By Miguel Machalski

When Cinemags asked me if I wanted to offer some tips and point out some frequent issues in the process of screenwriting (I hesitate to use the word ‘mistakes’: are there ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ ways of creating?), I immediately responded enthusiastically, though I was aware that in doing so I would be contradicting my own approach to creative endeavours. One of my bones of contention is that screenwriting (and of course filmmaking) is burdened with recipes and formulaic thinking which is one of the reasons why mainstream cinematography has become an industry not in the sense of the sustained production and distribution of films but of a mass fabrication of audiovisual products with systematised components put together on an assembly-line. But since in my two books on screenwriting I did go into the hazards of writing for cinema, I thought I might as well do so again. I would however like to emphasize that whatever I write here and in subsequent instalments is by no means intended as ‘the only way to do it’ but simply as the empirical result of my experience as a writer and consultant.

What’s your story about?

One of the first questions I ask – and of course try to answer – is ‘What is the film about?’. I don’t mean what’s the story or the overall theme – love, healing, achievement – but what’s it really about. Or to put it otherwise: what do I want to tell you about that particular theme. It doesn’t make sense to tell a story just to show that love, healing and achievement exist; we all assume they do. It is a lot more interesting and enlightening to try and show that they might not be so simple to reveal or to reach. What then becomes the heart of the story, it’s raison d’être, is how and why these states are difficult to reach. Take James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day, brilliantly scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: the prevailing theme is love, but the writer is talking about the fear of loving, as well as the blindness that sometimes prevents us from recognising and holding on to love until it may be too late. One of the main purposes in telling stories is the attempt to give your listeners or viewers a new perspective on what we call reality, which of course has multiple, indeed infinite, hidden faces and meanings.

In Stephen Daldry’s Billie Elliot, written by Lee Hall, a script I worked on at the time as an analyst, the ultimate message delivered by the screenplay is ‘keep fighting for your dreams and you will be rewarded with glamour, glitter and glory’, which is what the epilogue clearly implies when showing a dazzling grown-up Billy performing in front of an enthralled audience, including his narrow-minded, macho father magically turned into a ballet buff. In all honesty, I’m not quite sure this affords any new perspective on reality nor is it a message I’d particularly want my kids to get. If anything, it strengthens the misguided notion that fame and recognition are important human values. But if you recall the scene prior to this epilogue, it depicts Billy’s father taking him to the bus stop and seeing him off as the boy heads to London to carry out studies at a reputed ballet school, after succeeding in passing a highly demanding audition. Had the film ended here, the message would have been considerably different, and a good deal more edifying: ‘fight for what you believe in because the struggle itself is worth it (regardless of whether or not you are compensated with success, fame, money, etc.)’. Only a happy (or not so happy) few will become rich and famous, but anyone and everyone can fight for what they believe in. The reward is in the struggle, not in the victory.

I’m not sure the writer was fully aware of the implications of his story, of what he was really saying, consciously or not. I very often find that writers are gung-ho about a story they want to tell without fully weighing the actual meaning of their message. If in American History X, writer David McKenna and director Tony Kaye wanted to tell us that a hate-driven, murderous Nazi skinhead can suddenly change colours (seemingly on account of having been gang-raped in a prison shower) from one day to the next and try to save his younger brother from going down the same path, they are free to do so, but in my view, they are sidestepping the real issues: that these heinous specimens are bred by environment and upbringing, and that, consequently, they are pretty diehard and do not easily metamorphose overnight. As storytellers, we must assume responsibility for what we write and for the ideas we spread. Are we always fully aware of them?

But leaving aside the ethics – though I consider them an important part of being a scriptwriter (if you want to make money, there are surer ways of doing so) – and just looking at the aesthetics of writing, the lack of a clearly stated theme is often a crippling factor in a screenplay. One of the problems with genre movies is that they often rely solely on the codes and effects of the specific genre: a comedy seeks laughs, a horror flick provides scares, a thriller generates suspense, and so on. One of the appeals for the marketing of genre films is that the audience immediately knows what to expect in terms of overall mood. But all good genre stories use genre only as a platform governed by certain narrative rules in order to address meaningful themes and matters. Thus, George Romero’s classic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, shows us the meanness humans can display when striving for survival and w    as described as subversive for many reasons, while Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, scripted by Robert Towne, is about incest and family corruption. Both of them however stick closely to the codes of the horror genre and the film noir, respectively.

The bottom line is that, whether a story makes you laugh, cry, shudder or sweat, it should always be, in one way or another, thought-provoking. Because though the scares or sadness may stay with you for a while, it’s the power of the theme and the feeling that the story is somehow necessary that will make most films unforgettable.

(The Indonesian language version of this article appeared at Cinemags#133)
 

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