I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can’t express. It’s good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.
‘Rent’ was a special project for me. It was my first notable screenplay job. I worked with two wonderful directors on it, starting with Spike Lee in the summer of 2001. I wrote a draft for Spike and he was really good to me.
Every year I hear people complain that the quality of screenplays and movies is declining. In my opinion, the vast majority of scripts written – as well as most movies that are released – are not very original, well-written, or interesting. It has always been that way, and I think it always will be.
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
When I switched to screenplays – ’cause I had done musicals and plays – the first assignment in film school was, you have to write a silent film. And it’s tremendously helpful to learn how to do that because dialogue can be a crutch. If you can master a silent film, you’re golden.
Writing is like driving a car. Writing the beats of a screenplay? It’s like driving a rover on Mars. You have to be absolutely, extremely precise.
I like writing dialog but don’t think I’d be much good at a screenplay. I once had to write a treatment for a novel of mine – a condition of its being optioned by a movie producer – and I turned out something pretty lackluster. So my inclination would be to stay out of the way of an experienced screenwriter.
Courier 12 is the Type-O blood of fonts – works just as good for a ‘N.Y. Times’ op-ed as a screenplay or a short story.
I got an English degree in college and then went to law school because I didn’t know what else to do. I was a lawyer in Houston, Texas. I started writing plays and screenplays, and after about three years of practicing, I decided I would move to Los Angeles and give it a shot.
When there wasn’t a lot of work, I wrote a screenplay, ‘What Lies Beneath,’ which got noticed and got me more acting jobs. As I got more jobs, I was able to make my own films. That ethos of making my own work has provided me with a lot of opportunities.
In film, it is always collaborative, and so to me, it doesn’t make sense to not be collaborative in one of its most critical arenas – which is the screenplay.
I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels… a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.
I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I’d rather write plays.
When people asked me what I was going to do when I grow up, I always said, ‘I’m going to be a writer. I’m going to write screenplays. I’m going to write books. I’m going to write plays. That’s what I’m going to do.’
If you’re writing a screenplay for a feature, you don’t have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.
I just finished a novel, and I’m back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I’m just not sure what kind of music it is or where it’s going.
‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’ is one of the first unrated movies to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. But many video stores won’t take a movie that’s not rated, so I had to make the movie an R.
It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.
Getting your screenplay right is the most important thing you’ll ever do on your film.
The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.
My understanding of films was just as much as any young girl who watches Bollywood films. I had no idea about the whole process of filmmaking, about dialogue writing, scripts, screenplay etc. I had probably gone to two or three film shoots in my childhood.
Writing screenplays is not my business. I’ve written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You’re an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.
I just trust the director and never overanalyse the script, screenplay, etc. You are just taking a bet at the end of the day, so confidence, be it on the filmmaker or the script, is all that counts.
Based on a taut screenplay by Nabendu Ghosh, ‘Do Anjane’ was a Hindi adaptation of Nihar Ranjan Gupta’s famous Bengali novel, ‘Ratrir Yatri.’ It was my first chance to rub shoulders with the immensely talented Amitabh Bachchan and we went on to become a super hit pair.
My back went out and I gained 40 pounds while sweating over ‘Perestroika.’ It was incredibly hard, the hardest thing I had to do before the screenplay to ‘Lincoln.’
I wrote the screenplay for ‘This Is Where I Leave You’ – all 40 drafts of it.
Writing a screenplay’s not rocket science, but I was in a bar, and the bartender came up to me and said, ‘I saw ‘Night at the Museum,’ and the thing about him and his kid brought me and my kid together.’ Something like that… it’s like, ‘Oh, right. That’s why we’re doing it.’
The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.
That freedom of writing you don’t get in other formats, I’d rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.
I’ve always had a foot in everything. As a kid, I was active in sports and theater. Now, I’m learning I have to focus a bit. I’m trying to get to next projects, like writing a screenplay. Once that comes together, I could put my mind to another book – maybe a fun kids’ book.
Writing a screenplay is an act of faith. First, that it’s interesting enough that anyone would want to make it. Secondly, that anybody would want to watch it, let alone enjoy it.
I have a couple screenplays that are done, and I’m looking for the right people to help me make them. I do a lot of television writing to develop new ideas for shows.
Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.
I remember this one time I had a dream about me writing a screenplay, and when I woke up, you know those dreams that feel so real, but I woke up and I was like, ‘Oh my god I have this amazing screenplay I need to write down as soon as I wake up’ and then I woke up and I was like what the heck was I dreaming of?
Everyone thinks that ‘Chinatown’ is the best screenplay. I’m not sure it is.
If you’re writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.
I started writing ‘Southern Baptist Sissies’ right after I had written the screenplay for ‘Sordid Lives’, so that’s when I started on a darker path in telling the truth about my journey in the church, but there was still a lot of funny.
I think the goal is parity: I try to be pro-woman without being anti-man, and I hope and wish that men could do the same in that when they look at the screenplay, they say, ‘Wait, wait, wait – is my daughter represented here, is my wife represented here? Is my sister represented?’
I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.
In ‘Dear Father,’ you will see some remarkable work in terms of the screenplay.
The way I write is very much without kind of a goal. I have something I’m interested in and then I decide I’m going to explore it. I don’t know where the characters are going to go, I don’t know what the movie is going to do or what the screenplay is going to do. For me, that’s the way to keep it alive.
On every film, there are producers all over the place, and everyone’s got to have an opinion. I think the screenplay is a beautiful form with great potential, but the environment around it is awful for a writer.
For a novelist, no matter what, it’s a complete work, even if it’s not published. But if you write a screenplay, and it’s not performed, then it’s a sad and frustrating experience.
A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors’ reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting – these are all part of the translation.
In the spring of 1988, my wife, Joan Didion, and I were approached about writing a screenplay based on a book by Alanna Nash called ‘Golden Girl,’ a biography of the late network correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch.
No one bought my screenplays.
A screenplay is really a blueprint for something that will be filmed. Therefore you must always keep in mind that whatever you write is going to be staged, for real.
Those writers that have zero say in their movie adaptations have zero say because they sell it. If you don’t sell it, and you do it yourself, and you wait until the screenplay is ready, you don’t have to worry about that.
I’ve always written a little bit. I mean, I’ve written screenplays, and I’ve doctored my dialogue for years, and I’ve written speeches – I was a speechwriter on ‘The West Wing,’ so I like that kind of thing. But I never really thought I’d write a book.
