My First Cannes Film Festival

My first trip to Cannes was 25 years ago. I arrived a week before the festival was scheduled to open. I strolled around the quiet town, lazed on the beach and took the train to nearby cities — Nice, Antibes, and Monaco — all beautiful places.

Around Cannes, things changed dramatically as the global film circus rolled into town. It got crowded. The locals fled. Giant billboards advertising Hollywood’s latest offerings cluttered the boardwalk. Fences went up. Security arrived. You can imagine what it’s like this year.

I was there because my first feature was selected to open the Critic’s Week, one of the 7 films chosen from first and second features around the world. This is the icing on the cake for a low-budget independent filmmaker. It was amazing, and you can’t compare it to anything else.

I have lots of memories, but two important things were that my Mom was able to go, and I got a great review in Variety:

When the festival finished, I stayed on for another week. I watched the signage come down, the crowds go home, and the locals return to the little town they enjoy for 50 weeks a year.

Cannes is a nice place to visit, but for two weeks every year, it’s a crowded madhouse.

I loved it.

You’ve been warned!

 

 

Searching for an Authentic Education (part 3): Frank Daniel on screenwriting

It’s hard to find and write strong original stories that are realistic for independent film production — and particularly low-budget/no-budget film production. There are several tricks that experienced writers have used to conceive, believe and achieve their storytelling goals — and Frank Daniel passes a few of them along in [part three of] this last lecture at Columbia U.

For some, the difficulty with writing is exactly that — the difficulty with writing. There’s much to be said about understanding your own process for getting the words on the page. Distractions are everywhere in today’s world. But there’s always been distractions — and many times we seek them out, intentionally or not. Sometimes the distractions can lead you to great things. Sometimes not.

Your Creative Process

Trusting and embracing your creative process is something that can be learned and developed. It takes time, and it’s helpful to employ strategies to organize your understanding of how you work — your creative process.

I’ve used these tricks and never regretted it. It doesn’t cost anything to try’em. The title for this section might be ‘New Dogs, Old Tricks.’ Let me know if you find it helpful.

Frank Daniel on Screenwriting (part 3)

Columbia University School of the Arts, Film Division, May 5th, 1986

It’s not a bad habit to keep files. You can make notes about the interesting originals that you meet, and you can put them into the files that say ‘characters.’ It’s not necessary to write long treatises. You just need to make a couple of notes, but you must put it in writing. You cannot rely on your memory. You need to create this habit of verbalizing your observations — one file for characters, one file for sets and locations and things, one file for gags, one file for lines that you overheard, one file for titles, one for situations, etc. You don’t need to know what the situation is going to be used for, just that there was something interesting that you saw happening. Make notes and collect these observations.

Titles are difficult to find. Sometimes you suddenly get an idea of a title that has nothing to do with anything you are writing at the moment. So you put it in the file. It can be the first step of a foresight of a story coming off. You know what the first ideas usually look like, oftentimes those are just germs of ideas. It’s a scene that’s not a scene yet. It can be a sensation of some figments of character that asks to be put in a story. An atmosphere of a place or environment that attracts you — whatever. These beginnings of ideas are coming from your subconscious mind, so they can have any kind of form. And before those dim silhouettes of characters, imagined bits and pieces of scenes or elements become alive and interesting enough, before they begin to make some sense and create some whole — it takes a long, long time and you have to help the process.

Ideation

So these notes, and a constant alertness in which you need to train yourself, help the first step, the ideation of the story. In my classes, I always spend several weeks at the beginning of the year just getting the germs of ideas from the students and trying to see where an idea leads and finding out why the writer has a desire to deal with it. The fact is that the students very often don’t know the answers clearly. It takes time to figure all those factors out.

You might have had an experience that I’ve had very often. Suddenly you start reading strange stuff. You go into the library and browse through volumes on biology, history, horticulture, or something else that evidently doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re working on. I never stop myself when this happens, because I know that there is a need for it. You just read whatever strange book you feel like reading, and then suddenly, when the idea comes, you see why it was necessary.

Just One Idea

Maybe from a three hundred page book you have read, there is just one idea, maybe just one line that appears in the script at the end. But it helped you to explore the territory, the subject matter, maybe the character or relationships. In other words, the ideation can be helped, and that’s what you need to learn — to play games with your subconscious creative mind. You constantly trick yourself, you put yourself into difficulties and solve problems that you have created for yourself.

