Another wonderful moment in A New Life is the moment when your
character is asked if he would like to cut the umbilical cord, and he does it.
This is one of those situations in which you have placed a character before a
choice, involving a symbolic gesture that is full of meaning. When you write a
screenplay, do you think in terms of confronting characters with choices?
I know that a lot of people talk about storytelling in terms of choices,
especially moral choices, and that all seems really interesting to me. I don't
know quite how they do it. (Laughter.) I don't do it consciously. I
don't think I do, anyway.
I do think it's important to let the character be in a pickle, that the
character has to fight his or her way out of. And a really good pickle is where
you have to make a choice between two conflicting values. Do you put your
family first or do you put your country first? Do you put your love for your
wife, who's having a baby, ahead of your need to pass out, or your inability to
deal with the mucky part of life and death and birth?
I don't have it down to a formula. And as a matter of fact, I notice that when
I write something, and when I act in something, I find myself inventing a new
method, a new systematic approach to it each time, which is born of the piece
itself.
I remember wanting to write a long time ago and making notes on the story about
a preacher that I thought I might play, I thought it would be fun to play that
character. And last night, I saw for the first time the movie that Robert
Duvall wrote, directed and acted in, about a preacher. It was called The
Apostle and was really brilliant. I would never have been able to come
anywhere near it, because he spent 12 years I think researching it, meeting
those people, living with them. And what I thought was the most interesting
thing about it was the way he told the story. He started with a murder. It was
manslaughter, it wasn't pre-meditated. But he kills a guy. He's a preacher, and
he's running from the law from then on. And yet, while he's running from the
law, you see him rededicating himself to what seems to be a sincere service to
other people and to the God he believes in. It's a really fascinating contrast,
and you can't help but be involved because he seems to be so much of two minds
and yet he's completely involved in both of them. He doesn't seem to have any
remorse for the killing, and yet he seems to be totally dedicated to this
religious life. It's very interesting. But the storytelling element of starting
the story off with that, rather than some ordinary event in his life,
and watching him in action and seeing some kind of conflict that comes out of
everyday events... It's not an everyday event to kill somebody. But I think I
might have looked for everyday events, at least when I was working on the
story. The ways in which he used the people around him, and the ways in which
he had power over people. I think that would have interested me. And it
wouldn't have occurred to me to have him kill somebody out of a jealous rage.
And yet what a great storytelling device that is. I really thought I learned
something from that about storytelling.
So rather than tell you about great storytelling that I've done in the past, I
think the best thing I can point to is what he did.
I've learned recently that many Danish television people believe that any
given story is or should be primarily one character's. They ask: whose story is
it. And generally they expect to find that character both in the opening and in
the final shot. Is this something that you think is generally the case? That a
story is generally one character's more than any other's? Or do you think that
stories can also be shared just about equally?
Well, I tried to share stories in A New Life. I don't think I was
as successful as I thought I was going to be with that. Although I think I
shared the story between the character I played and the character Ann-Margret
played, and their paths crossed at the end even though they didn't know it. I
think a little more of the emphasis was on his story because I do think I have
what you could call an old-fashioned sense of storytelling, or time-tested if
you want to be less pejorative about it. That it's probably most satisfying to
mostly follow the adventures of one person.
If I have a thing that I do when I write that's consistent, even though I kind
of reinvent my method each time, I almost invariably go back to Aristotle's
Poetics. And I do this when I'm writing, when I'm directing and when I'm
acting. The central idea that I think is so valuable in that essay where he
analyzes Oedipus Rex and tries to figure out what makes it a play, and
what is a play, is the notion of dramatic action. And what I take that to mean
is that no character can come on stage without wanting something - really
desperately, really deeply wanting something. And if everybody wants something,
even if it's the delivery boy, then they'll automatically be in conflict; you
don't have to concoct conflict for them. I can always tell, I think, when
conflict is concocted in a hastily written television drama, like a cop drama,
because it looks like the writer has struggled to find ways in which the
characters disagree, because that writer's convinced that the essence of it is
conflict. But that's missing the point, I think. You automatically get conflict
if people in fact want something, and want it so passionately that they believe
they deserve to have what they want. Nero deserves to be able to play, even if
Rome is burning, because play is that important to him. He doesn't know that
he's being foolish or stupid or villainous when he does that. He deserves it.
