October 20, 2016

A Win-Lose Situation

            Okay, believe it or not, I’m actually somewhat ahead on ranty blog posts right now.  Three weeks ahead.  But I want to put it out there again that suggestions and requests are always welcome.  Or just general comments. 
            Without them I’ll just keep blabbing away about whatever comes to mind.
            For example…
             A few weeks back I blabbed on about art, especially the tendency in art stories to make characters as miserable as possible.  That idea bounced around in my head for a while.  The other day it hit another idea, and once they were next to each other I knew how to explain this.

            When we’re starting out as people, and as writers, we tend to look at things in very black and white terms.  Something is positive, or it’s negative.  Good or bad.  That’s it.  The idea of something being mostly good, despite having some bad in it, doesn’t tend to cross the mind as a first choice.  Or that a villain could be anything less than 100% evil.  White hats and black capes, right?

            I can be honest.  I used to do this a lot.  I think most writers do. It’s an experience thing.  None of us ever think we’re doing it—we’re all wise and worldly, after all—but the truth is it’s just a stage the majority of us go through as we’re learning to tell stories.
            If I had to make a guess, I think this is why a lot of these artistic stories tend to be so negative, especially the ones by beginning writers.  The only visible choices are all positive or all negative, and if they were all positive there’d be nothing for anyone to talk about. Soooo…
            The characters in these stories just have awful, pathetic lives.  They have bad jobs for low pay where they’re unappreciated and have horrible bosses.  They hang out with boring friends and have bad relationships and unenthusiastic, unfulfilling sex with barely-adequate partners.
            Sound familiar?
            While this can work on a very simple level, it’s just not a great representation of the real world.  Yes, the world is a messy place, full of compromises and mistakes and a lot of people trying to do the best they can, usually under less than ideal circumstances.  Bad things do happen to good people far too often, and some folks just never seem to get a break.
            However…
            There can be a lot of bad, yeah, but there’s also a lot of good.  Friends and family who help out.  Random sympathetic strangers.  Even just sheer luck. Sometimes—maybe just once or twice in our lives—we stumbled across just what we need at the exact moment we need it.
            The simple truth is, life is a mix.  It’s very rarely all good or all bad.  And that holds in fiction, too.  A good story is rarely going to be all of one or the other.  My characters need to succeed (we don’t want to be following losers), but success doesn’t always mean getting the sexy love interest, finding the treasure, or triumphantly winning the battle without physical or mental scars.
            Great example—we’ve all heard the story about the day Oprah gave everyone in her audience a luxury car, right?  Fantastic!  Nothing but positive there, right?
            Except…
            In the weeks to come, many of these people were begging her to take the cars back.  Seriously.  Did you know you have to pay taxes on big prizes like that?  What do you think the tax is on a $60,000 luxury car?  And do you want to guess at the minimum insurance payments?  The attempt to make all these lives better actually made many of them worse.
            You’ve probably heard similar stories about lottery winners.  At first they’re thrilled to win all that money—who wouldn’t be?  But then you hear stories about how people start to look at them differently and act differently. They’re no longer Yakko from work—they’re Yakko the multi-millionaire. And every time they don’t pick up the tab or don’t chip in or don’t offer to help, the looks change a little more.  Seriously, check it out—a huge number of lottery winners say it ruined their lives.
         Remember that classic story “The Monkey’s Paw,” where no matter what you wish for there’s always a negative twist to it?  Ursula K. LeGuin did the same thing in The Lathe of Heaven, about a man whose dreams shape reality.  And if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you may remember the Game of Rassilon, where those who win shall lose, and those who lose shall win.
            Alas, even with all these examples, it’s not always easy to see this.  Definitely not easy to write it.  Multi-layered success is a challenging thing, and—as I mentioned above—it takes a degree of experienceto pull it off.
            Simple experiment. Take your favorite book or movie.  Odds are it’s got a happy ending, right?  At least a mildly-positive one?
            Now—find the bad things.  What did it cost the protagonist to get to that happy ending?  Ruined relationships?  Compromised morals?  Lost job?  Property damage?  Bodily damage?  Maybe even a death or three?  I’m willing to bet there was a price.  Probably even a big one.
            Winning rarely comes without some losses.  Losing isn’t always the end of the world.  And my stories should reflect this.
            Next time… it’s Halloween.  Time to sit around the campfire and tell… well, some kind of scary story.  We’ll figure out what.
            Until then, go write.
May 9, 2015 / 5 Comments

