Year: 2012

            Here’s one more huge interview with a pro to tide you over until I get my act back together.  This time it’s David Self, the screenwriter behind Thirteen Days, Road to Perdition, and The Haunting, among other films.  Last I heard, he was working on the adaptation of the God of War videogame. 

            I got to chat with David for an hour or so about working on The Wolfman, the big-budget reimagining of the classic Universal Monster movie.  It was definitley a passion project for him (as you’ll see), and he was a lot of fun to speak with.  Alas, monster movies don’t do that well these days because too many people go in expecting horror and then blame the film for these expectations.

            A few points I’ve mentioned before.  I’m the one in bold, asking the questions.  Also, a lot of these aren’t the exact, word-for-word questions I asked (which tended to be a bit more organic and conversational), so if the answer seems a bit off, don’t stress out over it.  A long line of dashes (————-) means there was something there I didn’t transcribe, probably because it was just casual discussion or something I knew I wasn’t going to use in the final article.  Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply David Self endorsed any of the ideas here on the ranty blog.  It’s just me linking from something he’s said to something similar I’ve said.  And by the very nature of this discussion, there will probably be a few small spoilers in here (although I did cut out one big one).  If you haven’t seen the film yet, check it out.  It’s fun and you’ll get a bit more out of this discussion.

            Also, this is one of the rare cases where I didn’t get to see the fim before my interview (considering I was generally doing interviews two or three months before the films were released).  My questions are based off one of David’s earlier drafts I got to read, so you’ll see some back and forth as we establish what does and doesn’t happen in the movie, and why some changes were made.

            Material from this interview was originally used for an article that appeared in the January/February 2010 issue of Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

That’s just IMDb (laughs).  I haven’t been working on Deathlok in quite a long time.  I did a rewrite on Deathlok.

I guess I actively try to avoid boredom.  I want to find new intellectual arenas to challenge myself in.  I try to find projects that are different, have a different hue to them, work in different genres.  I make an effort to do that.  That’s my short answer, and I guess people buy it. (laughs)

This came to me from a good friend of mine, a producer, Scott Stuber.  I worked with Scott a long time ago.  He brought me actually three scripts.  Andy’s script, a script  by Paul Attanasio, and one Mark Romanek himself had been working on.  Kind of in the fall of 2007, just before the strike.  Actually, August, late summer.

At that point Andy had done what was the main draft.  Then they’d hired Paul to do a rewrite.  He got about halfway through and didn’t continue.  Mark Romanek started to work on it himself.  Paul, I think, was working at Mark’s direction at that time, and Mark got halfway through the script as well.  So they had two half-scripts and Andy’s script. When I came in I really wanted to work off Andy’s script because it was the most coherent and consistent one.  It was a complete script so it was the easiest to start from.

Oh, yeah.  I love the original.  The original film is a landmark.  It was my dad’s favorite film and I used to watch it with him when I was a kid and knew it well.  So there was a little trepidation in going back and trying to come up with a 2010 version of it.

Andy had really introduced a lot of the new elements that are in our version of the film.  In terms of the father-son dynamic and also, well… (David and I talked about a bunch of spoilerish stuff here that I’m not going to repeat for those of you who haven’t seen the film yet)  …That’s a major change from the original, obviously.  That idea was an idea Andy introduced.  Going back to your question— that was dramatically the biggest adjustment.

I think one of the things… In keeping with the original, Andy did well preserving the werewolf lore that the original film introduced to our sense of werewolves.  Changing at the full moon, being bitten.  Some of the rules we take for granted now.  Silver bullets killing werewolves.  There were a couple older films… you’d have to do your filmography… that this film all pulled together.  Those elements Andy was very particular in preserving, which I think was really important.

        
Among those things that was challenging is that the whole transforming at the full moon really limits…is a real structural issue that we struggled with for a long time.  How to make the plot advance quickly and turn our characters into a werewolf quickly when you’re dealing with this rule of having the full moon.

Exactly (chuckles).  So by nature, the earlier drafts of the script had a very extended amount of time before you got to see Benicio del Toro turn into the wolfman.  That was really the largest issue that I was brought in to solve–how to speed things up a bit.  It was still a very challenging thing, given the rules of our film.  That was the largest note that I had to contend with coming into it.

