Elia Kazan: Writing for the Theatre, Writing for the Screen

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

Kazan recalled in his autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life (1989): "In 1934, when I was in the Party, we helped start a left-wing movement in a very conservative Actors' Equity Association. Our prime goal was to secure rehearsal pay for the working actor and to limit the period when a producer could decide to replace an actor in rehearsal without further financial obligation... I was working on reforming Equity with a fine man named Phil Loeb... Our cause was so just that now, looking back, it's hard to believe there was any opposition to what we were proposing. Still it wasn't an easy to fight to win."

Kazan had appeared as an actor in two films: City for Conquest (1940) and Blues in the Night (1941). In 1947 Kazan, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford established the famous Actors Studio, where they developed the idea of Method Acting (a system of instruction and rehearsal for actors which founds a performance upon inner emotional experience).

Kazan directed All My Sons, by Arthur Miller, followed by Death Of A Salesman which featured Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. Kazan also worked with Tennessee Williams on the Pulitzer Prize winning, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). At this time, Kazan developed an interest in cinema and directed several films that dealt with social issues: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), Gentlemen's Agreement (1947), The Sea of Grass (1947) and Boomerang! (1947).

Kazan was known for his socialist views and he was eventually called to appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Infamously, Kazan decided to name names. As a result of his co-operation, Kazan was allowed to continue working in Hollywood. He went on to direct Viva Zapata! (1952) and Man on a Tightrope (1953). On the Waterfront (1954), was widely seen as an attempt to justify the morality of informing on friends to those in authority. Budd Schulberg, the writer and the actor Lee J. Cobb, who had both testified before the HUAC, also worked on the film. Other movies directed by Kazan followed, including East of Eden (1955), Baby Doll (1956) and Splendor in the Grass (1960).

Elia Kazan’s The Pleasures of Directing is a fragment from an unfinished book that the great director began writing as he was approaching his eightieth year. His aim was to show readers the process of directing a film or a play, and the technical aspects were to be spliced with observations on the character and talents of the writers and artists he worked with and the way their collaboration evolved.

In the following extract Kazan draws on his experience as a groundbreaking director in the mediums of film and theatre to contrast the art of writing for the theatre to the process of writing for the screen:

A director should know everything about playwriting and/or screenplay writing, even if he is unable to write, is incapable of producing anything worth putting before an audience. He must be able to see the merits but also anticipate the problems involved in producing a script. The director is responsible for the script. Its faults are his responsibility. There is no evading this. He is there to guide the playwright to correct whatever faults the script has. At the same time he must respect the merits of the playwright’s work during the tensions of production. He is responsible for the protection of the manuscript.

Note that the word is not ‘playwrite,’ it’s ‘playwright.’ A play for the theatre is made as much as it is written. A film is made, not written. They are both constructions. The construction tells the story more than the words.

On The Waterfront (Directed by Elia Kazan)

In the movies, the director should be co-author (ideally) because that is what inevitably he is. He should work on the screenplay with the writer from the very beginning. The manner in which the story is developed tells more than the words do. The problems that arise during production are almost always problems of construction. Since so much of the story of a film is told by visual images, the director is the co-creator. A screenplay is not literature – a film is constructed of pieces of film joined together during the editing process. The most memorable films are not usually treasured for their literary values. But in film as well as in works for the stage, story construction is a major component.

A filmscript is more architecture than literature. This will get my friends who are writers mad, but it’s the truth: The director tells the movie story more than the man who writes the dialogue. The director is the final author, which is the reason so many writers now want to become directors. It’s all one piece. Many of the best films ever made can be seen without dialogue and be perfectly understood. The director tells the essential story with pictures. Dialogue, in most cases, is the gravy on the meat. It can be a tremendous ‘plus,’ but it rarely is. Acting, the art, helps; that too is the director’s work. He finds the experience within the actor that makes his or her face and body come alive and so creates the photographs he needs. Pictures, shots, angles, images, ‘cuts,’ poetic long shots – these are his vocabulary. Not talk. What speaks to the eye is the director’s vocabulary, his ‘tools,’ just as words are the author’s. Until Panic in the Streets, I’d directed actors moving in and out of dramatic arrangements just as I might have done on stage, with the camera photographing them mostly in medium shot. My stage experience, which I’d thought of as an asset, I now regarded as a handicap. I had to learn a new art.