In The Words of Zefram Cochrane…

            Geeky Star Trek reference.  I’ll explain as we go along…
            But first, a story…
            Back when I was a young man in college and our country had just won its liberty from the British Empire, I took a class on early American literature.  There were only two books to study, both from earlier that month.  It was considered an “easy A” course.
            Okay, that joke died pretty quick.
            Anyway, I was in my early American literature class and we were discussing Wielandby Charles Brockdon Brown, first published in 1798.  It’s considered an early American classic, the first noteworthy American novel, and its author died penniless and drunk in a snowbank.  Story is, his own mother wouldn’t even buy his books.  He was pretty much unknown during his lifetime outside of a small circle, which shrank rapidly after his death.  It wasn’t until the 1920s that he became kind of known and retroactively entered into the canon of great literature.
            I asked my professor about this.  Why was this book now being considered great literature?  It had failed then, and barely anyone knew about it now, how does it qualify?  Surely is it was great, people would read it on their own.  Why should we consider it relevant nowwhen the author’s own mother didn’t even consider it relevant then?
            Rather then telling me to shut up or tossing me out of his class, said professor congratulated me for bringing up a good point.  What’s considered “great literature” changes all the time.  Every time someone publishes a new paper on Longfellow, Irving,  Melville, or Dickinson… the canon changes.  A lot of what we consider “classics” were either ignored or thought of as populist crap in their time. A fraction of it was literature.  Almost none of it was art.
            Back in 1989 (just around the time I was questioning my professor about Brown’s book), Robin Williams gave an interview where he talked about a production of Waiting for Godot that he’d been in with Steve Martin the year before.  “I dread the word ‘art,’” Williams told the AP.  “That’s what we used to do every night before we’d go on with Waiting for Godot.  We’d go, ‘No art.  Art dies tonight.’  We’d try to give it a life, instead of making Godotso serious.”
            Believe it or not, the play sold out every performance.  People loved it.  They lined up every night hoping for no-shows and cancelled reservations.
            Williams knew something a lot of folks just can’t wrap their heads around.  I can’t make art.  No matter how much I try or how long I work or how many guides I follow, art isn’t up to me.  It’s up to everyone else.  And how they define art changes all the time.  With every new paper or critique or review, what’s art now becomes shallow and tired.  And the hack stuff that stands the test of time?  Well, suddenly that’s art.  Or maybe not.  Nobody knows.
            Y’see, Timmy, art doesn’t suck, but trying to make art really does.  And usually (not always, but usually, in my experience), the results of trying to make art suck.  It feels forced and pretentious.  There’s so much message there’s no actual story.  It’s so busy trying to be art that it doesn’t feel alive.
            Before I worry about art, I need to worry about my plot and my story. Do I have believable characters?  Will my readers identify with them and want to see what happens to them?  Do they have arcs?  Do they have good dialogue?  Are there interesting challenges for my characters to overcome?  Is the outcome ever in doubt?  Does tension build?
            If I don’t have a good story, art is irrelevant because no one’s going to read it.  I can have the most magnificent sentence structure and vocabulary ever committed to paper, but if my characters are boring it doesn’t matter because the reader’s going to put the manuscript down in six or seven pages.  Because boring characters are… well, boring.  That sounds painfully obvious, I know, but you’d be surprised how many people ignore that simple fact in the name of art.
            Somebody once said “don’t try to be a great man—just be a man.  Let history make its own judgments.”  And the same goes for my story.  It just has to be a story.
            Someone else will decide if it’s art or not.
            I shouldn’t be worrying about that.
            By the way, before I forget, there’s still about a dozen galley copies left in that pre-order promo deal I mentioned a few weeks back.
            Next time, I’d like to talk a little bit about talking a little bit.
            Until then, go write.
June 7, 2014 / 5 Comments