You play other kinds of games, as well. For example, it’s well known that your desk, the place where you write should be used only when you work — when you really sit down and write. When you think and when you have what’s called writer’s block — which is just a very kind term for what’s called laziness in other professions — you don’t use your “creative” niche. Because your desk should be the place where the pleasure of writing occurs. You sit down when the scene is clear and when you can start typing. It’s a trick, sure, but try it, and you’ll see that it works.

Another way to help yourself — it may sound crazy, but it has worked for many people and I didn’t invent it — when you have an idea that is still unclear, when it still is more of a feeling of emotion and you know that you have got something you feel like doing, something you want to write, take a sheet of paper and write everything that you can tell about it: whey this script will be the greatest piece ever written, how it’s going to shake the world — in other words, brag on paper as much as you can. Use all the superlatives that you can imagine. Tell how people will stand in line to see it. Tell about all the festivals that will be astonished by it — whatever. And the moment you start writing all these gasconades some strange things will begin to happen. There will be some ideas that still may not have any specificity, but they’ll still be ideas that express the push and pull of the story.

The Envelope Please…

When you finish this bravado, take an envelope, fold the paper, put it in the envelope, seal the envelope, lock it up so that nobody can ever read it, and then forget about it. Then the work starts, the ideas start to become clear, and you get into the drudgery of writing. It becomes a question of how the scenes connect, and what the next sequence is going to be, what to tell now, what to reveal later, and all that.

Then, usually when you are approaching page seventy to seventy-five of the first draft of the script, there comes a moment when you are getting at least fifteen new ideas for better scripts than the one you are working on. Don’t throw those ideas away, make notes about each of them and by so doing get rid of them, for the time being, but if you reach that moment when you sincerely believe that the script you have been working on really stinks, and that it’s a piece of ‘you know what,’ then take out the envelope, open it, read the paper you wrote at the time of the prime inspiration, and you’ll be surprised.

The tormenting problems that you have had with your script have been there in the envelope, solved. You begin to see the answers, keys, the locks start opening. Now you can finish the script and then you can go back and improve it — make it into what it was originally dreamed to be.

Try it. Those who have used it have never regretted it. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s an old trick that I’ve learned from old script writers years ago.

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Days of Grain and Processing

Not so long ago, film was dangerous. It was mechanical, chemical and physical – and there was always a sense of risk. Film labs used to be one of the key links in the filmmaking chain. You would bring them your hours of work and trust them with all of the magic from set. Next day you’d be back to screen it. I loved that routine.

We still call it filmmaking, even though we’re not really touching a lot of film anymore. It was great to revisit 16mm B&W prints of my first feature. I hadn’t been at a rewind bench in years and the memories came flooding back. I loved my split reels and splicers!

I was inspecting two prints that were now 25 years old. I remembered that the lab had difficulty in processing my black and white 16mm film. (Their business was mostly 35mm color.)  They struck a “first answer print” which I screened, but wouldn’t pay for. They agreed it was dark, but rather than throw it away, they gave it to me.

The next print was better. Comparing them side by side, you can see just how different the one print is: the contrast is high and there’s a lot of grain. Even the perforations are black.

Watching that print gave the story a completely different feel. Yes, some narrative elements were lost in the shadows, but there was an overall sense of foreboding and creeping dread that I liked. It kept me watching for different reasons. I’m glad I preserved it.

Searching for an Authentic Education (part 2): Frank Daniel on screenwriting

Film moves on paper. It may be read on a laptop, but someone has to put the words on the page. Not every student who signs up for film school wants to be a writer, but every creative key in the filmmaking chain needs to know the fundamentals of storytelling and the different styles of contemporary screenwriting.

Screenwriting is hard. It’s one of the most challenging literary forms because it’s not what it’s supposed to be. It’s a written document that tells a story – but it’s supposed to become something else. The pages of a script are intended to be interpreted by a creative team – and then transformed into images on a screen. How that transformation turns out is anybody’s guess.

Average screenplays rarely become great films. It can happen, but the smart money starts with quality writing. If you start with good writing, the chances of making a good film are vastly improved.

I took a screenwriting class at the University of British Columbia around the same time I got this Columbia U bootleg lecture transcript. I had a great teacher, Bill Gough, who mentored me through the writing of my first feature film. I felt very fortunate to have his ongoing feedback and advice. Writing is about listening.

This is part two of:

Frank Daniel on Screenwriting

Columbia University School of the Arts, Film Division, May 5th, 1986

Scriptwriting, if it were taught only in the writing classes, would just be writing, but it’s more. It’s filmmaking on paper. Only when the other elements, the proper use of the language of the medium, are included does it begin to really work. That again is the reason why, in the first year, you are asked to take the directing workshop, even when you don’t have any intentions of becoming a director. You must try, at least once, to see what a director can do, what it means to devise an interpretation, to see what the camera and the editing can do for you. Then, even if you never continue directing, it will stay with you.