I generally like to outline, and I try to do the outline in one sitting, so it feels organic, to one moment and impulse.  The length of it can vary from a page to ten pages, depending on how much detail I’m seeing right off the bat in my head.  I just try to catch the organic impulse of the movie in one moment.  And then it mutates from there.

Yeah, this is a very different process.  It’s a film that is sort of a flashing green light to go.  There’s a lot more collaboration.  You’re working with a director, a producer, a studio, that all have things they need to achieve to get to where they’re confortable making the film.

Benecio was attached and Mark Romanek was attached.  They attached Tony and Emily Blunt after the draft I did in November.  And Hugo Weaving.  Those guys all came on after.  Although Benicio was just sort of… he wasn’t actively involved in development at that point, he was just waiting for us to do our job. ———–  I turned in my draft the night before the strike started and that was what they cast off of.  And then I was out on the lines

I’ve become more nocturnal with the advent of four of my children in the past couple years. Prior to that I was more of a workday type of guy.  I sort of now have a patched together day, where I work half of the day-day, and then after supper in the eveneing, after the kids go to bed, I have another work period where I tend to be pretty productive.  It was different when I was younger.

More of a scene or sequence objective I set for myself.  Not so much a page count.  One of the other things I like to do… I get slower as I get closer to the end of the script, because basically I read the script from page one again every day before I start writing again, so I can get everything in my head. It helps me with consistencey issues and voice issues.  I don’t have as much reading to do on day two or three, but when I’m getting down to the end I’m spending an hour and a half reading befoe I start writing new stuff.

Several scenes, like the sequence in the asylum, I just loved those.  There were pieces of Andrew’s writing that I just loved that I just cut and pasted those into the script I was writing.  I would tweak a word or two just so it made sense with what came around it.  I did start with an empty script when I started rewriting, but I had his sitting next to me the whole time as a reference.

Yeah.  It’s interesting, the character Andy —–  along was a haunted guy who had this sort of gothic, dark back story that preceded the film and becomes uncovered during the course of the film.  So he definitely structured that sort of psychological drama in that mode.  It was an important decision.  It’ll be interesting to see how it translates in the final version of the film, but the notion was this was a guy who had lost himself in theater and burned himself out.  He was a guy waiting to be saved.

That was Andy.  He was a guy who was haunted, who lost himself, was estranged from his family and has to come to home.  He’s taken on the least manly profession (laughs) in contrast to his father, this big-game hunter, depraved nobility kind of guy.

Yeah, we had several different versions of that.  I think it was challenging because——  A lot of that changed because of the physicality of the location that we had to work with.  There were a couple different versions which we had worked out, given the contingencies of the set.  This is the one Joe settled on at the end of the day.

Yeah, that version hasn’t made it into the final film.  We had a notion that this was not just an old guy, but there was this sort of implication that the creepy old guy could be Satan passing the cane along.  It didn’t make it (laugh), he just has the cane in the current film.  I thought it was just a good idea, it’s just his from the start now.  With the 2010 kicker of it being a sword.——I definitely tried to find a few places of connection for little spiritual totems of the original.

Yeah (laughs).  Aberline was introduced in Paul’s draft as a pursuing character that then we fleshed out.  He chose the name Aberline.  I didn’t really connect that with that notion when I first read it, but then I looked up the name and said ‘Oh, this is the guy from In Hell!’ (laughs)  We thought that was a fun grace note to have. 

——-No.  I mean, Paul didn’t bring it up that he’d been involved in the Ripper case previously.  We added that dimension to it.

(laughs).  No, he didn’t.  Not the script.  Benny is sort of… the process in independent films is a little bit different than this sort of film.  He didn’t rewrite anything but we had lots of conversations about his dialogue.  He certainly wanted to plumb his lines and stuff like that.  Not rewriting per se, but he had a lot of ‘Could I say it this way…?’  He’s a real professional.

I think as soon as you see Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins are both in this film… (laughs).  I think the audience gets some satisfaction about having their suspiciions confirmed.  I think his sense of betrayal is a good thing. Rather than it just being (chuckles) Bela Legosi, just some guy who randomly bites him.  I thought this was a good, meaningful melodrama.

