The Lost Tapes: Frank Daniel Q&A (pt 2)

I’m surprised by how many students take so few notes in class or screenings. It’s almost like pens, pencils and paper notebooks have been deemed too antiquated for the high-tech age. But trust me, they are essential tools for creativity and collaboration.

I was invited to a recent screening of a feature in the editing stage and I took copious notes — as usual. (One of the great tricks I learned in film school was how to write in a darkened theatre. Movie critics had to do it all the time.) Sitting down later to discuss the cut with the filmmakers, I took the opportunity to exercise my brain. First, I spoke about my reactions to the cut as thoroughly as I could until I had exhausted my memory. Then I pulled out my notepad and, to no surprise, had many more comments on the work that would have gone into thin air without the prompt of a hastily scribbled note.

The flip side is something that I’m sharing here: a transcribed recording of a question and answer meeting with the esteemed film and screenwriting instructor, Frank Daniel (circa 1986.) It’s unpublished – as far as I know – so this too would have disappeared. I’m so glad it didn’t.

If it’s helpful – in any way – please think about sending me a note. Thanks.

Audience Expectation

Q. Once in a while, I’ll see a movie, and I’ll like it very much in the beginning and even in the middle, and then when it gets to the end I sort of feel let down, like it didn’t really live up to what it set out to do.

Frank Daniel: There can be different reasons for that. For example, we had a problem with Desert Bloom. In the first edition, the end wasn’t there at all, and the problems of developing each scene in full length, and slow pacing were making it almost impossible to wrap up the story properly. So it was necessary to shoot some pick up shots, and then, by condensing the final sequence, the film got an ending. It still is not completely satisfying as it could have been, but the end of the picture is there, because the story always has an ending.

So the reason for the unsatisfying feeling might be the execution, as it was in this case, or it might be the three endings that we talked about that make you feel quite impatient, if not angry. Sometimes it is a problem with the final effect of the story itself. The reason why the story has been told is not clear. Every writer is obliged to ask himself: what will the audience leave the movie theatre with? What do I want them to feel? Not: what do I want them to think? They’ll think what they want, but feeling is something that is in your hands. If you don’t know how they should feel, the end cannot be there. You just end the story, but you don’t end the film.

Did you ever see a Fellini film? When you are leaving the theatre after Nights of Cabiria, or after 8 1/2, or La Strada, you know why he made the film, what he wanted your to feel. For real masters, stories are vehicles. They don’t tell stories to tell stories. They tell stories to create emotions, and in our medium there is no other way to communicate emotion except by evoking it, i.e. by using the story material, human conflicts and human relationships, and situations that created sympathy, empathy, hope and fear. If you start dealing just with the story, you are only doing half of your job.

Desire and Obstacles

Q. Is there a time when what you want to leave the audience with starts emerging? Is it as you’re developing the character?

FD: It’s actually just very simple mathematics. You have a main character that brings with him or with her a desire. That desire creates the obstacles. We identify with the character. Now, when the story ends, what happens to that desire is the key to the emotional impact. Are we glad that he reached what he was after, or do we hate him at the end because he reached it? Are we sad he didn’t make it, or are we glad that he couldn’t.

There are millions  of possibilities, but you must look at each conflict. Scientifically. That’s when you determine what the tension is – what we hope for and what we are afraid of. Because the basic theme is carried by the passionate action of the main character, the result comes in the resolution and our response depends on what happens to that passionate desire at the end. It’s simple… and it’s very difficult each time.

Adaptation

Q. What do you have to say about the script for Dr. Zhivago? Is it a different process to adapt a novel?

FD: As you know we don’t recommend adaptations in this program for several reasons. It’s not that any of us has anything against it. It’s a totally legitimate form, and film is entitled to use any material that lends itself to be made into a good film. But adaptations are really more difficult for a beginning writer than original stories, and paradoxically, you don’t learn as much from an adaptation as you do from an original story.

Then there is the danger, when a beginning writer starts adapting a narrative piece, that he starts indiscriminately transplanting things that are proper in one form, in the other form without the due transformation. Look at any of Hemingway’s novels. Look at the dialogue, and imagine actors saying the dialogue as it is in the novel. It would almost inevitably sound stupid. But it’s so brilliant on the page! To understand what each form requires takes some experience, trade skills.

Usually when you adapt, it is best to read the novel as many times as you can without any effort to start writing. Then you put the book aside and begin to imagine the film until you see it so clearly that you can start an outline – but a film outline. When you are able to tell the story in a film outline form, you still don’t go back to the novel. You work on the treatment – just scene, scene, scene, scene. Only then do you open the novel and start seeing how its material can be plugged in, and what can be used for the film.

The reading you do in the beginning is, let’s say, to analyze the novel for yourself. Why does he start where he starts? Why does he give some of the sequences in the form of a report and other sequences in scenes? Why does he use a certain point of view; first person narration, third person narration, omniscient narrator? That helps you understand what the stylistic decisions are based on – how the novelist came up with this accomplished narrative. Then you have to find equivalents for these elements.

For example, to transcribe a novel in the “I” form into a film is not that simple. Even worse is when you have a subsidiary character telling the story about the protagonist and antagonist, because the subsidiary character is there to tell the story, but as a rule he doesn’t have anything, or very little, to do in the story itself. You saw Sophie’s Choice, so you know what happens when the narrator, subsidiary character, stays in the story and the problem of the point of view has not been satisfactorily resolved.

Character vs. Plot

Q. You talked about characters being more important than plot in the beginning, that you have to think about your characters and know your characters before you tell them what to do. Then at the end you said that you need to write parts, not characters. I’m confused.

FD: There’s no controversy in it, I mean you first have to know the characters, but what you write are parts. In a novel you can write characters, because you have time to go into their thinking, and into their memories, their dreams, and their self evaluation and examination, in other persons’ views of them, even in the narrators analysis and commentary, and therefore, you really write characters. In our medium they must do it all. We portray people in actions. And the actor must have ways of showing who the character is, externalizing emotions and thoughts, and this is what leads to the parts. When you have a scene in which two people can sit down and talk as long as they wish, you haven’t got a scene.

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