{"id":4232,"date":"2014-01-22T00:00:05","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T05:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=4232"},"modified":"2014-01-21T21:31:24","modified_gmt":"2014-01-22T02:31:24","slug":"fuck-writers-block","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/fuck-writers-block\/","title":{"rendered":"Fuck Writer’s Block"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"adaptation\"
\nAdaptation<\/a> (2002)<\/em><\/p>\n

Writing is hard.<\/p>\n

It should be easy, because you just sit down and describe the stuff in your head, but what about when there isn’t<\/i> anything in your head?\u00a0 They call that \u2018Writer\u2019s Block\u2019\u2014which Jerry Seinfeld says is bullshit. “Writer’s Block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work<\/a>,” he says.<\/p>\n

And he’s absolutely right.<\/p>\n

If you’re serious about being an artist, and making a living as a filmmaker, then you gotta write.\u00a0 It’s work in the same way that being a teacher or a construction worker or a nurse or an office person is.\u00a0 It’s work, so do it.
\n
\nMovies are made in all sorts of ways\u2014a director films a screenplay they wrote, or was written by someone else, or was adapted from another medium like a book or a play or whatever, or, sometimes, there’s no screenplay at all.\u00a0But, for me, the ultimate pinnacle of filmmaking is the phenomenon of the writer-director.\u00a0 For me, this is the most interesting, because it is one person describing what’s in their head and then putting that description of screen (and with all the knuckleheads out there, it’s no wonder most movies suck). \u00a0But the three best movies ever made\u2014Signs<\/a>, Raising Arizona<\/a>, and Back to the Future<\/a>\u2014were all made this way.\u00a0 Not to mention Star Wars<\/a>, and several other great ones.<\/p>\n

What’s always interested me is the steps from brain to paper to set to editing to screen.\u00a0 So much gets lost and changed.\u00a0 There’s a wonderful, tumultuous uphill battle at ever stage of the process. \u00a0Which means that really, filmmaking isn’t necessarily about getting exactly what\u2019s in your head on screen, but about getting as much <\/i>of what\u2019s in your head on screen as you can.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, the real artistry lies in what the audience will ever see\u2014the process<\/i>. \u00a0For instance, the direction you gave an actor on set in order to get their best performance out of them.\u00a0 We all know the story of Spielberg slowly unwrapping a toy in front of the kid who played Elliott in E.T.<\/a>, in order to get the right reaction.\u00a0 Every movie has hundreds<\/i> of those stories.<\/p>\n

I often dream of a future where the visions in our head can simply be downloaded right to the screen. \u00a0‘Budgets’ become a thing of the past, and directors are simply connected to machines where their ideas are converted into ones and zeros right out of their brain.\u00a0 After a few sessions, the movie is done, and uploaded to a free marketplace for everyone to watch.<\/p>\n

This direct creation might be more \u2018pure\u2019, but how would the elimination of the painstaking aspects of moviemaking effect the outcome?\u00a0 To use Spielberg again as an example, we all know that technological mishaps forced him to not reveal the shark in Jaws<\/a> until much later in the film.\u00a0 And in the case of Star Wars\u2014if the original had just been spit right out of Lucas’s brain, would it even have been good at all? Based on John D’Amico’s recent interview with Roger Christian<\/a>, it sounds as though the freewheeling, outside-of-the-box process of physically making Star Wars informed its style and feel tremendously.<\/p>\n

My dream has always been to make movies.\u00a0 But, more specifically, to conceive, write, and direct my own movies.\u00a0 In 21 years, I’ve never lost that dream, and not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about it a little, or sometimes, a lot.<\/i><\/p>\n

The trouble is, I have very specific strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Quite frankly, I cannot see an entire movie in my head.\u00a0 I can easily doctor your script and fix up your story, but coming up with my own from scratch is nearly impossible.\u00a0 It’s the bigness of it all, that I find difficult.\u00a0 I can come up with a great beginning, or end, or scene in the middle.\u00a0 I can write dialogue, and come up with small character touches and environmental coloring\u2014all that fun minutia that make movies \u2018rich\u2019 and \u2018alive\u2019\u2014but I can’t give you three fucking acts the way Shyamalan or the Coen Brothers can.<\/p>\n