Knowing that you’re going to be outed?  (chuckles).  Yes and no.  I think it’d be much harder to pull off a Sixth Sense-style film these days that really depended upon that surprise.  I think that would be very difficult to pull off now.  On the other hand, if you’re creating enough engagement and suspense in the moment, you can know the outcome of a film.  Something like Thirteen Days.  You’re sitting in the theater so you know the world hasn’t blown up.  But you can create tensions and suspense, and if you’re doing your job, in the moment people will forget that fact.  ——–

—That’s the magic of it, that you can suspend disbelief there.  Watching something that’s well-told you can forget that you already know certain aspects of it.  There’s something anthropologically gratifyying about that to me.  The yarn-weaving and the storytelling is the social, fun experience, not the knowledge itself.

            Anyway, here’s something a little different.  And it’s huge to make up for the time off. And there’s lots of pictures to help you deal with the fact that it’s so huge.

            Here’s one of those interviews I did a while back.  I’d wanted this to be a conversation I had with Nora Ephron back in 2009, but I can’t find my original transcript and don’t have the time to find the recording and type up a new one.  Alas, this has now ended up becoming an Ernest Borgnine memorial piece…

            So, here’s a very fun conversation I had with Jon and Erich Hoeber, two screenwriting brothers who wrote the action-comedy movie RED, based off the comic miniseries by Warren Ellis.  They’ve since moved on to do a few other big-named movies and are working on a sequel to RED.  Jon and Erich were probably one of my favorite interviews I ever did in my years at CS, and we talked for almost an hour about the many aspects of screenwriting.  It was far too much to use for the space I was allotted (despite repeated begging to the editor), and it’s even too much for here.  So what you’re seeing is a somewhat truncated version of that interview (about 2/3 of it).

            A few points, but you’ll probably figure it out as it goes.  I’m in bold, asking the questions.  Keep in mind a lot of these aren’t the exact, word-for-word questions I asked (which tended to be a bit more organic and conversational), so if the answer seems a bit off, don’t stress out over it.  If you see a long line of dashes (————) it means there was something there I didn’t transcribe, probably because it was just casual discussion or something I knew I wasn’t going to use in the final article.  Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply Jon or Erich endorsed any of the ideas here on the ranty blog.  It’s just me linking from something they’ve said to something similar I’ve said.  And by the very nature of this discussion, there will probably be a few small spoilers in here.  If you haven’t seen the film yet, check it out.  It’s fun and you’ll get a bit more out of this discussion.

            Material from this interview was originally used for an article that appeared in the September/October 2010 issue of Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

            So, anyway, here’s me speaking with  Jon and Erich about writing RED.

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E:  We kind of fell into it.  My background is music.  I studied composition and conducting.  At the same time my brother was in film school.  He called me to write some music for a film he was making.  It was, in a way, the first time we’d reconnected as adults, because as kids we’d fought like crazy.  So I wrote the score for his movie.

            A couple years later, maybe a year later, we were both in  Los Angeles.  I’d come out here to sell out and write jingles or something.

            Probably if we had any idea how hard it was going to be we would’ve been stockbrokers.  Whatever it is people do who have real jobs.

J:  It’s interesting.  First of all, we’ve been big fans of Warren Ellis for quite a while.  What’s awesome is that we share a manager with Warren.  So we were able to run around RED and try to set it up with a little inside help, which was great.  But it was also a small, obscure-enough book that we were sort of operating outside the system.  We weren’t having to do battle for a big-money title.

E:  We also knew at that point Gregory Novak.  Around that time he had just started working for DC and he’s an executive producer on movie.  We got him involved  We got Mark Vahradian, who’s another producer.  And we ran around and tried to set it up.

E: Initially we got hold of the book… I would say about five years ago. We tried to set it up then and we failed.  But we always liked it and we always wanted to get it done.  And then a couple years later we had the opportunity to try again.

J: Mark at that point had joined forces with Lorenzo diBonoventura, who’s a powerhouse.

