thinks movies are accessible to them, you see, everyone has spent their life going to movies, watching movies on television, renting movies … They didn’t grow up performing appendectomies. No one seems to realize that the people at the very top, the ones everyone else would like to be — Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino — they know more about movies than you do, they’ve seen more. Thousands more. Movies are in their blood. It’s incredible when you read the bad screenplays of amateurs and aspirants, not only do they not resemble real life or human behavior, they don’t resemble movies. “Creativity” is promoted now like it’s a civil right. But to mention the sordid subject of talent is unseemly and elitist and muddies the playing field. After all, America’s got talent.
The fools who write those unreadable HOW TO WRITE A SCREENPLAY books don’t seem to have any knowledge of movies beyond a superficial understanding of the same handful of classics or modern hits that everyone knows. Some director recently announced his attachment to some project and said, “I seem to be attracted to reluctant hero stories.” Does he really not realize those are the only stories Hollywood has ever made? You have to inculcate movies, not “screenwriting.” There are shapes and patterns and a certain commercial contract made with the audience at the dawn of time. Then if you want to break that contract and go off and make Cassavetes or Antonioni films, fine — or fine. Cassavetes, at any rate, had to do one to subsidize the other.
That is some unvarnished truth: “You have to inculcate movies, not ‘screenwriting.’” His version of my persistent harangue, “Immerse yourself in the world of cinema!”
If you only read one of the written interviews I post here on a weekly basis, do yourself the biggest favor and go through this one.
Major thanks to Teddy Pasternak for sending me the link.
To read the whole interview, go here.
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