Direct Pressure

            So very late.  So very, very sorry.  Thanks for your patience.
            By the way, just hold that there and press.  If you don’t, it’s going to keep oozing.
            Hey, speaking of medicine…
            A friend of mine is a med student and she’s joked with me a couple times about the television show House.  Believe it or not, House was a very unrealistic view of medicine.  But it was unrealistic on a level most folks don’t consider.  On the show, tests that would take days were often run in hours.  Treatments showed results in minutes instead of days.  Even his revival rate was amazing.  Said friend told me the odds of actually reviving someone who crashes in the real world—well, they’re not good.  CPR saves lives, but nowhere near as many as you’d like to think.  But on House they pulled it off at least every other episode.
            There’s a concept you may have heard of (or some variation of) that we’ll call compressed storytelling.  Very simply put, it’s the idea that we can skim over a lot of time and events without it affecting our story.  As the name implies, certain events are compressed so I can spend more time with others. 
            Most short-form stories—movies, episodic television, and short stories—are usually compressed to some degree or another.  Alfred Hitchcock—director, storyteller, partner of the Three Investigators—once said that drama is real life with all the boring parts cut out.  That’s also a good way to sum up compressed storytelling.
            Compressing the story often builds tension and knocks the stakes up a bit.  Silly as it may sound, compressing the story builds pressure.  If my villain plants a bomb in the city that’s going to go off in two months, that’s not a lot of pressure on the hero.  If it’s going to explode in twenty minutes… that’s a bit more urgent.  Likewise, if my hero (or heroine) has eight semesters to tell Phoebe his true feelings for her, he’s got a while to think about it.  If she leaves in two weeks for a year abroad with Steve Carlsburg (man, that guy’s such a jerk)… well, our protagonist needs to get his or her act together now..           
           Now, the flipside of this is decompressed storytelling.  It’s the idea that I should take my time and include everything.  And I mean everything.  Every single detail and nuance and fact, whether they’re relevant to the story I’m telling or not.  If we’re going to believe Hitchcock (and the man did know a few things about storytelling), this is when we add all the boring parts back in.  Supposedly also in the name of drama.
            Y’see, Timmy, decompressing the story takes the pressure off my characters.  If they have time to sit in a diner talking about the movie they saw last week or their intense feelings about Miracle Whip, there really can’t be anything else urgent going on in their life.  Yeah, good characters might have an occasional conversational segue, but it’s the difference between randomly commenting that I don’t like ketchup and telling the half hour storyabout the scarring childhood event that made sure I never touched the stuff again.
           Here’s an even better example.  I could tell you that I woke up this morning and sat down to write this week’s post (a few days late)… 
            Or I could tell you that I woke up, rolled over, folded my pillow in half, and went back to sleep for ten minutes.  Then my girlfriend got up and I looked at the clock and realized I really needed to get up because I have a deadline coming up, but first I tried to remember some bits of a dream I had.  Then I wandered into the bathroom, did my morning business, so to speak (we’ll skip over details there for the sake of politeness), washed my hands, dried them on the tan towel that doesn’t match the rest of the bathroom because I could only get one in the correct color, and then spent a minute playing with my hair.   I’m thinking about trying a new style, something like the brushed-forward cut Jonny Lee Miller has on Elementary.  We’ve got similar hairlines, so I think it could work for me. 
            Anyway, then it was off to the kitchen for my morning yogurt drink and a bit of grumbling at the fridge when I realized I drank the last of the Diet Pepsi last night.  Which is clearly the fridge’s fault and not mine.  I checked Facebook and Tumblr and even Google+, even though I’m honestly thinking of dumping G+ and going back to MySpace, just so I feel like I’m getting a better use of my time.  It just doesn’t get the response that either Facebook or Tumblr does.  My friend Bo put it in a good way, that Google+ just never hit that critical mass where a site really takes off.