E: So we tried again and we were able to set it up with Summit Entertainment.  We had written a very detailed treatment, and they basically bought it just off the treatment.

J: There was a fantastic meeting after they had agreed to hire us to write it, where they called us in for a ‘creative session.’

E: It was the best notes meeting we ever had.

J: We sat down with them and all the producers were there and their assistants were there.  They said ‘Well, guys, we really like the outline you wrote and we think this’ll be very cool.  So don’t screw it up.”

E:  That was it.

J: It was like that moment in Forrest Gump– ‘I shure hope ah don’t let him down.” (laughs).  Summit has been fantastic.  They have things to say and great opinions, but in a very collaborative, open way, as opposed to ‘Here are the studio notes!’  My way or the highway.

E: We hadn’t bought the rights ourselves but we had agreed with our manager and with Warren Ellis that we would try to sell them and then they’d have to make a deal with both him and us.

J: No money exchanged hands but it was a secured position.

J: The opening, from a writing point of view, was a fascinating thing for us to play with.  Obviously when there’s a marketing campaign you know exactly what you’re getting into.  But generating a cold script, when this was first crossing people’s desks, it was a very odd departure to have seven pages of relationship going on between two people.  Somebody at work and somebody at this house.  And seeing there were tiny little bits of oddness about him.  You know he’s not normal, but what’s his problem?  Why does he have this empty life?  He’s sort of pretending to be a human being but he’s not quite a person.  And the fact that it goes on– when was the last time you saw an action film that didn’t start with action?  The fact that you’re talking about this as ‘indie tones’–

E:  It actually makes us smile.

J: It was something that was a big ballsy choice for us.  For us the most important thing is that it’s a character piece that turns into an action movie.  Or is also an action movie.  As opposed to, here is our high-concept action structure that you’re desperately trying to stuff character in, which is how the jobs usually go.

E: That’s very perceptive.  Our first take was hewed a bit closer to Warren’s original tone.  We loved the character he’d created, this guy leading this empty life and trying to figure out how to be human.  But obviously his original work was very, very, very dark.

J:  And we talked about that.  Wouldn’t it be cool to do a stripped-down, lower budget, John Boorman-style action film.  And that’s neat, but it’s sort of unsellable.

E: We came up with this very low-budget, very bloody version, and no one wanted to buy it.  Then when we revisited it a couple years later we sort of thought what if you just used this character as a departure, a starting-off point.  This relationship as a starting-off point.  What if this guy becomes sort of  a metaphor in a way for what happens to people when they retire in general.

J: And Warren Ellis’s theme of weapons of the Cold War left over, sitting around.

E:  Yeah, this dangerous, unexploded ordnance that’s left sitting around in the form of these people.  And what if you sort of expand that world.  So that led us to invent and create many, many more characters to populate this world.

J: And ended up as a radical departure from the source material.  But the big question we asked ourselves at that moment was the tone question.  What kind of a movie is this going to be like?  At the end of the process it always ends up being very clear.  Along the way it’s perhaps the most challenging balance of the whole creation process on this one.  A touchstone for us was going back to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.  Butch and Sundance was something we felt like you hadn’t seen in a long time.  It had that brilliant balance of character and humor but also those real stakes.  People get killed.  Our heroes die at the end of the movie.  You buy this threat that’s chasing them all the way along.

E:  There’s not a lot of movies that occupy that space, and I don’t know why. But the idea that you could have real fun and real jeopardy at the same time is something that’s very interesting to us.

J: Then, thematically, once you started playing with the idea of older actors, older characters with these massive histories behind them, that became another big driving force in the movie.  That was awesome.

E: We actually wrote this part for Helen Mirren.  We wrote it with her in mind.  You never do that because you always get your heart broken.  For Helen it worked because you’re writing a part for her that she hasn’t played in a very long time.  She’s been in gangster movies before, but everyone knows her now as the Queen.  But if you put a machine gun in her hand…  One way to sell this movie is just say ‘Helen Mirren with a machine gun’ and everyone starts cracking up.

J: It’s an amazing thing to take these iconic bad-asses and bring them back to that, which is a big twist of genre and a lot of popular perceptions.

