As Pål mentioned, a second draft is about to be worked into shape. Reading scripts and advice is good preparation, and if anyone hasn’t already read this piece by Mystery Man, do it now.
It’s a must, plain and simple.
Author: Christer Page 3 of 6
The Norwegian film is making an international splash. The PR campaign has been a Blair Witch rip-off, but I’m really curious about this one. Norwegian horror will be a big part of my ph.d. thesis, and so far we’ve stuck to a very narrow genre definition here…
I defended M. Night Shyamalan when he took a beating for Lady In The Water. I found The Happening much more interesting than most Hollywood output. Now, he has headed into the territory of the fantasy epic.
It’s the summer of Nolan. Inception rules the box office. It’s a blockbuster, for sure. But it’s nothing like what we have come to expect from traditional Hollywood summer fare.
I admit that I was overwhelmed, and my review is here.
Having thought about the film some more, I want to suggest that it’s got three traits that are worth pondering, and that illuminate problematic areas in much blockbuster screenwriting:
1 – Concept and consequence.
The world that Nolan creates in the film… The basic premise of the plot within this world, or rather worlds… There is so much setting up, and there is a seemingly endless potential for expansion. Indeed, the first hour of the film is dense with dialogue and set-ups, which need to be satisfactorily payed off in the second half of the film. Nolan elegantly by-passes stereotypical Hollywood storytelling in this area.
I’ve seen some comments here and there by people who were underwhelmed by the action sequences. But for me, the ultimate trick of the film is the expanding time frames in consecutive dream-worlds, and the way Nolan masterfully ties this concept to the very-slowly-falling van that drives off the bridge. The way time almost grinds to a halt here, at least in one layer of the story, and then the shock as the characters are plunged back into reality… I gasped more than once.
2 – Leaving the device alone.
The technology that enables the characters to travel between worlds is never properly explained. Thank God! It’s a given in the film’s story universe that all the characters are already familiar with it. Some will say this is chickening out from explaining the impossible. I would say that’s exactly the point, and Nolan is smart enough to understand that his audience would not accept any attempt at explanation, and trusts us enough to leave it alone and get on with the story.
3 – Character ambiguity.
A key point in the film. There is no real hero in Inception. DiCaprio’s character is a deeply flawed and often unsympathetic man. Nolan makes the best use of DiCaprio that I’ve seen in a long time. But added to this, Inception also lacks a villain. Ken Watanabe could be seen as the antagonist of the piece, but this assumption quickly falls apart. Thus, the film becomes something much more interesting than your common blockbuster, and provides a roller-coaster ride that is also deeply intelligent and emotionally complex.
The counter-point exists with Marion Cottilard’s very one-dimensional character. Which ties in perfectly with the intellectual concept of memories and dreams as the film unfolds.
I still think that Christopher Nolan is one of the three or four most interesting American filmmakers working today. David Fincher and Darren Aronofsky are others. And I still root for M. Night Shyamalan, although I have yet to see The Last Airbender…
Random thoughts after completing an enjoyable first draft:
A few years back, Pål and I wrote a couple of stageplays more or less on assignment, meaning that we pretty much wrote them for someone else to produce. Most writers will find themselves in this situation sooner or later. After all, we don’t usually get to write scripts for ourselves to produce. So whether it is writing a script for a producer, in collaboration with a director, for a theater troupe to produce, or in a workshop situation of any kind – be prepared for the job to quickly turn into a negative assignment.
Few people are good readers and responders. Most people naturally focus on what they don’t like or what they would have done different themselves, and forget that they are not the ones writing it. If production is imminent, fear can easily seep into the process too, with directors and actors more or less unwillingly focused on what they don’t want to do. I certainly know that I am capable of this behavior myself, and I’ve had to train myself not to act that way. And you can’t force anyone to understand this, you can only lead by example:
The bottom line is that you’re not going to get what you want by telling people what you don’t want.
But your readers are sometimes going to insist on exactly that. Pål once likened the experience of discussing a first draft to discussing kitchen utensils. It becomes really hard to deliver when your partner, boss or whoever tells you: “I don’t know what I want you to find, but it’s not a fork.”
You’re clearly on a negative assignment, and it’s draining your creative juices really quickly.
This sounds obvious and perhaps a little childish when I read it back to myself, but I think this negative approach is all too common, from amateur theater and all the way to professional filmmaking.
What to do?
With our current projects we decided that we needed to nurture ourselves a little, and thus agreed that we were going to be hardcore about what we would love to write. We were going to give ourselves a positive assignment. Our early meetings and discussions on the period scripts we’re now writing centered on what sort of visuals we would love to see, and what sort of themes we felt were resonating with us, without any thought of structure or practicality or indeed whatever anyone else might think about what we are attempting to do.
We then spent a few months writing a first draft that’s now done, where we joyfully threw anything we wanted to see into the mix. We ended up around 150 pages. Some good, some not so good, but at least there’s a surplus of pages and somewhere to go. And I believe the script communicates a positive approach to the storytelling.
We’re not going to lose that when we start revisions.