            Then my girlfriend and I debated when we should go to the grocery store, because I needed Diet Pepsi and we also needed cat litter. But we were hoping the new Star Trek: Attack Wing ships will come out today because we love the game and we want that Borg tactical cube.  If we were going out later for that, it’d be much more time-efficient to do all our shopping at once.  But we didn’t know if the ships were definitely coming out today or not, which would also affect dinner plans because if we went over to Game Empire we’d probably grab a slice of pizza at Mamas and Papas and call that dinner.
            Then there was a minor panic attack after an email with my editor.  Turns out I had that deadline wrong and I was really freaking out before he calmed me down and assured me I could work for another two ort three weeks and it wouldn’t change a thing on his end.  So I took a few deep breaths, made a joke about how this just feeds into my drinking problem, poured myself a drink, and then sat down to write today’s ranty blog.
            Which, as a reminder after all that, is about how I don’t need to include every single detail and nuance and fact.
            And, man, I did not have time for all that.  I’m on a deadline…
            In my experience, some writers fall back on decompressed storytelling when they don’t actually have much story to tell.  I can’t make my novel lean and tight because if I did it’d only be three chapters long.  So I fill it up with segues and character moments and drawn out descriptions. 
            The common excuse for this is that I’m being “literary.”  I’m raising the bar and writing at a higher level than the rest of you.  All you people who keep skimming over those character moments and beautiful details and exquisite language in favor of things like “plot” and “action”… you’re the ones responsible for the dumbing down of America.
            I think a lot of this mindset is a function of something I’ve mentioned before—the very special episode syndrome.  If you’re not familiar with it, the very special episode is when a series does something a bit out of character.  Sitcoms do a serious story about abuse or racism.  Dramas do an all-musical episode.  Superhero comics spend an issue dwelling on the nature of mental health and suicide.  These decompressed stories tend to get a lot of notice and praise because they’re daring to push the envelope a bit and do something that radically contrasts their usual material.  I’m sure anyone reading this can come up with dozens of examples of such things.
            Something to take note of, though, is part of the reason the very special episode works is because of that contrast.  When we see a story where Spider-Man deals with one of his regular foes going kind of crazy and eventually killing himself, it has a lot more punch than if we read about a similar story in a psychiatric textbook.  Its rareness makes it special.  It’d be interesting to see what James Bond or Freddy Krueger do when they’ve got an absolutely free day, but it’s also going to wear pretty thin by the end of the first act.
            This is the big mistake I think people make with VSE (my new abbreviation), and it’s something else I’ve talked about before.  It’s when I look at the rare exception and assume that’s the rule.  It’s when I think the one aberration is what we should all be following.  If one story about Spider-Man dealing with mental health does well, we should do five!  Or ten!  Hell, why would we do anything except mental health issues? 
            This is why the last four seasons of Scrubswere all about people dying from cancer and drug overdoses, by the way…
            Now, as I often say, there is a place for both of these things.  I am a very big proponent of the idea that if you want to succeed in this business (the business of selling stories for money), then less is more.  But to automatically declare either method “wrong” is… well, just wrong. 
            If everything I’m writing is all one or all the other, though… maybe I should stop for a moment and reconsider.  Do I actually have a story and plot?  Are my characters dynamic and trying to resolve a conflict?  Or am I using decompressed storytelling to hide the lack of these things behind a lot of flowery language and drawn out, irrelevant dialogue?
            Are my characters fleshed out?  Is my setting well established?  Or am I skimming past plot points as fast as I can so nobody will notice I don’t have these things?
            Maybe it’s time to adjust the pressure a bit.
            Speaking of which, next time, there’s an idea I’d like to impress upon you…
            Until then, go write.
December 20, 2013