E: In Warren’s book it’s a code where he becomes active again.  We initially tried to put that in the movie but it didn’t really work.  And there was some discussion about whether the title was going to change or not.  But Summit really liked the idea of using the original comic book and we did to. So we thought, well, if we’re going to use the title RED we better get it back in here somehow.  We came up with ‘Retired- Extremely Dangerous,’ which has now become the tagline for the movie.  And that seems to work pretty well.  Everybody thinks that’s funny.  And obviously having Ernie Borgnine deliver it is just great.  He is the nicest guy.

J: Celebrated his 93rd birthday on set up in Toronto.  Bruce took him out, we took him out.  Just partying like a rock star on his 93rd birthday.

E: We write treatments.  Usually we’ll brainstorm the movie and one guy will go off and  write a treatment, and then he’ll flip it over to the other guy.

J: Jointly we create these incredibly elaborate, detailed treatments.  Which tend to be sort of the contract to keep everybody on track.  After the treatment’s set we just start breaking it up.  You write the first ten, I’ll write the next ten, and we start passing pages back and forth.  So everybody knows exactly what the other guy’s doing.  But our first push is to just get to the end of the movie as fast as possible.  Don’t look back too much, try to keep it alive and bright.  And sometimes one of us’ll latch onto a certain character a little more than another.  But once we get to the end we just start going through it again and again and again.  That’s the genius of partnership.  Constant fresh eyes.  Constant challenge.  Constantly challenging the other person.  What if we did it this way?  What if we did it this way?    So we are fast but massive rewriters.  Never stop pushing on it.  Which is why a lot of our scripts tend to be tightly integrated, complex movies where you’re juggling a whole bunch of things at once.

E:  No matter how well you outline there are things you can only discover when you’re writing the script. Voices and the way people do things and the little things that integrate from scene to scene along the way.  Jon actually invented the Ivan-Victoria love story when we were writing the script.  It wasn’t in the treatment.  Things like that are things you kind of discover along the way.

J: I’m always amazed when I hear writers–most of them tend not to be pros– but when people say ‘I don’t outline.  I like to discover it.’  And I’m like, man, I hope you discover an ending along the way, otherwise you’re going to be in a world of hurt.

E: We’re big believers in our structure.  If we have a structure that we really like than we never really worry that we can fill it in.  The big question is what’s the best way  to do it.  But we always start knowing exactly how the thing is structured.

J: As opposed to tone.  Tone changes.  Tone flexes.  Sometimes you just realize the thing you’re working on is a little funnier or a little a darker or a little different than you really thought once you start filling it out.  That’s a very odd and interesting part of the creative process.

E:  We sort of do a ten to fifteen page treatment that pretty much says what every scene in the movie is.  But it’s short enough that it’s not unmanageable.  That you can’t just work with it quickly and move things around when you’re developing it. If you start to get bigger than fifteen pages, for us, it starts to become a big enough document that you start to get lost in it.  So we try to keep it short enough that it’s manageable and long enough that it has all the information in it.

J: It’ every scene listed and sort of an emotional check-in of where the characters stand.  What the beats and changes and emotional arc are.

E:  Usually about three weeks, I guess.

J: There’s two levels to that.  There’s the first pass through the treatment which generates 120 pages or 110 pages, and that’s probably three weeks.  But I think it’s probably another three weeks of going back and forth before I feel like it sort of looks like a movie.  He says three, I’d say six to get it to what I think you’re asking.

E: We rewrite constantly, and the more we do it the more complexity and refinement we get.  By the time we gave Summit our ‘first draft’ we’d been through it many, many times.

J:  But it was great because it was then at the point that they read that first draft and greenlit the movie.  And I have to throw out credit there to the producers, who in this case were incredibly about challenging us on things without telling us how to do anything.

E:  We’re at our best when someone tells us ‘Can you make this better?’ and we’re at our worst when they say ‘Do it like this.’  Because if they say do it like this you can only do it like that, and we always feel trapped. 

J: Because maybe the solution to that line or that character or that problem has nothing to do with that scene.  It’s an act and a half away in the movie.

