Conversations with Screenwriters
"...Susan has a knack for posing questions that get the answers we all want to hear."   --Allan Burns"Collected from the pages of Written By magazine, these  interviews with screenwriters by Susan Bullington Katz provide insight into  the wildly different processes by which writers produce their stories for  the motion-picture screen.  In all, 22 award-winning screenwriters are  engaged in informal but revealing conversations with Katz, who has a  deceptively simple but fruitful way of handling an interview.In his foreword to this collection, screenwriter Alan Burns notes,  'Someone once said that a critic is a person who comes onto the battlefield  after the war and shoots all the wounded. The person who said that was a  writer.' Katz knows all about a writer's wounds, and she's gotten her  subjects to discuss their own with great candor. Compiling these interviews  over the course of five years, Katz notes that 'not one of them said about  the actual act of writing that it's easy.'Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who has adapted literary works such as 'A Room  with a View' and 'Howard's End' for film, relates that while writing, 'I  really don't think much about it, how it's going to be in a film. I just  think, 'How are these two characters going to interact with each other?' I  know it can't be the same as on the page in a novel - it must be much more  direct and the language has to be simpler.'Writer/director Frank Darabont, who has adapted Stephen King's 'The  Shawshank Redemption' and 'The Green Mile' for the big screen (along with  Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'), describes the payoff a filmmaker gets when  an audience responds to his work: 'There's nothing like pushing all those  buttons as you go through the story and have the audience react the way you  decided a year and a half ago they were supposed to react,' he says.  'There's nothing better than surprising them and hearing them gasp, or  amusing them and hearing them laugh, or touching them and hearing them  sniffle. That is the best.'Katz asks writer/director Mike Leigh how he makes the audience care  about his characters. 'I can only make you care,' responds Leigh, 'by  caring about them myself.' For Leigh, the writing of the shooting script  comes out of working with the actors to explore the world of their  characters in rehearsal. For his Academy Award-winning film 'Secrets &  Lies,' Leigh rehearsed for five months before finalizing his script and  shooting.Anthony Minghella describes how he left the novel 'The English  Patient' by Michael Ondaatje behind in adapting it to screenplay form. 'I  think the job of the screenwriter if much more architectural than it is a  work of poetry,' he says. Minghella believes that a script is a map that a  filmmaker can use to create cinematic poetry; he beautifully compares a  writer's inspiration to looking into a drawer which is only open for about  two or three seconds every day. 'There's a lot of time spent roaming,  waiting for the drawer to slide open,' he says, 'then you see some lines  and write them down quickly as you can, and the drawer slams.' Minghella  notes that sometimes the drawer stays open for hours, or 'days will go by  where the drawer never opens.'Katz's interview with Horton Foote, the Academy Award-winning  screenwriter of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and 'Tender Mercies,' is an object  lesson in the power of persistence. 'Don't ever give up on something,' says  Foote. 'You just can't, because you just never know.' Foote's 1953  television play 'The Trip to Bountiful' took 32 years to make it to the big  screen.Writer/director Atom Egoyan, whose films include 'Exotica,' 'The Sweet  Hereafter' and 'Felicia's Journey,' has always been intrigued by the things  people =can't= say. Not surprisingly, his heroes are playwrights Samuel  Beckett and Harold Pinter. 'I've always loved the silence and pause, where  there would be extended moments where the viewer or the reader would have  to imagine what was unsaid,' he offers.This fine collection of interviews is highly recommended for anyone  interested in how the filmmaking process begins." --American Cinematographer magazine, March, 2001 (review by Ray  Zone)This fine collection of interviews is highly recommended for anyone interested in how the filmmaking process begins. --American Cinematographer, March, 2001