Black Christmas

If you’ve been following this ranty blog for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard me mention Shane Black once or thrice. For those who came in late, he’s one of the men behind the million-dollar spec-script boom 20 years ago. You might know him as the writer of films like The Monster SquadLethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight.

(Supposedly, an unwritten part of his deal for Lethal Weapon was getting to be in an action film, so the studio stuck him in some stupid alien-fighting-bodybuilders-in-the-jungle movie that no one was going to see–never expecting Black would rewrite all his dialogue to become one of the most memorable characters in the film…)

He took some time off from Hollywood and then returned a few years back as the writer-director of the award-winning Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which propelled Robert Downey Jr. back into the public eye. Then the two of them got together again for this summer’s Iron Man 3, which Black directed and co-wrote.

Anyway, back when I used to write for Creative Screenwriting, Black was kind of a Hollywood legend as a person and as a writer. So when the editor of CS Weekly asked us for December article ideas, I tossed out doing a general interview with Black. After all, the man’s set almost every movie he’s written at Christmastime—he had to have something to say about it. My editor agreed it would be a neat thing and put out some feelers, and we both kind of forgot about it. We were a very small, niche film magazine, and he was… well, he was Shane Black.

So when Black wrote back in less than a week and said “Sure, let’s grab a coffee or something,” you can imagine the squeals of glee.

Alas, reality hit just as quick. At this point the magazine was starting to struggle financially and my first novel, Ex-Heroes, wasn’t going to see print for another three months. The squeals of glee faded and I suddenly realized I couldn’t afford to grab a coffee. Hell, I wasn’t sure I could afford gas to drive to a Starbucks to meet him. After the shame faded, I wrote back with some lame excuses about sound quality and not wanting to waste his time. We set up a phone interview and I missed my big chance to hang out with Shane Black for an hour.

Fortunately, he was very pleasant and gracious on the phone, and it was one of those conversations where I felt like I learned more about storytelling in forty-odd minutes than I had in some college classes.

A few of the usual points… 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. Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply Mr. Black was specifically endorsing any of the ideas I’ve brought up here on the ranty blog—it’s just me linking from something he’s said to something similar that I’ve said (some of it inspired by this conversation).

By the very nature of this discussion, there will probably be a few small spoilers in here, though not many. Check out some of his movies if you haven’t already seen them. They’re clever, damned fun, and filled with fantastic characters.

Material from this interview was originally used for a “From The Trenches” article that appeared in the December 18th, 2009 issue of CS Weekly.

So, anyway, here’s me talking with Shane Black  about Santa, Christmas, storytelling, and Frankenstein in the Wild West.

Happy Holidays.

Were you a big fan of Christmas specials and movies growing up? What are some of your favorites?
Well, it’s interesting. I watch all the old Christmas movies and I like them for odd reasons. Like It’s A Wonderful Life.  It’s a Christmas movie, but within it they have a lot of bizarre, Capra-esque touches that are more indicative of just life. The scene where the gym starts to open–the floor starts to pull back and there’s a swimming pool underneath. Someone falls in and then everyone just jumps in the pool. That moment is as fresh today as it was back then. That kind of crazy improv moment where everyone starts laughing and jumping in. Even as a kid I was struck by that. “Wow, that’s a different kind of moment than most movies. That feels like it just happened almost by accident.”

My favorite Christmas film is probably this Spanish Santa Claus movie. It’s called Santa Claus and I even used a bit of it in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Basically, Santa Claus fights the Devil. The Devil tries to stop Christmas. There’s this one scene where he just runs around the room doing gymnastics. You’ve got to see it. You’ve got to pick it up and look at it— The Devil’s this really athletic, slightly gay-looking guy who can blow flames through a phone line. If he calls you on the phone, flames come out the receiver and they singe your ear. That’s probably my favorite. Santa’s really lame and the effects are terrible.

My other favorite was called Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny. There’s no snow. It was filmed in Florida in broad daylight. Santa’s sled is stuck because there’s no snow, and they’re all waiting for the Ice Cream Bunny. While they’re waiting Santa tells all the kids the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which takes roughly 50 -75 minutes. At the end of which the Ice Cream Bunny shows up and everyone says “now we’re safe.” I can’t believe some of the frauds–even as a child–that were perpetrated on me (chuckles). It’s pretty amazing.

