Screen News Australia is intended to be a venue
for the discussion of any and all topics relating to the business of telling
stories onscreen that we all share a passion for. If there is indeed a need for
a bog such as this I hope that a diverse range of opinions and points of view
will be presented.
Please feel free to make a contribution of any
kind about an aspect of screen story telling that you feel strongly about.
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.