And somebody who tries to stop him because people are dying or hungry wants it
for reasons that are just as important to them. And they'll find themselves in
conflict.
I learned something very interesting when I was young and was in an improvising
workshop. It was Paul Sill's workshop. He ran a company here called Second
City. And his mother had invented theater games. We did theater games for six
months or so. In one of the exercises, people tried to agree with each other.
And what was fascinating about that was, no matter how hard you tried to agree,
there was always some little conflict that came up between you which made it
difficult to agree.
The fact is, I think, any time you have two conscious humans, they're going to
want something just a little bit different from one another, and conflict will
be automatic. So you don't have to pursue conflict. What you have to pursue is
what they want. And if you pursue what they want, not only will you get
conflict, but you get life... because the people die if they don't want
anything. You have dead, cartoon characters - just flat, two-dimensional
drawings up there unless they want something. And when they do want
something, the people can't take their eyes off them. The people are drawn into
that, because we want what they want. We want to see if they can get it, even
if they want something villainous. We want to see if they can get away with it.
We have a chance vicariously to get rich at other people's expense, to have sex
with this beautiful woman even though she's married, or whatever the story is.
It's interesting to see if they're going to get what they want. I think of that
in very concrete terms. You can get a crowd of people on the street to stop and
look at you if you just stand and look up at something on the second floor of a
building. They want to see what you find so interesting. They want to see what
you're involved in. What are you after? There's something active about your
just standing there and looking at it... if it's not just a casual glance, if
you're really focused on it. And that's tied into wanting things. I think
people are drawn to watch people who want things. And my wanting what I want,
your wanting what you want, your trying therefore to stop me from getting what
I want so you can get what you want, is the protagonist and antagonist from the
Poetics. And I think you get good writing if you look for that, and you
get good acting and good directing. And if the writer hasn't given the
character a strong "want", something that they're endeavoring to accomplish,
the actor is lost. You can't make it up with being cute or charming. You have
to find some way to bring that to it.
It's especially difficult when the author thinks it doesn't really matter that
they give you dialogue to say that's just expository. They're really just
giving the audience information, and they're making the actor be the messenger
boy, the Western Union delivery person. It shouldn't be permitted. There should
be an artistic law against that, because it's boring and it's demeaning to the
actor. The actor can bring so much life to to it if the actor has somethng to
achieve, something to accomplish, and in the course of accomplishing it, gets
the author's exposition across.
To me, one of the best examples of that are the opening lines in
Othello: It's a fight about something. Roderigo says to Iago:
Tush, I take it much unkindly that thou, Iago,
who hast held my pursestrings as thy very own,
should treat me thus.
Roderigo has been giving him money so that he'll advance his cause with
Othello, and he doesn't think Iago is using the money right, and Iago is
saying: "No, are you kidding, I'm helping you, I'm helping you!" and tries to
show him, tries to convince him he's helping him. So in the first couple of
lines of dialogue, you've got a want expressed. He wants his money back or he
wants his money's worth. And the other guy is trying to convince him to keep
giving him money. And in the course of convincing him, we learn everything we
need to know about who Othello is, who Iago is, and what's been happening up
until the curtain went up. That's much better than the maid picking up the
phone and saying: "Master isn't home now. He drove to Philadelphia. He should
be back in two days. And the Mrs. has been drinking too much lately." This bald
faced exposition is not only boring, it's an affront. Whereas if you can keep
it active, it's fun for everybody. It's fun for the actors to play, and the
audience doesn't even know you're telling them stuff. It's carried on the back
of this active animal.
That's what I try to do. Those are ways in which I consciously
try to tell stories.
What do you see as hardest thing about telling stories in film?
