The Lost Tapes: Frank Daniel Q&A (pt 3)

Frank Daniel influenced world cinema. He was a film producer, director and screenwriter. He also made a tremendous impact as a teacher invigorating young, hopeful filmmakers. Researching his protégés, the students who sat in his classes and the films they went on to create reads like the guest list of a banquet for cinema greats.

Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver,Raging Bull), Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus), David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Lost Highway) are just a few.

David Lynch said: Frank Daniel—who was the dean of the Czechoslovakian film school—was by far the best teacher I ever had. Just a great, great teacher. Unbelievable! I never really liked teachers, but I liked Frank because he wasn’t a teacher, in a way. He just talked. And he loved cinema, and he knew everything about it.

Here’s a transcript from an audio recording of Frank Daniel talking with students about cinema in 1986:

THE LOST TAPES: FRANK DANIEL (pt 3)

On Sequences and Dramaturgy

Q. Will you explain the first culmination of the second act?

FD. Okay. Well, it’s not really the proper word, but it’s used. So why not stick with it? The story starts at the moment when the character is in trouble. I didn’t go into this in detail with 8 1/2 because that would have brought in new and different stuff. Anyway, in open stories like 8 1/2, the conflict has started before the film begins, and that’s why it’s difficult to point out where the first act ends.

In this case you discover the problem of the character, the conflict doesn’t happen in front of your eyes. You discover what the nature of the conflict is. Is it the wife, the lover, the problems with the production, problems with the meaning of the story? All those things are presented, and the summary of those creates the first act, but he has been in that trouble already. So that’s a little different strategy or “dramaturgy.”

Usually the story begins at the moment when the character faces the difficulty that he or she has to solve, and it better be a clear difficulty, and he better realize that he must do something. Otherwise we don’t have the feel that something has started, and the tension cannot be installed. We are dealing with dramatic form which means with action, and action without tension is pure nonsense. It doesn’t exist. Action immediately brings tension. So the awareness of the tension, and the clarification of what the nature of your tension is, helps to build the whole script.

Now, the character aims towards the goal, the objective, and you have the first meeting of the obstacles and antagonists or circumstances, and you have the rising action. The first sequence usually presents the alternative solutions. What are the choices? What should be done? And the character selects one alternative and if it’s skillfully handled, it’s the worst one. Then he selects another one and in the meantime the rest of the alternatives are eliminated.

Then one of the ways to solve the predicament seems to work. The character finds some expedient that seems to work, and that’s usually the first culmination. But, and that’s the “but” and “therefore,” that we talked about, it’s just not that simple, because there are consequences of things that happened before that he didn’t take into consideration. He offended somebody, he didn’t do things that he was supposed to do, he forgot about things. You bring those things back in the second part of the act and at that time they can be entered almost without motivation, because anything that works against your character at that time is acceptable.

Any accident, any coincidence, is fine, because it makes his predicament worse, and therefore we enjoy it. Also, it helps to explore the validity of the desire, of the dream. So it’s testing the character until you close the story, and at a certain point before the final culmination he has tried everything he could, and there is only one way left, because the alternatives were presented and eliminated. You see that, for some reason, he cannot use any of them any more, and therefore you have the final culmination, the confrontation with the inevitable.

After that you have the descending part of the story where we see what happened after the evil won, lost, or whatever. You see how they live afterwards. And the function of the twist in the middle of the third act is the last test. You wouldn’t believe the solution, very often, if it came directly from the resolution. So you come with something that once more offers the character a possibility to try for the last time, in a different manner.

Q. It’s supposed to be a truism that you have to write a lot of bad pages before you begin writing well. Is that right? Do you have to write some bad scripts before you start?

FD. It’s not necessary. There are people who come with a first script that’s excellent. It’s necessary to write a lot, and it’s necessary to rewrite even more. But don’t try to be perfect in the first draft. In the first draft don’t worry if you don’t have the right expression, the right words, just put anything there, underline it, and go full speed forward, because you’ll find it later.

There will be times that you drag your mind for weeks to find that really perfect sentence, but that’s after the first draft. If you start doing it during the process of putting the story on paper, then you will never finish, and script writing is mainly rewriting. That’s a real truism. If the scene doesn’t work, you start asking why doesn’t it work? It’s too flat, no obstacles. It’s because it was not prepared properly. Is it in the right place? What if I shift it?

Cards are also a very good help, but only after the script is written. You put each scene on a card and play with the continuity by shuffling them around. Before that they don’t help too much. The main thing is to feel the flow of the story. That fever that you find yourself into, as the characters are going somewhere and you must follow them. That’s what you need to pour the story out. And then the build-up begins.

Some people say scripts are first written, and then they are built. And I think this is close to the truth — that the building comes afterwards.

How You Start Doesn’t Matter

Q. In some cases we see the problem first before we introduce the main character, and sometimes we see the antagonist first and then the main character.

FD. It can be any way. You can have an idea of a nice location, a deserted house for instance. That’s how the story starts, with the atmosphere. The order they are introduced doesn’t matter, but you have to do the whole job, and be clear about it: the main characters and the exposition of their world, of their desires and dreams, of their predicament, and of the circumstances. How you start doesn’t matter.

Sometimes you can map out the world of the story for yourself. You can make all kinds of shopping lists to help yourself. You just take a sheet of paper and start putting down all the people that should be in the story. Then you start a list of the most exciting and important locations, and then all possible events that can happen or usually happen in that environment. It’s not necessary that you use them later, but if you ask what happens in a small town during the year, you can find events that help you to feel at home in that environment. And then list the relationships.

If you look at Star Wars, you can guess George Lucas had a shopping list — on paper or in his mind — of everything he remembered from the movies he saw as a teenager, and then put all those teasers in  the movie. He used elements of thrillers, and westerns, and fairy tales, and everything else that attracted him as a boy. And, from that shopping list, the stew was made.

The Way Things are Told

Q. Can you have a story that’s a story but it’s not a film? Can you waste time fooling yourself into thinking that it is a film? How do you apply and acid test?

FD. There are stories that are totally introverted, and yet they are stories, and you cannot turn them inside out. Externalization is very essential to film, so in a case like that you find out after a while that you don’t have a chance to succeed.

Q. There’s no chance to externalize what’s going on?

FD. If you can, then it’s wonderful. Then the story lends itself to cinematic treatment. I had an experience with adapting a short story which was totally an internal story, and there were no scenes to use in the movie. I took a year and gave up. It was a paradox that everybody liked, but not a real situation. So sometimes it is infeasible.

It’s not understanding what the attraction is that makes it so difficult to adapt. Sometimes it’s the style. That can be the case with a humoristic story, for instance, where the whole beauty is in the way  things are told, and, when you start putting the scenes on paper, they are not funny at all. It’s the way they are seen when they are described, and that, in the end is impossible to develop into a movie because you lose something that was the beauty of the narrative form.

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Tags: Cinema, creative writing, David Lynch, Education, film, film education, Film School, film teacher, filmmaking, Frank Daniel, Milos Forman, Paul Schrader, screenplay, script, scriptwriting