This struggle has kept me frustrated and so-close-yet-so-far from my dreams for these 21 years.\u00a0 In high school, I made a confusing two-and-a-half hour feature called The Velvet Autumn.\u00a0 The script was loose, pasted together over the year-and-a-half long process of production, and was always being re-written.\u00a0 Ten years later, I started on Hectic Knife<\/a>, and the style was exactly the same.\u00a0 There is no 100-page Final Draft document on my computer called \u2018Hectic Knife\u2019\u2014the \u2018script\u2019 was written week-to-week by Peter Litvin and I on scrap paper, and shot right after it was written\u2014the paper itself, subsequently lost into the ether.\u00a0 We truly did write<\/i> about 95% of the movie, but there\u2019s no hard document of text to show that.<\/p>\n

And it’s that hard document of text that I really want.<\/p>\n

I’m proud of Hectic Knife, and the way it was made.\u00a0 In the scope of filmmaking, it represents a think-on-your-feet, improvisational attitude where shots are designed and executed on-set, and there is a constant free flow of ideas.\u00a0 One of my proudest moments in my entire life was being awake for 72 hours straight (literally) on a Hectic shoot, on my last legs, and Pete kept coming up with idea after idea, extending an already bloated scene that we were essentially making up as we went.\u00a0 I walked off, splashed some water on my face, and came back to set and came up with a really clever little idea that made it into the movie and made things click.\u00a0 I’ll cherish that moment for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n

But, it’s still not the dream.<\/p>\n

Raising Arizona is perfect because it’s exact<\/i>\u2014it’s impossible to imagine there being a scene cut from it. \u00a0It’s a perfectly contained and executed idea.\u00a0 Every shot flows perfectly into the next, and the movie never falls back<\/em> on \u2018coverage\u2019\u2014it merely uses it for its designed purpose.\u00a0 Every little moment in that movie, every enunciation, color, music cue, camera movement, and lens choice, is all immaculately constructed.\u00a0 Every aspect works together to create a totality of images and sounds that keeps the viewer delighted, intertwined, and intellectually stimulated.<\/p>\n

That’s<\/i> the dream.<\/p>\n

I once read that the Coen brothers devote three weeks during pre-production to meticulously storyboarding every single shot, and then they simply follow that exactly on set.\u00a0 This does two things\u2014one, it reduces the budget and time on set, because you’re following a formula and everyone has the instructions already, so no time is wasted, and time is money. \u00a0Two, it ensures their artistic vision. \u00a0This is their auteurism at work.<\/p>\n

Some might say that this total pre-construction deadens the result.\u00a0 To that I say, just compare a Cassevettes film to a Coen Brothers movie, and you tell me which one is more ‘alive’, and which one is better.<\/p>\n

Making movies is fun.\u00a0 I loved making Hectic Knife. \u00a0I loved its controlled chaos.\u00a0 Coming up with ideas on the spot is a great way to exercise your creativity.\u00a0 But, someday, at least once, I would love to walk on set with the day\u2019s shoot completely planned out beforehand\u2014the only things still needing to be worked out being the performances, and slight tweaks in order to perfect the camera movements and lighting.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve realized is, I need to be writing.\u00a0 There’s no harm in writing a film by just writing scenes here or there.\u00a0 Nobody but me says I have to write an entire script all at once. But insecurity breeds excuses, and my excuse so far has been my inability to write an entire script.\u00a0 Well, fuck that\u2014I can write a scene, so that’s what I’m going to do, every day.\u00a0 They could be a page, they could be ten pages.\u00a0 It could just be a description of an environment and sounds, or a long speech about turtles.\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 What I do know is that I have scenes inside me, and scenes eventually equal movies.<\/p>\n

I hope that this piece can be looked back on one day as the first step of a movie by me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"adaptation\"
\nAdaptation<\/a> (2002)<\/em><\/p>\n

Writing is hard.<\/p>\n

It should be easy, because you just sit down and describe the stuff in your head, but what about when there isn’t<\/i> anything in your head?\u00a0 They call that \u2018Writer\u2019s Block\u2019\u2014which Jerry Seinfeld says is bullshit. “Writer’s Block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work<\/a>,” he says.<\/p>\n

And he’s absolutely right.<\/p>\n

If you’re serious about being an artist, and making a living as a filmmaker, then you gotta write.\u00a0 It’s work in the same way that being a teacher or a construction worker or a nurse or an office person is.\u00a0 It’s work, so do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsessays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4232"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4249,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4232\/revisions\/4249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}