The Writer’s Craft: A David Mamet Interview

Glengarry Glen Ross (Directed by James Foley)




‘There’s no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.’ – David Mamet


One of the most prolific and influential playwrights of the late-20th century, David Mamet’s work is famous for its lean, gritty and often profane language possessed of such a singular rhythm that his dialogue has been dubbed ‘Mamet speak’. Known for his robust male characters, Mamet’s facility for creating highly-charged verbal encounters in a masculine environment repeatedly made his work the subject for discussion and controversy. Emerging from the Chicago theater scene, Mamet came to prominence with American Buffalo (1975) and A Life in the Theatre (1977) before making the transition to Hollywood with the scripts for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and Verdict (1982). Following awards for the powerful stage plays Edmund (1982) and Glengarry Glenn Ross (1984) – the latter of which was turned into a notable 1992 film directed by James Foley – Mamet made his directorial debut with the thriller House of Games (1987). Also that year, he wrote one of his most memorable screenplays, The Untouchables (1987), for director Brian De Palma, while penning his satirical denunciation of the movie business with the play Speed-the-Plow (1988). Mamet tackled sexual politics with the theatrical piece Oleanna (1992), while continuing to make his mark on film with Homicide (1991) and Wag the Dog (1998) before going on to direct The Spanish Prisoner (1998) State and Main (2000) and Heist (2001) to considerable critical acclaim. 

In 2004 Mamet directed the political thriller Spartan about a Secret Service agent played by Val Kilmer who is assigned to the kidnapping case of the missing daughter of a senior politician. To promote the film David Mamet hosted a roundtable interview with several journalists. The discussion which followed provides a revealing insight into Mamet’s thoughts on the craft of writing:

Homicide  (Directed by David Mamet)

Do actors usually get your dialogue or do you have to coach them?

No, they get it. I write it to be spoken, and I think that almost all actors appreciate that.

How many passes does it take to create perfect dialogue?

That’s a really good question. I’m not sure I know the answer. I do it fairly spontaneously, and then sometimes, for various reasons, it has to be recrafted. I used to be really good at that, but it gets more difficult as I get older just because my brain is failing. I have less brain cells because long before any of you guys were born, there was something called the ‘60s. That’s where the brain cells were.

What’s your writing regimen?

I think I’m going to just start writing and keep writing until they throw me in jail. Other than that, I set aside all day every day for writing and break it up with going home to see my family or having lunch or getting a haircut...

Is writing a screenplay or stage play easier?

It would seem that you could do almost anything on film, but that’s part of the wonderful fascination of filmmaking. You say, well, okay, you can do anything you want. Now, what are you going to do? So that’s the wonderful challenge of film. Theoretically, I can do anything I want, limited only by my ability to express it in terms of the shot list. So that’s a fascinating challenge. So I don’t find it any more freeing or any more constrictive than writing plays. They each have their own strictures. The wisdom of how to understand those strictures fascinates me.

Heist (Directed by David Mamet)

What are the strictures of playwriting?

Aristotle said it’s got to be about one thing. It’ll be one character doing one thing in the space of three days in one place, such that every aspect of the play is a journey of the character toward recognition of the situation. And at the end of recognizing the situation, he or she recognizes the situation, undergoes a transformation, the high becomes low, or in comedy, sometimes the low becomes high. That’s the stricture of playwriting.

How did you approach ‘Spartan’?

I just started writing it and kept writing, and it evolved and evolved. It’s like filling in a crossword puzzle. You know that word has got to be abracadabra, right? Because there’s no other word it can be until you get halfway through and you see that the word down the middle has a P in the middle of abracadabra and there is no P. So therefore, one of them has to be wrong. They can’t both be right. And the same thing is true about structuring a drama. You go along and say, ‘I know this has got to happen at the end of the second act,’ until you realize you’ve spent two years, and it doesn’t work. So something’s wrong. Either the first and third acts are wrong or the second act is wrong. How am I going to fix it? The structure is the whole thing – getting the movie to eat up 15 lines on a sheet of paper so you can write it.

Heist (Directed by David Mamet)

 How do you make a genre film your own?