Baby Doll (Directed by Elia Kazan)

A true artistic partnership between a writer and a filmmaker is an excellent solution, but it’s rarely arrived at. The dialogue remains an adjunct to the film rather than its central element. What can be told through images, through movement, through the expressiveness of the actor, what can be told without explicit and limiting dialogue, is best done that way. Reliance on the visual allows the ambiguity, the openness of life.

In the work of the best playwrights there is a mysterious, surprising quality. This play is unlike that of any other playwright. You may realize that the author is dealing with a strongly felt personal concern so important to him that it has been able to arouse the degree of energy necessary to produce a total manuscript. He has something to say; it is his message. The director of a screenplay has to appreciate what the writer is trying to say and stand up for it as surely as if he wrote the words himself. He is responsible for the writer’s theme and must ‘realize’ it, make it come to life for an audience. In film this consists of the choice and arrangement of images.

Most screenplays are adaptations of novels, stage plays, stories, news items, history. But the most interesting scripts verge on autobiography. The writer speaks to you, through the screen, using all the means of this form that are special to it, the succession of images as well as words. The best screen work has this element, even if the story appears to be objectively observed. The story is molded by the writer’s beliefs and feelings.

Splendor In The Grass (Directed by Elia Kazan)

The subject of writing for the theatre or screen defies easily formulated rules. The best rule of screen and play writing was given to me by John Howard Lawson, a onetime friend. It’s simple: unity from climax. Everything should build to the climax. But all I know about script preparation urges me to make no rules, although there are some hints, tools of the trade, that have been useful for me.

One of these is ‘Have your central character in every scene.’ This is a way of ensuring unity to the work and keeping the focus sharp. Another is: ‘Look for the contradictions in every character, especially in your heroes and villains. No one should be what they first seem to be. Surprise the audience.’

It is essential that the viewer be able to follow the flow of events. If you keep trying to figure out who is who and where it’s all happening and what is going on, you can’t emotionally respond to what’s being shown to you. But keep in mind that the greatest quality of a work of art may be its ability to surprise you, to make you wonder.

Another rule I have found useful is: Every time you make a cut, you improve a scene. Somerset Maugham, a wise old man, said that there are two important rules of playwriting. ‘One, stick to the subject. Two, cut wherever you can.’ Another wise man said: ‘If it occurs to you that something might be cut, it should be cut.’

Paul Osborn, an experienced and smart playwright and screenwriter, invited me to a screening of a movie made by the producer Sam Goldwyn. Sam asked Paul his opinion. ‘Needs cutting,’ said Paul. This made Sam frantic because he thought the same but didn’t know what to do about it. ‘But where?’ he asked. Paul answered, ‘Everywhere.’

America, America (Directed by Elia Kazan)

There’s no such thing as realistic theatre. The very presence of the audience, the fact of selection of any kind, the very taking off of the fourth wall, makes it not realistic. I’m not interested in what’s called realism. I don’t believe I’ve worked ‘realistically’ or ‘naturalistically’ either. What our stage does is put a strong light on a person, on the inner life, the feelings of a person. These become monumental. You’re not seeing the characters in two dimensions. They’re out there living right in your midst. It puts a terrific emphasis on what’s said too. You can no longer pretend a character is talking only to the partner he’s playing with. He’s talking in the midst of eleven hundred people and they’re there to hear him. They can hear his breathing, so right off the bat, the theatrical exists. You can’t duck it.

Stage operates through illusion. There’s nothing between the actor and the audience. Only he – without help – can project the idea to the audience. In movies, the camera helps out – moves the idea along. Sometimes it can talk, as it closes in or backs up, helps express emotion, what a character is thinking; or it can anticipate action. The more words, usually the lousier a movie script. Movies must be the real thing. Camera gives the plot an assist, helps the story get there.

