Stupid auteur theory
(Billy Wilder)

“What does the director shoot—the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.”

The best plot is no apparent plot
(Stanley Kubrick)

“I like a slow start, the start that gets under the audiences skin and involves them so that they can appreciate grace notes and soft tones and don’t have to be pounded over the head with plot points and suspense hooks.”

Always use acting adjectives
(Quentin Tarantino)

“You shouldn’t try to predestine where you’re gonna go and what you’re gonna see. You can hit the nail on the head, but you want the kind of freedom that allows for something you hadn’t even imagined to happen. I’m very much a man of the moment. I can think about an idea for a year, two years, even four years all right, but what ever is going on with me the moment I write is gonna work its way into the piece.”

Trading scraps of paper
(Wes Anderson)

“We do a lot of talking about what we’re going to write for a long time before we ever start to write. And when we do start writing, it’s a lot of trading scraps of paper back and forth for a long time. That sort of grows into something.”

Get ideas for 70 scenes
(David Lynch)

“If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by–5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.”

Things I hear the characters say
(Jim Jarmusch)

“A lot of times when I’m writing I’m just sort of writing down things I hear the characters say, and I really don’t believe it came from me.”

Writing is just a tool
(Sofia Coppola)

“I find that [writing and directing] are both part of the same process for me, because the writing is just a tool to getting to the final story. But writing is so hard for me—it’s the most challenging part [of the writing process]—so when you finish it and print it out, that’s the most gratifying.”

Have no limits.
(Pedro Almodovar)

“A film has thousands of shots. You have to ask for a lamp or you won’t get one, you have to ask for a color or you won’t get it … everything has to be very organized at the time of shooting. But in writing and conceiving the film, my way of being sincere and honest is to have no limits. To let things happen almost from the most irrational point of view.”

You can be a terrible writer
(David Cronenberg)

“It’s a very pared down, simple form, really, the screenplay. The only thing that goes directly on the screen is the dialogue and the narrative structure. You can be a terrible writer, but if you write good dialogue and have a good sense of narrative structure, you can be a good screenwriter and still be functionally illiterate, which a lot of good screenwriters in my experience are. Very different.”

I prefer collaboration
(Jane Campion)

“I prefer collaboration because it’s not so neurotic-making. You can check things through and laugh. The other person can help you feel better when things go badly.”

Rewriting is for pussies
(P T Anderson)

“The passages you have to labor over are invariably worse than the ones that seem to write themselves. This notion that writing happens in the rewriting is something that I’ve never agreed with. I’ve always hated rewriting. Rewriting is for pussies! Send it out, zits and all, is my feeling.”

I just do it.
(Nora Ephron)

“When I work with my sister Delia, we outline everything we’re doing. Completely. The outlines are endless, at least fifty pages long. But when I write by myself, I almost never have an outline; I just do it. I know the structure. I know the beginning, the middle, the end.”

Everything becomes fodder.
(Lena Dunham)

“To my own detriment, everything that happens to me becomes fodder. Sometimes I wonder if I would be a bit happier if I were more in the moment, and less trying to translate the moment into a piece of writing or a piece of film. I have never known another way to express myself, whether it was writing weird confessional poetry in fourth grade or my first play, which was closely based on what I thought the relationship between my mom and her two sisters was.”

Script, script, script
(Alfred Hitchcock)

“To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script, and the script.”

I write essays
(Jean-Luc Godard)

“I write essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. I’m still as much of a critic as I ever was during the time of ‘Cahiers du Cinema.’ The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it.”

Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

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by Lawrence Gray

If one is writing with an independent voice, one does well to be a writer/director who finds his or her own funding and audience!

 The big bucks goes to the conformists,
the purveyors of nothing in-particular

And who knows, you might, if you can wangle the grants or grab just enough celebrity attention, be a David Lynch or a Terrence Malick or a Pedro Almodovar or Lars Von Triers. On the other hand you might just be an Ed Wood. And you might never know where you fit in until you are too old and bitter to be able to re-align your career.

Which brings me back to the question: what’s your story?

Are you aiming at being the big bucks five-picture deal guy, the TV show runner, or the indie filmmmaker? Are you going in search of your own voice, and courting failure because it may be years before you discover that you have nothing special?

Or are you going in young and green and willing to do the donkeywork of re-vamping old formats hoping that one day you will have the power to make the “passion projects”? Or perhaps, nothing in particular, may well be enough for you?

 Are you aiming at being the big bucks five-picture deal guy…
or the indie filmmaker?

Most of us think we can be all these things. We think we can be artists and technicians and writers of hits and writers of “important” game changing pieces of work.  But we cannot. And worse, if one makes a choice, it can be the wrong choice.

Trying to write action films aimed at teenagers when you have no talent for it, is as worthless as trying to write great art when you really just want to film things being blown up! Having talent for one thing rarely translates into talent for the other. And the rewards for either are not the same.

If the bucks are big, you can rest assured that the competition is big and the winners so often are not those with a talent for writing, more with a talent for having the right parents and connections.

Life for the writer is hard. They have to work out where their talents and interests lie and where the politics of the day lie and where the money goes and what the audience responds to and what they think the audience should respond to and how much suffering and general indifference and rejection they can take.

The earlier you understand what your story is going to be, the better it is for you, because then you can understand the finances of your chosen arena and the personnel of your career line and factor into your life various solutions to the problems of making art and making a living.

The earlier you understand what your story is going to be,
the better it is for you

But of course being a character in the story is a lot different from being the writer of the story, and that I am afraid is going to prove your greatest problem at all times.

Lawrence Gray

In a prior life, before moving to Hong Kong in 1991, I helped found the London Screenwriters Workshop, and since coming to Hong Kong I founded the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle.

I was chairman of both august organisations and have only just stepped down from the Writers’ Circle, considering myself far too damaged to continue leading the charge for the great unknowns of Hong Kong literature. [more]

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( photo credit Construction Schedule: Eric Fischer)