About half your films have been set at Christmas. I know your first script, Shadow Company, was originally set at Halloween, and then you rewrote it as Christmas in a later draft.  Why?
Yeah.  Christmas for some reason… Even though it’s a worldwide phenomenon I always associate it with a certain kind of American way of life. It’s also sort of a hushed period, during which, for a period of time, we agree to suspend hostility. I’m always fascinated by the almost palpable sense in the air that something’s different at Christmas.

If you look at a tipping point scenario– how many people does it take to start a standing ovation? Just one. And then in five seconds two other people, then three, then four, then 75,000 are clapping. Because the tipping point is as simple as one person pushing in that direction. And it can go ugly just as easily. It can go the other direction. One person starts to get out of hand and then everyone’s out of hand.

So Christmas to me represented the best we have in terms of keeping things on that side of the dial. A period in which, for whatever reason, the tipping point was more likely to bump into someone on the street and have them say “Oh, hey man, my bad,” then to have him say “Fuck you, buddy! Watch where you’re going!” That was remarkable to me.

Also in California, Christmas, if you look at it as a substance almost, as a thing more than an idea, Christmas exists out here in California but in these indescribably beautiful ways to me. You have to dig for it. It’s not a 40 foot Christmas tree on the White House lawn, it’s a little broken, plastic Madonna with a flash bulb inside hanging off a Mexican lunch wagon. It’s a little strand of colored light in some cheap trailer in the blinding sunlight, but it’s still protesting its Christmas-ness. I adore little touches of Christmas that indicate subtly… It’s like talismans. You walk around and these are the magic. These are your touchstones. Little bits of Christmas that remind us that this doesn’t have to be a blinded, blighted, sun-washed, hostile place to live. Christmas has always had that magic ability to me, to exist almost like a magic substance that you find little bit of if you dig carefully enough for it. I know that sounds kind of crazy.

No, I’m intrigued. When did you develop this view? Was Lethal Weapon set at Christmas because of this or did the… the philosophy of Christmas develop along the way?

Along the way. Well, Lethal Weapon is a Frankenstein story to me. It’s a guy who’s a monster of sorts, who sits in his trailer and watches TV.  People despise him, they revile him, because… it’s like a western. They think the west is tame. They think they’re safe and secure in this sedentary little suburbia. This sort of lulling effect that whatever violence and terror are in the world, we’ve managed to secure ourselves from it. But he knows different. Frankenstein in his trailer, he’s been with violence, he’s lived violence. He knows that its still there. The west is not tame, it is not gentrified. When violence, in Lethal Weapon, comes to the suburbs and takes this guy’s daughter and kills cops, they go to Frankenstein and say “Look, we hate you for what we do. We think you’re an anomaly at best and a monster at worst, but now we need you because you’re the only one who understands this. We’ve gotten hypnotized by tranquility. We forgot that violence is still there, and you’re the one who can deal with that, so now we need to let you out of your cage.” That was the idea. Christmas, it seemed to me, was the most pleasant, lulling, hypnotizing atmosphere in which to forget that violence can be so sudden and swift and just invade our private lives.

Did you actually study screenwriting?
Nah.  I took theater classes at UCLA. I was studying stagecraft and acting. It was a Mickey Mouse major.  y finals often were painting sets, y’know? It was kind of a cakewalk though college. I took all the requirements– I liked theater, I liked movies, but I’d never seen a screenplay and I thought they were impossibly difficult. Coming from back east I just assumed  movies were something that floated through the ether and appeared on your TV screen and some magician wrote them, but there was certainly no way I could. Then I read a script and it was so easy. I read another one and said “I can do this. This is really rather simple.” So I never took classes, I just read scriptsI loved.

My style, such as it is, that sometime people comment on, is really cribbed from two sources. One is William Goldman, who has a kind of chummy, folksy, storytelling style. It’s almost as though a guy in a bar is talking to you from his bar stool. And then Walter Hill, who is just completely terse and sparing and has this real spartan prose that’s just punchy and has this wonderful effect of just gut-punching you. I took those two and I slammed them together, and that’s what I use. People say it’s interesting. Mostly it’s a rip-off. It’s Goldman meets Walter Hill.

