Three Directors on Screenwriting

Raging Bull (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Mishima, Raging Bull and Patti Hearst, on balancing fiction and history:

Interviewer:  In dealing with truth, how do you decide how far to go with fictionalizing true events?


Paul Schrader: It's a balance. There are two responsibilities, the first is to history as you know it and as you know, history is not a simple thing. We can both walk away from this meeting with two very different versions of what happened, but you have to be very faithful to the facts as you discern them. And secondly you have the responsibility to drama which is not necessarily the traditional truth - it has to do with themes and tensions, the exploration of issues - and at some point you strike a balance and say, "Okay, this is fair enough to history - and this is fair enough to drama, and I'm okay now." You can go over the line, you can do things dramatically that they are such an affront to history that they undermine the credibility and drama of your story.

The Godfather II (Directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

Francis Ford Coppola on the screenplay as haiku:

Interviewer: What’s the greatest challenge of a screenwriter?

Francis Ford Coppola: A screenplay has to be like a haiku. It has to be very concise and very clear, minimal. When you go to make it as a film, you have the suggestions of the actors, which are going to be available to you, right? You’re going to listen to the actors because they have great ideas. You’re going to listen to the photographer because he will have a great idea.

You must never be the kind of director, I think maybe I was when I was 18, “No, no, no, I know best.” That’s not good. You can make the decision that you feel is best, but listen to everyone, because cinema is collaboration. I always like to say that collaboration is the sex of art because you take from everyone you’re working with.

Interviewer: What is the one thing to keep in mind when making a film?

Francis Ford Coppola: When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In The Godfather  it was succession. In The Conversation it was privacy. In Apocalypse Now it was morality. 

The reason it’s important to have this is because most of the time what a director really does is make decisions. All day long: Do you want it to be long hair or short hair? Do you want a dress or pants? Do you want a beard or no beard? There are many times when you don’t know the answer. Knowing what the theme is always helps you.

I remember in The Conversation, they brought all these coats to me, and they said: Do you want him to look like a detective, Humphrey Bogart? Do you want him to look like a blah blah blah. I didn’t know, and said the theme is ‘privacy’ and chose the plastic coat you could see through. So knowing the theme helps you make a decision when you’re not sure which way to go.

Sunset Boulevard (Directed by Billy Wilder)

Billy Wilder on novelists in Hollywood and the craft of screenwriting:

Interviewer: Why have so many novelists and playwrights from the East, people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker, had such a terrible time out here [in Hollywood]?

Billy Wilder: Well, because they were hired for very big amounts of money. I remember those days in New York when one writer would say to the other, I'm broke. I'm going to go to Hollywood and steal another fifty thousand. Moreover, they didn't know what movie writing entailed. You have to know the rules before you break them, and they simply didn't school themselves. I'm not just talking about essayists or newspapermen; it was even the novelists. None of them took it seriously, and when they would be confronted by their superior, the producer or the director, who had a louder voice and the weight of the studio behind them, they were not particularly interested in taking advice. Their idea was, Well, crap, everybody in America has got a screenplay inside them--the policeman around the corner here, the waiter in Denver. Everybody. And his sister! I've seen ten movies. Now, if they would only let me do it my way . . . But it's not that easy. To begin to make even a mediocre film you have to learn the rules. You have to know about timing, about creating characters, a little about camera position, just enough to know if what you're suggesting is possible. They pooh-poohed it.

I remember Fitzgerald when he was working at Paramount and I was there working with Brackett. Brackett, who was from the East, had written novels and plays, and had been at Paramount for years. Brackett and I used to take breaks and go to the little coffee joint across the street from the studio. Oblaths! we used to say. The only place in the world you can get a greasy Tom Collins. Whenever we saw Scott Fitzgerald there, we'd talk with him, but he never once asked us anything about writing screenplays.

Pictures are something like plays. They share an architecture and a spirit. A good picture writer is a kind of poet, but a poet who plans his structure like a craftsman and is able to tell what's wrong with the third act. What a veteran screenwriter produces might not be good, but it would be technically correct; if he has a problem in the third act he certainly knows to look for the seed of the problem in the first act. Scott just didn't seem particularly interested in any of these matters.