Well, you can’t help but make a distinct movie. If you give yourself up to the form, it’s going to be distinctively your own because the form’s going to tell you what’s needed. That’s one of the great things I find about working in drama is you’re always learning from the form. You’re always getting humbled by it. It’s exactly like analyzing a dream. You’re trying to analyze your dreams. You say, ‘I know what that means; I know exactly what that means; why am I still unsettled?’ You say, ‘Let me look a little harder at this little thing over here. But that’s not important; that’s not important; that’s not important. The part where I kill the monster – that’s the important part, and I know that means my father this and da da da da da. But what about this little part over here about the bunny rabbit? Why is the bunny rabbit hopping across the thing? Oh, that’s not important; that’s not important.’ Making up a drama is almost exactly analogous to analyzing your dreams. That understanding that you cleanse just like the heroes cleanse not from your ability to manipulate the material but from your ability to understand the material. It’s really humbling, just like when you finally have to look at what that little bunny means. There’s a reason why your mind didn’t want to see that. There’s a reason why you say, ‘Oh, that’s just interstitial material. Fuck that. That’s nothing, right?’ Because that’s always where the truth lies, it’s going to tell you how to reformulate the puzzle.

Spartan (Directed by David Mamet)

What’s the bunny rabbit in this movie?

Part of the bunny rabbit in Spartan is what does he do in the second act? He finds out that everything is screwed up, and it’s not a question of manipulation. I better get on my white horse and ride off in all directions, but the question is what am I going to do? So the first thing he does is he says, ‘I’m going to get everything to the first lady, because she’s the mommy. She’ll solve the problem.’ He finds out that he’s failed. He was so intent on trying to get to the mother of the victim that he overlooks the fact that he’s just gotten trapped. This woman doesn’t look like she’s the secret service but she is, and then it turns out that that wisdom there leads him to where does he go then? First he goes to the young girl and says, ‘Here’s the story. Can you help me; can you help me?’And what she says is, ‘All I’m going to tell you is what you told me in the first reel, right?’ He doesn’t like that, so he’s going to get out of it by going to the mother. He goes to the mother first, and she says, ‘There’s nobody there but you; therenobody there but you. Everything you wanted to avail yourself of isn’t there. There is no government. The government’s trying to kill you. There isn’t any unit cohesion. The unit’s trying to kill you. There isn’t any sense of patriotism. Your country’s trying to kill you. Everybody wants you dead. You have to save her.’ The woman says, ‘You have to save her because there’s nobody but you. It’s just your responsibility.’ And then he goes to his friend, Tia Texada, and says, ‘What am I going to do?’ She tells him the same thing, ‘There’s nobody there but you.’ So he says, ‘I’d better go do it. Let me go back and avail myself of one of my other allies.’ And the other ally says, ‘I’m not even going to help you. There’s nobody there but you.’ She offers him an out as we find that friends often do when we’re in the midst of a moral dilemma. We go talk to our friends, right? One of our friends always says, ‘Listen, I understand that you wanna do what you think is the right thing, but that’s really not the right thing here, and let me tell you why.’ It does you a credit that you said you want to do the right thing, but the really righter thing would be to do the wrong thing. And the question is, having had the problem restated to him, having understood what the problem is and having had the problem restated to him, he’s now given an out. What’s he going to do? That’s when he has to make a decision that starts to get into the third act. As in any dramatic structure, the third act is really just a reiteration of the first act where the terms are clarified.

Spartan (Directed by David Mamet)

So personal responsibility is the bunny rabbit?

Yeah, maybe that’s the bunny rabbit.

How did you keep the exposition to a minimum?

That’s the fun of it. Anybody can write a script that has ‘Jim, how were things since you were elected governor of Minnesota? How’s your albino daughter?’ ‘As of course you know, Mr. Smith, your son has myopia. It’s amazing that, having that myopia, he was winning the national spelling bee.’ That’s easy; that’s not challenging. The trick is to take a story that might be complex and make it simple enough that people will want to catch up with it rather than stopping them and explaining to them why they should be interested because then they might understand, but they won’t care. What makes them interested is to make them catch up. What’s happening here? Who is this guy? What crime was committed? Who was taken? Why is she important? Why are all these government people running around? And how is he going to get her back? They want to see what he’s going to do next. That’s all that moviemaking comes down to – what happens next?