– Extract from ‘The Pleasures of Directing’ in Elia Kazan: Kazan on Directing (Vintage Books, 2010) 

Ingmar Bergman: On Art and War

Shame (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

‘Ingmar Bergman’s simple, masterly vision of normal war and what it does to survivors. Set a tiny step into the future, the film has the inevitability of a common dream. Liv Ullmann is superb in the demanding central role – one that calls for emotional involvements with her husband (Max von Sydow) and her lover (Gunnar Björnstrand). One of Bergman’s greatest films, this is one of the least known.’

                                                                                                                      – Pauline Kael




‘Bergman’s magisterial confrontation with war, set in a characteristically ambivalent decor, either a peaceful farm somewhere in Sweden or a landscape from Goya secreting intimations of disaster. Here live a man and wife, indifferent to the war until it arrives on their doorstep to strip their lives to the bone. Presenting war with shattering power as a blindly destructive force, Bergman uses it brilliantly as a background to the real pain: the way the couple are forced to look at each other, and to realise that the only honest feeling they have about their relationship is shame. It ends with one of the cinema’s most awesomely apocalyptic visions: not the cheeriest of films, but a masterpiece.’

                                                                                                        – Tom Milne, Time Out


‘When I see Shame today, I find that it can be divided into two parts. The first half, which is about the events of the war, is bad. The second half, which is about the effects of war, is good. The first half is much worse than I had imagined; the second much better than I had remembered....One might say that the authenticity of the second half is disturbed by an overblown scheme involving a wad of paper money that changes hands several times. This scheme reflects an influence from American dramaturgy of the 1950s....When I made Shame, I felt an intense desire to expose the violence of war without restraint. But my intentions and wishes were greater than my abilities. I did not understand that a modern portrayer of war needs a totally different fortitude and professional precision than what I could provide. Once the outer violence stops and the inner violence begins, Shame becomes a good film. When society can no longer function, the main characters lose their frame of reference. Their social relations cease. The people crumble. The weak man becomes ruthless. The woman, who had been the stronger, falls apart. Everything slips away into a dream play that ends on board the refugee boat. Everything is shown in pictures, as in a nightmare. In a nightmare, I felt at home. In the reality of war, I was lost.’

                                                                       – Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film

One of Bergman’s most underrated works, Shame has however been highly praised by critics as one of Bergman’s most significant films and is noted for its resonance with contemporary political events, in particular the Vietnam war.

Bergman’s film is rooted in his extraordinary sequence of 1960s chamber dramas, albeit in a different form and cloaked in a more political aspect. Following the modernist experiments of Persona and Hour of the Wolf; Shame is a more subdued “realist” work. And while Shame does focus on a central pairing, Bergman this time employs a larger cast of characters in the story.

Shame is something of a summation of Bergman’s career. His celebrated partnership with cameraman Sven Nykvist, editor Ulla Ryghe, his established ensemble of actors, are all on display here and fundamental to the film’s success. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann give key, masterly performances in the lead roles, while Gunnar Björnstrand is present in a superbly restrained performance.

Prior to the sudden intrusion of armed violence into the film, we are witness to a more intimate domestic catastrophe, the marital problems between Eva and Jan. The detailed early scenes of a marriage under strain are skilfully managed mixing buried conflict with affection and frustration, as we simply observe a couple going about their daily business seeing how they interact at any given time.

When the external world of military conflict intrudes into this couple’s seething domestic life Bergman switches to more handheld camera, zoom and jump effects to accentuate the realism of war as it breaks through into the more formal chamber drama. This is accentuated by the film’s bold use of sound, mixing war speeches with general war noise and the lack of a traditional film score. 

Shame is a genuinely political work engaging with issues  of occupation, violence and complicity in a typically “Bergmanesque” way, as Bergman the director finds moral complexity and crisis amidst the rubble of social collapse.