Did you always write like this or are there some older Shane Black scripts that will never see the light of day?
No, the first scripts I wrote were scripts I wrote after I decided to go out and see what they look like. So I picked up William Goldman,  I picked up Walter Hill, and then I wrote Shadow Company, which even on the page, the ’84 version, looks exactly like a Goldman script. Lethal Weapon, it’s pretty much in the style of those two writers. Material aside. Material is different, I’m talking solely about the style on the page and learning the logistics of how to do it. Those two were my mentors.  ater mentors were people like James L. Brooks, who taught me an amazing amount, and Joel Silver, of all people, qualifies as a mentor.

How do you generally write? Do you use outlines or notecards or just start cranking it out from page one?
I don’t really use notecards. What I do is I try to figure out what the piece is about and link that to the story arc or the character arc. I always think there’s two things going on in any script–there’s the story and then there’s the plot. The plot is the events. If it’s a heist film, it’s how they get in and out. But the story is why we’re there, why we’re watching the events. It’s what’s going on with the characters.  And theme above that. Once I get those things, once I know what the theme is and what it’s about, I can start trying on story beats and plot beats to see if they feel like they’re moving, but they have to relate to the overall theme. If you look at The Dark Knight, you’ll find before those guys wrote a word of script, they knew exactly what their movie was about. All the themes were in place. Sometimes they has to bend the scenes in The Dark Knight to fit the theme they were trying to get across. It’s clear they didn’t write the scenes and then look for what they were about, they clearly knew where they were headed. So thematically I get a sense of what the movie’s gotta be, but I don’t use notecards.

I can juggle a lot in my head. I can’t get more than say, twenty pages, without planning ahead.

How long does it normally take you to get a first draft of something?
I try to keep by studio standards, which is three months. They give you three months from commencement pay to final payment, and I think that’s enough time if you really work at it. We did a draft that I really loved, and it did not make the screen, of Last Action Hero, my partner and I. We did that in six weeks and I was very proud of that. From sitting down with this original screenplay and completely rewriting and retooling it. We were good, we were fast.

You mentioned your partner. I know you worked with Fred Dekker for a while–have you gone back to writing with a partner?
Lately just to facilitate things. It takes me so long to think of ideas and so long to convince myself to get to work, and there’s so much fear involved. Writing to me is a process of just desperately trying, on a daily basis, to concentrate until something becomes more interesting than my fear. Then you’re sucked in and you start doing the work, but up ’till then it’s just horrifying to me. So if I can have help, if someone’s in the sinking boat with me, even if we’re both going to drown, at least there’s a comfort to not being alone. I’ll write the next one solo.

Now, you took time off, came back with a new script you shopped around, and nobody knew who you were. That was Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, right?
It was.  Most people would have nothing to do with it.

Did planning to direct it change how you wrote it?
No, I thought about that. That was when I was dealing with Jim Brooks. He basically said “You don’t need to worry because you direct on paper. You don’t call shots, but you call mood and you call progression and pace and emphasis and just about everything else.” So I may have even done a little more of that on Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

Now that you’ve sat in the director’s chair, has it changed how you approach a script?
No, except I’m even more conscious of what will later be shoe leather. The greatest shoemakers in the world supposedly can make a pair of shoes and leave no [extra] leather. They didn’t waste any. I’m very conscious now as a director. If you’ve got two scenes, like a newscaster and a scene before that of a conversation, can’t you have the conversation with the newscaster in the background and do it in one? It’s just shoe leather. No shoe leather.

It’s probably safe to say a lot of people have offbeat movies they watch this time of year, and a bunch of them are probably your movies. Is there anything unusual you like to watch at the holidays?
Oddly enough, every year about this time, for no reason I can fathom, I watch The Exorcist, my favorite movie [chuckles].  Every year I’m reminded of how it doesn’t age, not one single day. It’s as riveting as it ever has been.

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