How do you not become lost in power?

That’s a very good question. I think the answer is that you have to have the specter in front of you all the time. You have to be able to learn, and I think I’m capable of doing this to a certain extent, and I would like to be able to do it to a greater extent, to say that you have to be able to take pride in mastering your own impulses, take pleasure in gratifying them. There are a lot of really great models, and the military is one of them. I think this is a very pro-military movie in many ways. It’s saying, Here are people who are capable of subordinating their financial needs and their physical needs to an extraordinary regiment, mental and physical regiment, in the cause of service. The question of the movie is, ‘To what extent is that person capable of abiding by precepts which he’s teaching other students, which he’s explained to others?’

Spartan (Directed by David Mamet)

Do actors like Val Kilmer respect your dialogue and not try to change it?

Yeah, they don’t do that to me because of several reasons. One is the dialogue is good; the other reason is the actor is good.

Have you ever deviated from your own script?

I haven’t deviated from it. I’ve certainly changed it.

In what circumstances?

Well, if something’s not working, a lot of the times you say, ‘Well, let’s try something else.’ I mean, I’ve always got a typewriter in the trailer. Say, ‘You know, that scene isn’t working right. Give me a moment, I’ll write a new scene.’

You get inspired too. Oftentimes, you just get inspired. Stuff’s happening on the set. You say, ‘Oh my God, let’s do some more of that,’ or, ‘Now I understand what happens in scene 47. One of my favorite moments was doing State and Main with Alec Baldwin and Julia Stiles. They’re both drunk out of their minds, and he crashes the car. The car is upside down; they’re both drunk, and he crawls out of the car and looks around. He says, ‘Well, that happened.’ It was like an inspiration at four o’clock in the morning. He said something else, and I said, ‘Well, wait a second, say this.’ I was looking at what was happening on the set and said, ‘Wouldn’t that be funnier?’

The Spanish Prisoner (Directed by David Mamet)

Has an actor ever invented a brilliant line that you took credit for?

No, I would never take credit for something somebody else said.

But in a play, you wouldn’t change what’s written.

Well, of course, when it’s written. I mean, I just opened a play in San Francisco on Saturday, and I’m changing the play up until opening night, and that’s the first production. I’ll probably change some things as I work on the manuscript before it gets published. At a certain point you’ve got to stop.

What have been the greatest frustrations of letting other people direct your scripts?

Well, the greatest frustrations have been having the scripts directed other than the ways in which I thought they would have gone. But when I did a script for someone else to direct, I got paid for it. I mean, that’s one of the things you get paid for.

The Spanish Prisoner (Directed by David Mamet)

Something as well regarded as ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ – what would you have changed?

Oh, nothing. I wouldn’t have changed anything. I love that one.

When do you make yourself stop writing?

I’m pretty good. At a certain point you want to do something else. Past a certain point, you say it could be perhaps a little bit better with a lot more time, but I try to get it as perfect as I can given the fallibility of the fact I’m not going to live forever.

How do you approach something that’s your own as opposed to a for hire project?

I don’t think I approach them any differently. I put my name on it. That’s the best I know at this time.

Do you see a career plan?

I don’t know. I just make them up as I go along. Whatever anybody says, you’re always making it up as you go along. It’s like when you have babies; nobody gives you a how to book; nobody gives you a manual. It’s like any of the important things in life. Whether it’s your career, whether it’s marriage, whether it’s child rearing, you’re making it up as you go along. And you try to have certain precepts, and sometimes they even change.

Glengarry Glen Ross (Directed by James Foley)

Has directing become as natural as writing?

Well, I enjoy it. There are certain things I can do naturally, but the people a lot of us admire – I’m sure a lot of athletes that people admire – they’re working on their weaknesses all the time. That’s what I’m doing at least some of the time. So do you enjoy doing the thing that goes easy? Yeah, sure. But there’s also great enjoyment in doing the thing that comes with difficulty.

Directing is more of a challenge?

Well, certain aspects of the writing are easy. I write dialogue fairly easily. Plot is a big pain in the ass. I work very, very hard on that, but I enjoy working on it because it has great rewards. And I love directing.