The film reaches a crescendo of cruelty and murder, carefully predicated, yet devastating in all its inevitability and foreboding. The final images, in which Jan and Eva await likely death in a fishing boat surrounded by a tide of corpses are amongst the most searing in Bergman’s entire oeuvre. 

Shame takes Bergman’s relentless preoccupation with personal relations, privilege and art, into a wartime sphere of survival and occupation, crossing the personal and the worldly, where the reality of pervasive violence can no longer be kept at a distance.

‘The Shame’ is Ingmar Bergman’s 30th film – a film in which improvisation has played a major part. ‘But improvisation must be prepared for,’ says Bergman.

A November noon; a small room in the Svensk Filmindustri studios. Ingmar Bergman, ensconced in a beautiful, baroque armchair, talks. He is interviewed by Take One’s Swedish correspondent, Lars-Olof Löthwall.

Q: During production of ‘The Shame’, you made certain minor alterations from time to time. Previously, the manuscript has been Holy Scripture to you, isn’t that so?

A: No, actually I worked in this way with Persona. With Persona, I had ample time, I had an ensemble of virtually two characters, and it cost nothing to begin experimenting, to try improvising.

But the basis for all improvisation must be preparation. If I haven’t prepared, I can’t improvise. If I’ve made careful preparations I can always improvise. Then I know I have something to fall back on. What I detest is formlessness. That terrifies me. It is seldom that mere formlessness in a work of art conveys anything vivid. More often it gives an impression of effort. But a combination of improvisation and planning – that’s good.

Q: You shot quite lengthy sequences in ‘The Shame’ which you didn’t at first think were suitable.

A: I’ve always done so, that has been my practice for the last ten to fifteen years. You see, one has to begin somewhere in a film; when you do, you’re likely to be far out from the centre of eventual interest, you find yourself disoriented. No matter how well you prepare, you don’t really know how a film’s going to look when you’ve finished it. Above all, you’re not sure of the tone, and that’s tremendously important...for which reason I always have a margin of at least a week for retakes, usually at the tail end of the production...

When we begin a film, the actors know as little about it as I do. Usually I overwork them, as well as myself, in the first week. I’m looking for something. All the time, in this first medley of images I’m in search of some strong, key expression. Now, if you try forcing this into existence by an effort of will, your work of art will be dead and thin.

Q: When you’ve written your manuscript and it’s ready for you to start shooting, it’s pretty well set up as a visual continuity. Do you work in such a way with your imagination that you can then – if one may express this in a banal way – close your eyes and see the film as a sequence of pictures?

A: No. Well, bits and pieces of it, yes. But it would be intolerable, for me and for those working with me, if, at every moment, I were to try and shape the film by force, if I insisted on a sequence of detailed, preconceived pictures to illustrate the conception I had as I envisioned or wrote the script.

When I write I must try to capture something in words which for all useful purposes, you might say, can’t be expressed in words. Later it is necessary to translate the words again so that in quite another context they’ll come alive. To be sure, so long as I have a firm grasp on my point of departure, there will always be an inner relationship between the original vision I had and the completed, materialized picture-sequence.

While that original conception must always be in the background, I must not let it become too dictatorial, since, for one thing, I must be prepared to modify it when I switch from writing to directing. For another, my actors, too, have a right – to say nothing of an obligation – to draw straws, to choose among alternatives. The whole process is essentially creative. You write down a melodic line and after that, with the orchestra, you work out the instrumentation.

Q: In an interview you said that if you once lost your feeling for play you’d be finished. But in ‘The Shame’ you’re actually very close to the intense centre, you have got something deep inside, in a grip...

A: But that’s a game, too. I believe that every seriously intended work of art must contain an element of play. If we believe otherwise, we commit ourselves to a colossal exaggeration. I believe that in this feeling of a game we can find a stimulating sense of shaping a universe, shaping people, shaping situations: we experience the passion of holding up a mirror and finding out what that mirror reflects...

Look at the great ones, like Churchill, Picasso, Stravinsky. Picasso and Stravinsky, both, have the eyes of a child, they have ‘humour lines’; they suggest some kind of secret feeling for the game.

