# 3 Jean Claude Carriere

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I have never been overly impressed by ‘scriptwriting gurus’ (or gurus of any other kind) but have great respect for Jean Claude Carriere – a screenwriter who never mentions the three act structure, ‘turning points’, ‘inciting incidents’ or ‘character arcs’ but whose words go to the beating heart of the screenplay:

“The screenplay is not only the dream of a film but its infancy. It goes through a toddling, stammering phase, gradually discovering its strengths and its weaknesses. As it gains confidence it begins to move under its own power.”

Jean Claude Carriere THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF FILM

Jean Claude Carriere’s screenwriting credits include: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise, The Tin Drum, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and, in collaboration with Michael Haneke, The White Ribbon.

“Work on a screenplay often operates in a series of waves. The first waves are exploratory. We open all the doors and we begin to seek, neglecting no path, no blind alley. The imagination launches unbridled into a hunt which can lead it into the vulgar, the absurd, the grotesque, which can even make the imagination forget the theme that is the object of the hunt. Whereupon another wave rears, surging in the opposite direction. This is the backwash, the withdrawal to what is reasonable, essential, to the old question: exactly why are we making this and not some other film? Quite simply, what basically interests us here? This is the moment when we survey the road the characters have travelled, but we also look at verisimilitude, structure, interest, levels of audience understanding. By backtracking, by returning to our original garden, we obviously abandon along the way the majority of our illusory conquests – but not necessarily all of them. We return to scholarly, sometimes commonplace and even pettifogging concerns. They help us take stock. In the heat of the chase we might easily have forgotten to bring along our supplies, our drinking water, our maps. Rare are the authors who can afford, on their own, this balanced and impartial movement between the two zones.”

Jean Claude Carriere THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF FILM

“… the most serious, the most pernicious illusion – and here the actor’s and the author’s paths converge, in film as on the stage – is when we convince ourselves that the intellectual approach is enough, that intelligent analysis will cover every contingency. All that is needed, we tell ourselves, is for the author to know what he means, draw up a precise plan, define his structures – and the rest will follow. In which case the actor’s performance, too, would simply be a translation into words and gestures of an idea the mind has already chewed over.”

Jean Claude Carriere THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF FILM

During rehearsals for one of Pirandello’s plays, a high-strung actress said to the playwright, “Maestro, I fail to understand. On page 27 my characters says this. On page 54 she says that. Can it be possible, given everything that has happened to her, her motives, her character, that she has changed so much, that she can say such a thing after having clearly said…” Pirandello patiently heard her out (he was a polite man). She spoke at length, asking the usual questions. When she finally stopped he said, as if it were obvious, “But why are you asking me all this? I am the author.”

Jean Claude Carriere THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF FILM

“This step by step discovery of a theme, a story, a style – a highly erratic process, marked by long dry spells and sudden flashes – closely resembles the work of an actor venturing into a part. What will he find? At first he has no idea. A play – by Shakespeare, say, or Chekhov – always presents a vibrant and indefinable whole, imperious to the most piercing analysis. It is out of the question to tackle those plays as if they were the expression of a particular point of view. To do so would mean stifling them, strangling them, the eternal pitfall of limited directors, who invariably force their own terms on anything which is beyond their comprehension…A true author never knows exactly what he means. He is what Victor Hugo called “the mouth of darkness”. Words are transmitted through him, often quite beyond his control. They come from obscure regions; the richer and deeper his genius, the vaster those regions will be. They are regions he shares with others, and even, in the case of the greatest authors, with all humankind, for he becomes one of humanity’s voices.”

Jean Claude Carriere THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF FILM

A good screenplay is one that gives birth to a good film. Once the film exists, the screenplay is no more. It is probably the least visible component of the finished work. It is the fist incarnation of a film and appears to be a self-contained whole. But it is fated to undergo metamorphosis, to disappear, to melt into another form, the final form.

Making a film is truly a work of alchemy, of transmuting paper into film. Transmutation. Transforming matter itself. I have often compared this metamorphosis to the caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly. The caterpillar’s body already contains all the cells and all the colours of the butterfly. It is the potential butterfly. But it cannot fly. Yet the urge to fly is deeply buried in its most secret essence. The screenplay is not the last stage of a literary journey. It is the first stage of a film. A screenwriter has to be much more a filmmaker than   a novelist. The screenwriter must bear in mind at all times, and with almost obsessive insistence, that what he is writing is fated to disappear, that a necessary metamorphosis awaits it.