When you sit with your plot, do you start with character, theme or story elements?

I think when you’re working on the plot, you’re talking about what does the character want? All the plot is is the structure of the main character towards the achievement of one goal.

– ‘The Dramatist Poet: A David Mamet Interview’. By Fred Topel. (Interview first appeared  in Screenwriter’s Monthly)

 

A Letter from David Mamet II

Homicide (Directed by David Mamet)

This is the second part of writer and director David Mamet’s letter to the writing staff of CBS’s The Unit in which he discusses the task of the dramatist: 

How does one strike the balance between withholding and vouchsafing information? That is the essential task of the dramatist. And the ability to do that is what separates you from the lesser species in their blue suits.

Figure it out.

Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.

Look at your log lines. Any logline reading “Bob and Sue discuss…” is not describing a dramatic scene.

Please note that our outlines are, generally, spectacular. The drama flows out between the outline and the first draft.

Think like a filmmaker rather than a functionary, because, in truth, you are making the film. What you write, they will shoot.

Here are the danger signals. Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of shit.

Any time any character is saying to another “as you know”, that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.

Do not write a crock of shit. Write a ripping three, four, seven minute scene which moves the story along, and you can, very soon, buy a house in Bel Air and hire someone to live there for you.

Remember you are writing for a visual medium. Most television writing, ours included, sounds like radio. The camera can do the explaining for you. Let it. What are the characters doing - *literally*. What are they handling, what are they reading. What are they watching on television, what are they seeing.

If you pretend the characters can't speak, and write a silent movie, you will be writing great drama.

If you deprive yourself of the crutch of narration, exposition, indeed, of speech. You will be forged to work in a new medium – telling the story in pictures (also known as screenwriting)

This is a new skill. No one does it naturally. You can train yourselves to do it, but you need to start.

I close with the one thought: look at the scene and ask yourself “Is it dramatic? Is it essential? Does it advance the plot?

Answer truthfully.

If the answer is “No” write it again or throw it out. If you’ve got any questions, call me up.

Love, Dave Mamet

Santa Monica 19 Oct 05

(It is not your responsibility to know the answers, but it is your, and my, responsibility to know and to ask the right questions over and over. Until it becomes second nature. I believe they are listed above.)

A Letter From David Mamet I

David Mamet is a playwright and screenwriter renowned for his precise representation of American vernacular, which he uses to investigate the link between language and action. 

Mamet was born in 1947, in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Vermont's Goddard College and New York's Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater. 

Mamet's first successful play, The Duck Variations (1972), has some characteristics with the rest of his work: a fixed location, a small cast, a minimal story, and language that mimics the rhythms and syntax of everyday speech. Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), tackled the complexity and misunderstandings surrounding male-female interactions and was adapted for the screen as About Last Night.

Mamet delves into the corporate world in American Buffalo (1975) and The Water Engine: An American Fable (1977). American Buffalo, for which Mamet won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, takes place in a junk store where three men plan the theft of a precious coin. The protagonist of The Water Engine invents a revolutionary engine but is assassinated for refusing to sell it to corporate attorneys. 

A Life in the Theatre (1977) depicts the theatrical world in stark and wryly funny detail via the performances and backstage talk between an experienced actor and a beginner. The Woods (1977) is a about a young couple who uncover the darker aspects of their love while vacationing in a remote wooded cottage. Mamet followed The Woods with three brief domestic dramas in which he emphasises conversation heavily. Reunion (1977) is about a lady and her alcoholic father reconciling their twenty-year separation; Dark Pony (1977) is about a father telling a tale to his little daughter as they drive home late at night; and The Sanctity of Marriage (1979) is about a married couple's separation. 

Glengarry Highlands Glen Ross (1982), Mamet's best-known work, is a satirical look at American industry. Four Florida real estate brokers compete to be the greatest salesman for their organisation by victimising naïve consumers. While Mamet depicts the agents as dishonest and amoral, he admires their dexterity and sympathises with their excessively competitive lifestyle. Glengarry Glen Ross won the Pulitzer Prize for drama as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Mamet's subsequent play, Edmond (1982), centres on a businessman who abandons his wife and wanders into New York City's seedier neighbourhoods. Following his beating and robbery, he resorts to violence and is arrested for the death of a waitress.

