The shape of things to come.

It wasn’t my intention to mention the Academy Awards again but the fact that Parasite won Best Picture, is worth applauding. A foreign language entry has never won Best Picture before. Parasite was simply undeniably the best picture of the year and I congratulate the Academy for breaking with the precedent. The story, which is what we as writers are particularly interested in, is driven by Bong Joon Ho’s desire to make a film about a serious, timely and worthy subject - inequality. It is why we make film. To say something we feel is worth saying.

And that’s how each film starts…and you start writing. Jotting down thoughts. You stare out the window a lot and it comes to you in bits and pieces over weeks or months. Then, you spend a lot of time staring into, the window, the window of your mind. Some stories grip you by the throat, some hold you by the hand, some wash over you like warm honey…some set you on fire. I write about Portrait of a Lady On Fire further down…

I first ventured into the the subject of Story last February. I wrote about the IDEA that leads you into Story. And in the following blogs I wrote about some of the elements that go, into story. Character, dialogue, the visual element, writing for film, screenwriting, is like no other writing and you can only write with that always in mind. Screenwriting is visual writing.

So storytelling in a visual medium. Simple and confounding each time we face writing a story, each time we invent all that goes into it.

In the most basic terms, Story, is a series of events that center around one or two characters, your leads, who is or are, in a particular situation. The situation develops (key word) into a series of events. Each cluster of events present a dilemma, conflict, danger, temptation, and decisions your characters are led to, that complicate things. Particular physical challenges or emotional ones, depending on the genre you are writing in. Throughout good storytelling there is dramatic tension. Tension similar to that of bicycle chain, which, without that tension, the bicycle could not move forward. Finally, all the elements lead to an end, a resolution, in which we see the character/s and the original situation, changed in some significant way.  

That same tension throughout the story creates SHAPE, each layer complimenting the next. Like a good haircut. Drawing out the person’s defining features. So it is with Story. 

The overall shape of a story is defined by it’s building blocks, Set Up, Build and Payoff and I suggest you think of every Story in the form of a Set Up, Build and Payoff. It is the underlying shape of a Story. The arc if you will. And within each of those three parts there is a mini arc. All too often the forward motion of a story is interrupted by the writers or directors inability to accept that some scenes simply interrupt that flow, that forward motion. A perfect recent example of such folly is painfully obvious in Scorsese’s The Irishman. In my opinion between Scorsese and heavy hitter screenwriter Zaillian. They make the the common mistake in adaptation of trying to include everything in the book. It is hard to cut scenes that you love, that really work as scenes, but that simply get in the way of the story as a whole. If you don’t develop the instinct or the ability to be your own most honest critic, you are open to your script being sliced and diced until it is perhaps unrecognizable to you.

Filmmaking is an insanely difficult process. There are so many people involved. So your job is to lay the tracks and provide the elements that glide along those tracks. All the tasty memorable morsels that fill the wagons, that glide along the tracks.

Unlike The Irishman a recent film that has intrigued me particularly as a writer, is Portrait of a Lady On Fire, written and directed by Celine Sciamma, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes. The refreshing idea of wanting to say something about equality, this time in the context of a relationship, as well as the construct Sciamma chose in which to tell that story, is interesting to me. Yes the windblown, remote, dreary, location is not new for a period romance. But this is no ordinary romance because of the underlying idea of equality she wants to convey which she accentuates by setting it in 1794.

Another stroke of brilliance is in making one of the leads a painter. This brings a third elevating dynamic to the story and immediately the painting itself, gives it a fascinating evolving dimension. We find that the painter must paint the portrait in secret which allows the character to observe her subject intensely, feature by feature, which builds an element of suspense lest she be caught. As it unfolds both characters then begin to paint the portrait together. A most inventive choice for a visual medium. There are at least five or six such key choices the writer makes, and since the story seems to not be attributed to any source, I relished how the writers imagination worked in creating her story. The writer also being the director is of course the best of all possible worlds.   

The film does have moments that interrupt. When you find yourself distracted wondering…what is that about…or…didn’t need that, specially the end which was one too many for me, one too obvious followed by the one that really counts but is diminished by by the previous. Sciamma must not have found a way to combine the two to give us the information, without the using the trite first one.

Remember though I am writing not as a critic but as one interested in the workings of a writers mind and the development of a screenplay. How Sciamma, with minimal dialogue, chooses the words like a master jeweler placing the gems so perfectly so as to bring out the value of each facet, each moment. That coupled with near perfect direction. The characters seem to stalk each other revealing themselves gradually and building to an intense simmer and then an explosion of passion, never exploitive, but palpably moving. Then a slow test of wills between the two characters, and eventually settling into a richly shared mutuality and the deeply satisfying equilibrium of equality. Finally. And inevitably. Loss.     

Imagination…is the life blood of a writer. Every story has been told before but no has told it like you.  

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See you next month.