Q: Games and games! Your script girl claims that when you did ‘The Silence’ and Ingrid Thulin was supposed to be dying, alone in a hotel bed, she spiced up the situation by doing a cha-cha before taking the scene!

A: Certainly; I’ve often noticed this: if you’re concentrating on a serious story, a deeply serious, perhaps tragic situation, a desperately painful involvement, you have a bursting need for jumping off into the opposite – into a lively clowning mood.

Perhaps because the moment of pain which was the nucleus of your creation is now far behind you, experienced long before you wrote it down, and even further away from the production of the film. Each and every artist who creates does so by building on his own painful experience, on a moment of agony which does not necessarily exist at the time of his performance. Of this we are reminded – sometimes with a secret smile – behind the mask we are assuming. This doesn’t mean that the experience will then seem less genuine. On the contrary.

Q: You have often mentioned the moment of pain which is the kernel of a film’s inspiration. Can you trace ‘The Shame’ back to such a moment?

A: No. That’s a long and tangled thread. It’s an experience of humiliation. A long, painful experience of man’s humiliation.

For some time, since the first moment of recognition, I have wondered how I would have sustained the experience of a concentration camp, of being forced into such a damnable position. How noble would I have been?

At the bottom of everything there lies this abomination to which man is exposed, the world over: they club his head in, they scream at him, they assault him, they terrorize him.

The older I get the more ghastly it seems to me. And the harder it is for me to live with in my conscience.

This is what we’re attempting, modestly, in The Shame: to show how humiliation, the rape of human dignity, can lead to the loss of humanity on the part of those subjected to it.

Q: You must despise films that glorify war, that interpret war as a manly adventure...

A: I think they are swinish.

Q: You have said that working with actors involves talk. In getting responses from them, isn’t it largely a matter of confidence, or what?

A: There is nothing more mysterious in it than that they have confidence in my ear and that I have confidence in their ‘inner hearing.’

Q: The rumour that you threw a chair through the window, and such-like, has never accurately been established...

A: I did so. That happens when one is afraid. The more insecure you are, the angrier you get. Or the more afraid. And fear is transformed into anger.

You can’t just stay being afraid.

I used to be very dependent on people’s opinion of me: I was tyrannically vulnerable to criticism and was unhappy for days if anyone said anything wounding to me or about me. Today I don’t care about anything except the life I have with friends and the work I have to do. This is all that’s important to me.

I have no need of power.

I have no need to be influential.

I have no need to be a participant in, or a shaper of, Swedish cultural life.

I have no desire to justify myself before criticism.

I have no need at all to be aggressive. I hate that.

I want to look around at the world, above all to read books and fill the gaps in my education which are a result of the uninterrupted work I have pursued since my student days.

Q: Do you experience the times when you don’t work as empty?

A: Not at all. Once I did, but only for short periods. I never had any free time. Spare time is something I experience as an unbelievable delight! To have a good book in my hands and actually immerse myself in it...

I have often thought that I should devote myself to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. I mean methodically. Actually stay with it. That takes time and patience. I have two kinds of spare time: one kind is only fugitive – attendant on my getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, eating and perhaps taking a walk. The other kind is methodical spare time, when I take a certain time every day to sit down and do something I believe is interesting. But it must be done at a specified time or the day just flies away.

Q: You like working by schedule?

A: I love to.

Q: You have said that it is more important for the public to feel than to understand.

A: To feel is primary, to understand is secondary. First feel, experience – and then understand. Self-evidently, the main thing for the public is to have an experience. Later they can bring intellectual processes to bear. That’s always a pleasure. And eventually the intellectual process, itself, may elicit a new feeling.

When the audience misunderstands a film...The Silence, for example – it became a great success because people went to see it not for the film’s sake, but to see certain parts of it.

By now, The Silence is as innocent as a kindergarten infant by comparison with the films made since. It’s no fun to make pornography when everyone else is making it...