E: One thing is, we do a lot of comedy but most of our comedy is not comedy that’s making an obvious joke.  It’s comedy that comes out of character.  All the characters take themselves seriously, but they have very different worldviews. So John Malkovitch has a way of seeing the world that is the complete opposite to the way that Sarah sees the world, and the two are naturally going to be funny when they’re put up against each other.  If you do it where it is really character based as opposed to more slapstick, then you get away with more comedy closely connected to drama.

J: Because the drama comes from the same place the comedy does.  It’s all character driven, as opposed to trying to just make up a situation.  The other thing, though, is that Eric and I have always written in a lot of genres.  We love to go see all kinds of movies, we love to go write all kinds of movies.   And we’ve been doing that for a long time, much to the annoyance of our management.———– It’s nice to have all those tools in the wheelhouse, which in a movie like RED really come into play.  You have to have this mystery-thriller line to hang it all on, which ultimately no one will care about but if you can’t make it look good people will flag you for it.

E: And you’ve got a little bit of  love story.  A little bit of action.  A little bit of comedy.  The trick is how to make it all one thing.  That is to say, it all has to come from the same place.  It all has to come from character.  It’s not like you’re taking these things and sticking them together.  You’re taking the character, which is the heart of this movie and the heart of any good movie, and finding different ways to express that character.

E:  I think in a movie like this you never care that much about what the mystery is.  You just want it to work.

J: After the fact, especially.

E:  Yeah.  It’s sort of a MacGuffin that allows you to let the characters do what the characters do.  We were sort of tweaking what that mystery was all the way through the script.  At the end of the day, it was simply what will sound interesting enough and what will mechanically work well enough that we can take several steps to get there.  I guess… we don’t care about it  It’s not where out bread is buttered.

J: We don’t care about it? (laughs)

E: Well, we care about it.  You have to do it well enough, but it’s not what makes the movie great.

J: Right.  It gives you a framework to have the characters that make the movie great.  You can’t ignore it, but that’s not why anyone’s going to see this movie.

E: At the end of the day you’ll remember if it worked or didn’t work.

J:  But what you’ll remember is “Old man, my ass,” or “I trained Kordeski,” or “If she didn’t love me, it would’ve been in the head.”

J: It’s always good to have a girl in the movie. (laughs)

E: Part of it is this.  Warren starts with the premise of this sort of extremely dark character.  He’s done this his whole life and as a result he’s sort of become inhuman.  He’s not quite a human being and doesn’t know how to be a human being.  Starting with that premise, we asked ourselves the question, how do you develop that character.  And how you develop that character is across the course of the movie he realizes there is more for him than just being this old piece of the Cold War.  That he can have a life, that he can have a love interest, that he can sort of become human.  If you imagine that now as his arc, then Sarah is the character who can, across the movie, start to transform him.

J: It’s also great to have a character who’s an outsider to this group of insiders, just from a sort of exposition and comedy point of view.

E:  You’ve got a straight man with all these killers.

E:  Cooper is… obviously we needed a great antagonist.  Everybody in this movie has a little arc, and obviously Cooper does, too.  What’s really interesting is there are big cultural differences in the CIA, between what it was like 30 or 40 years ago when people went to all these Ivy League schools with this sort of blue-blood culture, almost.  Also this sense of we do what we have to do and we don’t really talk about it.  Now the CIA is different.  It’s a little bit more corporate and a little bit more professional, in a certain sort of way.  In a certain sort of not-necessarily good way.  So these were some of the things we were thinking about when we were developing Cooper.

J: For me it’s a real cornerstone of how Eric and I write, which is about genre twist.  Any movie of size is going to be a genre movie in some fashion.  You’re going to have seen virtually every character before.  So for us the question isn’t going to be how do you come up with those characters, it’s what are we going to do to show you something you’ve never seen before within a genre that you’ve seen a thousand times before.

E:  How do you take that scene you’ve done a hundred times and do it fresh.

J:  For us a big example was Cooper’s introduction.  He’s on the phone, he’s talking to his wife, he’s talking to his wife, talking about kids, he’s got to get milk–and he’s killing somebody.  And any time in a scene you can do two things at once it’s obviously a good idea.  You’re establishing Cooper and you’re also really setting a lot of tone for violence and comedy that runs throughout the movie.  For us it’s really about those little mini-moments that end up having these big impacts and big ripples.  Like you said, he’s a junior version of Frank.