There are a number of things, but one of the first that comes to mind is the
tension between the need to tell things visually and the use of words. There is
a real pleasure in language that we all experience. And a pure silent movie
without language isn't as satisfying as good visual storytelling supported by
rich language. But it's difficult to get the right balance. And it depends on
the kind of story you're telling and the kind of audience that will probably
come and see it.
And there are some films that are delicious and almost completely verbal and
hardly visual at all, in the conventional sense anyway, like a couple of Eric
Rohmer movies that I can remember, and My Dinner with André
[Louis Malle, 1981]. One of the most wonderful movies I've ever seen is Wally
Shawn's movie that Mike Nichols is in? You have to see it. It's gorgeous. The
people sit at a table and talk to the camera. They don't even talk to each
other. But it's brilliant! Mike Nichols gives a performance like nothing I've
ever seen on the screen. The Designated Mourner it's called. It was a
play that they did in London and then made a film out of it. It's brilliant and
it breaks most of the rules I just told you about. (Laughter.)
I think when you're really honest, you keep discovering exceptions to your
own rules.
And it's good. And I think it's good to shake things up and try to do
things in a way you've never done them before.
I love it, what they say in their [Dogma] manifesto: "From now on, I renounce
being an artist and I give up artistic taste and æsthetic
considerations." I can't wait to see that movie, The Celebration,
because it sounds like an interesting movie. I think it's really a good idea to
reconsider everything every once in a while.
May I ask what comes easiest to you in the storytelling process?
I love dialogue. And that's why I feel tension between that and the visual.
When I was about twelve, I started playing with a movie camera, shooting silent
movies in my backyard. So I've always loved telling stories through imagery
too. But it was only a few years later as a teenager that I was sitting on
trains, when my father was doing a play in Philadelphia - he was trying out
Guys and Dolls - and I would take the train down to Philadelphia to see
him. And on the way, I'd be writing down conversations I was overhearing,
trying to learn how people spoke. We all think we know how people speak, but if
you actually copy down a real conversation, you find ellipses and repetitions
that you're not aware of when you're in a real conversation. And they're
fascinating. You can hear the brain working. And you can hear what the people
really desire of one another, that they may not even be aware of themselves. So
I would copy down those conversations, and I had been reading Hemingway and
Gertrude Stein and had, I thought, learned something from the way they listened
to the way people talked. Especially Gertrude Stein. And since then, I've given
a lot of thought to it and I'm really interested in the way people speak in
short bursts, with a lot of repetititon. And each repetition is a burst of its
own, with its own energy. It's like little packets of information. People don't
speak in paragraphs.
And I think there's a lot I've learned about that from Shakespeare too, because
every clause of Shakespeare, and every clause within a clause, is so difficult
to parse. That's possibly just another way of writing down the packets of
thought that are being communicated. There are probably very believable and
recognizable familiar ways to say that, that we think we can't do because we
think we have to make it clear in some other way. People are always parsing it
vocally instead of saying: what if this had been written down verbatum on a
train to Philadelphia? What was the person going through when they said it? Now
obviously people didn't speak in iambic pentameter on the train to
Philadelphia. But even if they had been, they probably would have spoken in
bursts. And I think you have to find out where those little impulses come from.
I am fascinated with dialogue. I wouldn't say it comes easily to me, so much as
I just love it. So I have to make sure I don't get buried in it.
What do you see as the worst mistakes a beginning screenwriter can make when
telling a story? And is there any advice that you would want to give student
filmmakers about their storytelling?
Those are two good questions.
I think a really big pitfall for beginning writers - and this was true of me
and I think is true of many other beginning writers whose work I read - is that
you really can't write convincingly about something you don't know anything
about. I think Robert Duvall's living with those people for twelve years is a
great gift that he made to the audience. Because I believe that I'm looking at
real lives, something like the way they were really lived.
