You could try to write a really good one.
#Screenwriter career movie#
I guess the answer would be to write a robot movie that's emotionally honest.
What if we have no depth? What if we just like robot movies? We are told to write only things that are emotionally honest or true or have some socio-political content or something with depth or whatever. We are told to write only this kind of movie or that kind of movie and, stupidly, we believe these people. We spend far too much time agonising over the why. I'm not a big believer in writing tips, because when you get down to it, it's all so personal, and whenever someone gives me a tip, it just makes me feel like I've been doing it all wrong. Scott Frank ( Minority Report, Marley & Me, Out of Sight ) But the interesting thing is that the process of writing both originals and adaptations is much more similar than you'd think because, even when you're adapting someone else's work, you still haven't decided what you're going to say with it. Original screenplays are harder to write, not surprisingly you have to come up with all the raw material yourself.
And I don't think Kubrick was relying on the box office power of Thackeray when he did Barry Lyndon. But I don't think it's true of Paul Thomas Anderson when he adapted Upton Sinclair's little-known novel Oil into There Will Be Blood. It's true of something like Fifty Shades of Grey, I suppose. People often say that there are so many adaptations now because the film industry wants to minimise risk by picking stories that have been proven to work with a large audience. Pretty much all the work you get offered as a writer comes in the form of some kind of source material.
#Screenwriter career how to#
Peter Straughan ( Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, The Men Who Stare at Goats ) So you just cheerfully take it on board and have a crack. Well, the short answer to that is yes, but the long answer is that by the time you're 50 you've made a fool of yourself so many times that the thought that you might make a fool of yourself is no longer a deterrent. People often say to me, "Wouldn't you rather this had all happened when you were 30?". I never had any training at all in screenwriting and, like almost everything else in my life, it all came about completely by accident. I think you always have to remember when you're writing a script, that it isn't necessarily going to be that script that gets made, but what it acts as is an audition that opens the door for you. Julian Fellowes ( Downton Abbey, Gosford Park ) When you start writing a script, you're an architect and there's nothing creative about it – that's a slight exaggeration, but it's true. For a film, you can write between 100 and 140 pages, but there's not a lot of difference there. Novelists can write 900 pages if they want. Make it drive you to the next moment because there's no time to mess around. If you write a scene that is lateral, cut it out or make it do something. You only have around 120 pages so it has to be structured. So if your movie cost $10 to make and it makes $20, it's commercial. The thing about a commercial movie is all it has to do is make more money than it cost. You want to make it compelling and commercial.
The first thing to do is to is pick something worth writing about, which seems fairly obvious. Brian Helgeland ( LA Confidential, Mystic River ) And it also makes me realise that the process of drafting, re-drafting and throwing away material is never for nothing. Having written several screenplays, I want to stay in the state where I think I know something and then discover I know nothing again. That doesn't mean one has to concede on every point. The ability to change is key in writing drama. Most of the writing journey is a process of this – finding form to chaos. It was the mental warm-up, the place where I was starting to piece together all the other moments. I now think of that play as my apprenticeship. I think it was because I wrote and re-wrote the first page maybe 100 times. My first play took me two years to write.
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