E: Almost every scene that we wrote is in the movie, but there’s one scene that’s on the floor, where Cooper is explaining to his wife how he fell down the stairs and got his shoulder dislocated.  We know that Frank did it.  You kind of see on her face that she knows that’s not true, but it’s a very subtle thing and I think it slowed the movie down too much, so that scene isn’t in.  This movie, very surprisingly, there’s very little of it that’s not on the screen.  In part, I think, because it’s so tightly plotted that almost all of it’s necessary.

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            And that’s that.  I’m hoping to be back on track later this week, but just in case I’ll warn you it may be another interview.

            One way or another, go write.

            It’s what I’ll be doing.

            Okay, a quick tip for you about numbers, because I’ve had a few folks ask me about this in the past few months.

            Some people get confused about numbers versus numerals in their writing.  Were there twelve days of Christmas or 12 days of Christmas?  Does my lord offer you a thousand swordsmen or 1000 swordsmen?

            Some of this confusion comes from journalistic standards.  A lot of non-fiction writing tends to follow the rule that everything below twelve is written out, but from 13 up you use numerals.  It varies a bit from publication to publication.  Sometimes the cutoff is ten or eleven, but it’s usually somewhere in the very early double-digits.

            That’s non-fiction, though.  Non-fiction is hard facts.  Here, we’re more concerned with making things up, yes?  With making them seem real, but not too real.

            My personal rule of thumb is that it looks very unnatural for people to talk in numbers.  We all speak in words, not numerals.  So when someone’s speaking, numbers should always be written out.  For example, in my new book, 14, someone might say “I live in room twenty-eight,” but then they’ll walk down the hall and go into room 28.  Dialogue is always written out, but numerals can show up in the prose.

            Now, there are a few exceptions to this.  Off the top of my head…

            Firstis cases where the numerals are part of a proper name.  No one should ever fire an Ay-Kay Forty-Seven or an Em-Sixteen.  The year is 2012, not twenty-twelve or two-thousand-twelve.  In Ex-Patriots, Captain Freedom is the commander of the Alpha 456th Unbreakables and speaks of them as such.  So when the numerals are part of a proper name, it’s okay for me to use them in dialogue.

            Secondis in first person stories.  If you think about it, a first person story is really all dialogue, because the character is addressing the reader.  This site is mostly first person—me talking to you—and I tend to write things out most of the time.  So I need to be extra careful using numerals if I’m writing in first person.

            Thirdis screenplays.  I should always write out numbers in screenplays because if I don’t it messes up timing, especially if I’m doing it a lot.  I might write 4,321 to save space, but the actor still has to say “Four thousand three hundred and twenty one.”  Check out this clip from my very cliché-filled road trip movie.

Now compare it to this…

            This block of dialogue just got cut in half by using numerals instead of written out numbers.  Except it really didn’t.  It’s going to take just as long for the actor to say, and all that’s really happened is the producers, assistant directors, and script supervisor have a bad estimate for how long this will take to film.  Not only that, odds are I’m going to mess it up, too, because I’m thinking my script is shorter than it really is.

            So  keep that in mind when you’re writing that subtle reference to 007’s twentieth adventure.

            Next time, I’d like to talk to you about one of my favorite animated movies, and how it’s an example of wonderful storytelling.

            Until then, go write.

            This week’s topic comes from a comedy sketch done many years ago by British comedian Benny Hill.  He’s best known in America for having lots of scantily clad women dancing around him, while the rest of the world also remembers his ability to rattle off some clever wordplay or jokes.  If I do this right, though, “patting the dog” will become a regular writing phrase and we’ll all get to give him credit for that, too.

            Many years back, Hill did a sketch where he played a foreign film director being interviewed by the press.  When asked about his new film (and I’m paraphrasing a bit here), he explains in broken English that it’s a “deeply emotional tale of love and human kindness.”  When the interviewer prods him a bit, Hill goes into further detail.