Along with his stage career, Mamet has written many screenplays. Mamet's first script, an adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice was followed by The Verdict, which follows a despondent, drunken lawyer as he confronts judicial unfairness in order to win a malpractice action. Mamet’s screenplay for The Untouchables centres on Ness's battle to enforce Prohibition and bring gangster Al Capone to justice.

Mamet's other major films include Things a change, Redbelt, The Spanish Prisoner and House of Games, which he wrote and directed and which won Best Film and Best Screenplay awards at the 1987 Venice Film Festival. 

He also directed Spartan, Heist, State and Main, The Winslow Boy, Oleanna, and Homicide. 

He directed the 2013 HBO film Phil Spector, starring Al Pacino as Spector with Helen Mirren and Jeffrey Tambor. 

Mamet has become particularly known for his vivid style of dialogue, defined by a sardonic, street-smart edge and meticulously structured for impact.

When asked how he acquired his style of dialogue writing, Mamet said, "In the days before television, my family enjoyed whileing away the nights by making ourselves unhappy merely on the basis of our ability to speak the language brutally. That is most likely where my skill was developed.

Mamet has also served as an instructor at Goddard College, Yale Drama School, and New York University. Additionally, he often teaches to courses at the Atlantic Theater Company, where he was a founding member. 

This is a letter that playwright, director and screenwriter David Mamet addressed to the writing staff of the CBS show The Unit, in which he lays out his guiding principles for compelling screenwriting. Mamet also takes time to criticise TV executives, who he refers to as ’penguins’. Overall, it offers some penetrating insights into what makes good writing and storytelling.

To the Writers of The Unit

Greetings.

As we learn how to write this show, a recurring problem becomes clear.

The problem is this: to differentiate between drama and non-drama. Let me break-it-down-now.

Everyone in creation is screaming at us to make the show clear. We are tasked with, it seems, cramming a shitload of information into a little bit of time.

Our friends. The penguins, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information — and, so, at times, it seems to us.

But note: the audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.

Question: what is drama? Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.

So: we, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions.

1) Who wants what?
2) What happens if her don’t get it?
3) Why now?

The answers to these questions are litmus paper. Apply them, and their answer will tell you if the scene is dramatic or not.

If the scene is not dramatically written, it will not be dramatically acted.

There is no magic fairy dust which will make a boring, useless, redundant, or merely informative scene after it leaves your typewriter. You the writers, are in charge of making sure every scene is dramatic.

This means all the “little” expositional scenes of two people talking about a third. This bushwah (and we all tend to write it on the first draft) is less than useless, should it finally, god forbid, get filmed.

If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it will bore the actors, and will, then, bore the audience, and we’re all going to be back in the breadline.

Someone has to make the scene dramatic. It is not the actors job (the actors job is to be truthful). It is not the directors job. His or her job is to film it straightforwardly and remind the actors to talk fast. It is your job.

Every scene must be dramatic. That means: the main character must have a simple, straightforward, pressing need which impels him or her to show up in the scene.

This need is why they came. It is what the scene is about. Their attempt to get this need met will lead, at the end of the scene, to failure – this is how the scene is over. It, this failure, will, then, of necessity, propel us into the next scene.

All these attempts, taken together, will, over the course of the episode, constitute the plot.

Any scene, thus, which does not both advance the plot, and standalone (that is, dramatically, by itself, on its own merits) is either superfluous, or incorrectly written.

Yes but yes but yes but, you say: what about the necessity of writing in all that “information?”

And i respond “*figure it out*” any dickhead with a bluesuit can be (and is) taught to say “make it clearer”, and “I want to know more about him”.

When you’ve made it so clear that even this blue-suited penguin is happy, both you and he or she will be out of a job.

The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next. Not to explain to them what just happened, or to*suggest* to them what happens next.

Any dickhead, as above, can write, “But, Jim, if we don’t assassinate the Prime Minister in the next scene, all Europe will be engulfed in flame”.

We are not getting paid to realize that the audience needs this information to understand the next scene, but to figure out how to write the scene before us such that the audience will be interested in what happens next.

Yes but, yes but yes but you reiterate.

And I respond figure it out.