It's really not worth much to just tell me a bunch of stereotypical impressions
that you got from reading a newspaper or that you figured you could just
imagine if you sat down and thought about it for five minutes. And stereotypes
come easily to us. In a way, we have to think in steoreotypes to get through
the day. But stereotypes are the enemy of art, I think. When we're children,
and we draw a face - sometimes its because an adult will show us the stereotype
- we'll draw a circle for the face and a couple of circles for eyes and maybe a
circle for the nose and a line for the mouth. That's not a face! It doesn't
look like a face. It isn't a face. We've just all agreed that those
stereotypical symbols represent a face. And if you try to actually draw what's
really there, what you really see, it's shocking sometimes how much more alive
that looks, even if the proportions are all wrong.
So I would say to a beginner: be really on guard against stereotypical
impressions. Just because you're writing about a mobster, doesn't mean he
necessarily talks tough. He might look like an accountant, he might be
effeminate. There might be all kinds of things about him that you would never
expect. But don't make them up out of fantasy. See if you can learn what it's
really like and when you're looking at the real thing, try to really look at
the real thing, and don't filter it through some stereotype and say, "Ah, yes.
I see what this is. This is that stereotype..." You have to get to recognize
your own stereotypical thinking so you can check it at the door.
Another thing to watch out for is thinking you can impose on the audience and
they won't mind. They might not mind, but they'll get tired of you and they'll
leave. By impose on them, I mean: give them a whole lot of exposition that's
not active and not playable, but just sort of "the daily news" about this
character. It's tiresome for an audience.
Those are just a couple of things. There are plenty of other things for
beginners to think about. But something that I don't think I've heard anybody
else say about what to look for in a beginning film that I've noticed in most
beginning films that I've seen, is that there is almost always a moment in the
film that's crucial to your understanding what the film is about. And
very often, that moment isn't clear. The filmmaker knows what it means, and the
audience doesn't. And if you say to the filmmaker: "You know, this moment
doesn't work. Why don't you just cut it out?", the filmmaker will grab his or
her hair and say: "What do you mean? That's the whole picture! That's
where he decides to give the secrets to the Nazis..." And you say: "But it's
not there. You haven't shown that." He says but that what he's
thinking. So I say: "Then make him do something that let's me know what
he's thinking because I can't tell."
It's amazing how difficult it is, especially in the crucial moments, to make it
clear what's happening. I think you have to be able to say to yourself: "Why is
this shot here? What do I think is happening in this shot? Is it really
happening?" And you need to be able to take it when somebody says to you:
"That's not what I see happening." You need then to go back and re-shoot it,
and make it happen."
It may also be that you're trying to squeeze too much into it. You need
sometimes to be very simple about it and break it down into simple steps so
that people get it.
It's tricky because on the one hand, all art is more affecting the more
compressed it is. On the other hand, sometimes the more compressed it is, the
more confusing and obfuscated it is. So have to just hit that right balance, or
come in at the right angle, so that you're not telling them everything, you're
not telling them what they already know, and yet you're telling them enough so
they know what's going on. They should be able to follow the story.
And we're just talking about following the story. We haven't even gotten into
what does the story add up to, what does it mean. Are there levels of meaning
in it?
There's a wonderful movie that just came out here called Smoke Signals -
the first movie written, directed and acted by Native Americans ("Indians"). In
that movie, the writer and the director are able to take an image of a father
and a son and allow it to mean a half a dozen different things. They mean the
actual psychological relationship between the father and the son; they mean the
sociological implications of fathers and sons who behave like that toward each
other; they mean the religious, spiritual relationship of us to our
forefathers; and they mean the relationship between us and the earth as the
father or the father-mother... I mean it's just amazing how, by virtue of the
images that you see, and the way the images are cut together, with not much
dialogue and no stating of the theme, literally, just by the way the images
come at you and how they're juxtaposed with one another, you get this layered
meaning. And that makes it tremendously satisfying æsthetically,
intellectually. And yet it's completely understandable on a base level of
storytelling, of what happened to this boy and his father, between him and his
father. It's really good storytelling. I hope you get a chance to talk to both
of those people: to Duvall, and the guys who made Smoke Signals. I think
that they're both really good examples of storytelling in film.
New York, 12 October 1998