            “It’s about a man who tries to leave the mob and sees his friends slaughtered by criminals with machetes.  So he tracks down the villains and kills them all.  Then he finds their boss and kills him in front of the man’s family.  Then he kills the man’s wife, and then his children.  Then he desecrates their bodies and, as he leaves, he sets fire to their home.”

            “I thought it was a deeply emotional tale of love and human kindness?”

            “It is,” insists Hill.  “As he walks out the door, he pats the dog on the head.”

            That got a big laugh from the studio audience.  And from me, even though I was only eleven and really watching the show for the scantily clad women.  It was clever enough to stick with me, even past those distractions.

            See, the studio audience and I both recognized the absurdity of what Hill’s character was suggesting—that one miniscule, token act could balance out, or even override, the atrocities he’d just described.  Patting the dog is a nice thing to do, yes, but in all honesty it’s kind of low on the scale.  Heck, for most of us it’s more of an automatic response than a deliberate act of kindness.  We see a dog and we pat him or her on the head.  That’s all there is to it.  We probably think more about tying our shoes in the morning.

            So the idea that patting the dog would make us completely change our views on this character or this story is… well, laughable.  It’s too little, too late.  It’s the weakest kind of spin job.

            And yet, how often have we seen this sort of thing in books or movies?  We’ll have a completely unlikable person who does nothing we can sympathize with or relate to.  Violent drug dealers, sadistic assassins, abusive spouses, jerk bosses, there’s dozens of characters that could fit this category.  And all too often, the writer will give them some tiny, banal moment that’s supposed to make us suddenly change how we feel about them.  They pat a dog.  They thank the guy who sells them their morning coffee.  They get drunk and confess their awful childhood.  They go to church and say their prayers.

            Y’see, Timmy, if I’m patting the dog, it means I’ve got a character who’s doing some small, token thing that’s supposed to counterbalance a lot of really awful things. And that just doesn’t work.  I can’t spend page after page making the audience feel one way about a character, then expect their views to completely shift because of one minor action.

            Now, at the risk of possible Armageddon, let’s mix dogs and cats

            I’ve mentioned the “save the cat” moment once or thrice.  This is Blake Snyder’s term for when a character does something small and quick early on in the story that gets us on their side.  His example of this is “saving the cat” (which some writers take way, way too literally) but it can be any number of things.  It’s just a simple action that assures us this person is a decent human being.  In my new book 14, the main character’s saving the cat moment is when he decides not to drown a cockroach.

            Here’s a well-known save the cat moment from the movie Robocop.  Remember when we see the still-human Murphy practicing his quick-draw and spinning his pistol into his holster?  He explains that he’s learning the trick for his son, who sees all the great cops on television do it and therefore assumes his dad should also be able to do it (because his dad must be a great cop).  And, Murphy tells his new partner with a grin, it is just kind of cool.  It’s a quick little moment, barely thirty seconds long and only about fifteen minutes into the film, but it establishes Murphy’s a good dad and an overall decent guy.

            Now, the big catch with a save the cat moment is that we’ve never been againstthis character.  Saving the cat has never been about changing our view of a person, it’s about emphasizing our view of them.  It’s just a shortcut to help the reader like them quicker so the writer can move on to more important things.  Like, say, the plot.

            A lot of folks try to have half-assed save the cat moments in their stories, but really they’re just patting the dog.  A couple easy ways to figure out which column my random act of kindness falls in…

–If everything I’ve done up till this point has been to make the character unlikable, then this moment is patting the dog.

–If it comes more than halfway through the story, odds are I’m patting the dog.

–If I’m trying to change the reader’s perception of my character with this moment, I’m just patting the dog.

            This isn’t to say I can’t reverse how my readers see one of my characters, but it’s not going to be a quick fix thing that I can do with one line.  It’s going to take lots of moments and a lot of work.  It’s a long process that can’t be rushed.  Even if I’m doing it with a clever twist, the reader needs to look back and see that the seeds of this change stretch all through my story.

            Because there’s another word for when someone does a sudden reversal like that.  It’s called a betrayal.  And no one likes to be betrayed.  Even if it’s just by characters in something they’re reading.

            Next time, I’d like to run some numbers by you real quick.

            Until then, go write.  And remember to thank Benny Hill.