Q: How do you see your future as a film-maker shaping up?

A: I know I’ll stay with it; if I make my films cheaply enough I can stay with it as long as I have reasons for making films. Nobody, however indirectly, can prevent me. For one reason: I no longer have occasion to be afraid. Of critics, for example: before now they were either sawing off the branch I sat on, or making it stronger for me. I depended on them for my livelihood...There were few moments in my life when I wasn’t gambling with my existence.

If Smiles of a Summer Night hadn’t been an international success I would have been virtually finished. I had just had The Seventh Seal refused, in manuscript. When Smiles of a Summer Night became a success, after its showing at Cannes, I drove to Cannes to see Carl-Anders Dymling and laid that script on the table and told him: ‘Now or never.’ Then he accepted it.

Q: You have said that among films by others you have especially liked were ‘Lady With a Dog’, ‘Umberto D.’, ‘Rashomon’. Have you added to that list?

A: Yes, with Fellini’s II Bidone (The Swindler). I have a great admiration for Fellini. I feel a sort of brotherly contact with him, I don’t know why exactly. We have written brief, confused letters to each other many times. It’s amusing...I like him because he is himself, he is who he is and what he is. His temperament is something I have a feeling for, though it’s quite different from my own; but I understand it so damn well and I admire it, colossally.

He is said to be enchanted by my films. That experience is mutual.

Q: How many times can you see a film? You have a private collection of 200 films.

A: How many times depends on how much I like them. I have seen Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday) countless times.

I sit and wait for the parts I enjoy. These can be whole sequences, great moments or just details.

Q: You have maintained that you are self-taught, yet surely a number of directors must have had a certain influence on you?

A: I have not been subject to influences from another director’s artistic style. But influences are not specifically those that come from one’s own occupational involvement. You can be influenced by anything around you: modern photography, TV reportage, pop music – which I find fascinating.

The whole life-way influences one.

But film-makers exert the least influence over me. Because I don’t see the world the way they do. Formally, I achieve my results by going my own way.

I don’t need help from anyone else’s means of expression.

Naturally I am influenced, at large, by the new mode of film-making, by the feeling for film as film, where actually you don’t need lighting effects, for instance, and in which you can get effective results without complex equipment. By these means we can return, in a sense, to the origins of film, when it was simple: when you set up a camera in a bush. I have always found this congenial. A purely technical extension of territory attracts me.

Q: Is ‘The Shame’ to be your last black-and-white film? You have been discussing colour very much lately.

A: I don’t know. Colour is interesting. I was at home with some friends Sunday afternoon and a young girl, about 15, came to the house. She had been to the movies and seen a film which I admired personally. But she was contemptuous: It wasn’t in colour! Then I thought: this is the new thing today; this new generation finds nothing stimulating in a film unless it’s in colour.

It has been a long time since I saw a colour film which I found inspiring. Yes, I was very impressed by the colour in Agnes Varda’s Happiness. There I felt the colour was deeply sensual.

Colour is best when it isn’t colour. That may sound banal, but it’s a fact.

Q: Music is finished, you said.

A: In The Shame it has come to that point. No music any more.

Q: You have seldom made a film with a purely literary foundation; usually it’s from your own manuscript. Does this mean that you don’t think books should be filmed?

A: I think it’s hard to film books or short stories. The material is too rich, it often fences in the film. It’s hard to create from it. I don’t know. I feel no temptation to try.

Q: Films which never become films – why can’t you make novels out of them?

A: I am not a writer, I am a film-maker. I have no need to express myself with words.

Q: Yet your scripts are written with such literary pregnancy.

A: That’s for practical reasons: so that my co-workers will understand what I mean.

Once I had a literary inferiority complex. I haven’t any longer. For some time I harboured the illusion that I would write a play or a novel or a collection of short stories, or whatever. I’ve entirely given up that idea. I am completely satisfied to express myself in my films.

– An Interview With Ingmar Bergman by Lars-Olof Löthwall. Originally published in Take One 2, no. 1 (September-October 1968): 16-18