The problem with many Hollywood writers nowadays is that although they are very often good writers, they have been working, since the studio system disappeared, as total loners. They write in their offices and homes and they don’t feel the contact that, in the old days, the studio days, a writer necessarily did. He was forced to come every day at nine, sit in his cubicle, and type or do whatever. The writers usually played cards and had fun, but they were on the premises of the studio. They had a chance to see what happens when a picture was shot. They were constantly meeting the other professionals, they could ask questions, and they could collect and pick up all the know-how. That’s what we are trying to supply in our program.

We hope that having professionals as teachers will give you the basic idea of what it means to be a scriptwriter. Once you are on the right track and moving forward, you will realize that you will be learning all your life. There’s no end to it. The moment a writer or a director thinks he knows it all he should stop working, because from that moment he will only repeat himself. So if you learn the basics while you’re here, it will be easy to see all the ramifications later. The other classes and the other parts of the program, history, theory, etc., just add to your broader vision of your profession.

As you know, most of you come to the school with very little education in the history of cinema. For most film students all over the world, cinema means what’s being shown in the movie theatres now, today, and things that were made before are seen as prehistory or archeology, something that nobody needs to know about. Then everyone is surprised when a genre that had existed for at least fifty of sixty years reappears and is revived. Everyone looks at it as if it were a brand new phenomenon, a miracle. However, if you are familiar with the history of cinema you will be aware of the other forms, other genres, other types of narrative structures and styles that filmmakers have explored in the past. And that can help you explore different ideas with a new understanding of your own writing.

Now, let me try to explain what the reasons behind the design of the curriculum at Columbia were. It took several years to put the program into shape. Both Milos Forman  and I are firm believers in the validity of a solid curriculum. Curriculum for us means a step-by-step outline of the tasks and the problems that the student should go through and solve. That means that if the curriculum, in this sense, is clearly designed any professional who comes in to teach can start functioning. He doesn’t need to invent anything. He just follows the outline and uses his professional expertise to help the students. It make me feel happy that we have achieved it, and that I am leaving the school with a sound curriculum in existence, functioning and working.

Now let’s go back to the two parts of screenwriting: the writing and the dramaturgy. In the writing process the main educational problems are usually connected with the fear that everybody brings in the writing classes. Most of the beginning students don’t believe they have anything to say, and they feel like the director in Fellini’s “8 1/2.” Consequently they try to borrow from other people, and when they begin to write treatments, you can immediately tell who is scared to death, and thinks of avoiding the inevitable and who is trying to collect the courage to jump into the cold water and try something really new, original and personal.

Those who come with a genre story are usually trying to protect themselves, believing that the genre formula will help them put together some acceptable plot and that they will be in an area that’s foolproof. Which means that they start “plotting.” The only things they are concerned with are; where does my first act end and, what’s the culmination of the middle of the second act, etc. etc. They concentrate on all these purely technical and cerebral questions which don’t help the imagination at all. And what they usually end up with is something quite empty. They aren’t in their story, and they are not in the chosen genres. What they end up with are cliches, empty plots, flat characters and dull dialogue.

There is a belief that if you write a genre story, a thriller, a mystery story, etc., you are working on something that is commercial. This consideration, what’s commercial and what isn’t, is something you better forget about completely. All the marketing specialists, and I have a chance to see them every summer when they come to Sundance, are masters at telling you what was successful last year. They believe it will be successful next year, again, but it never works. If you look at those Columbia graduates whose scripts were acquired by the producers or made into film, you’ll see that they succeeded because they came with something that was original, that was not like anything that was made recently.

“After Hours” was not a commercial idea. When Lois Bonfiglio heard – she was then with the Ladd Company and was here when Joe Minion wrote the script – that Martin Scorsese was making the picture she was quite unhappy that she had passed on it. From that moment everybody started reading all the scripts the students were working on because maybe, now and then, something different might come along.

How many times have I seen people try to figure out what would be successful in two years with very little luck. And yet it takes two years to develop and finish a script, if you are fortunate enough to make it into a film. Can you imagine what the world will look like in two years? What will the trends in society be? What need will people feel? Nobody can predict that, and if you start taking the audience into consideration in this way, making assumptions about their future tastes and desire, you are in a field which is only based upon guesses, and usually wrong guesses, and unwillingly you create a sort of censorship for yourself.

The only thing you really need when you write is a total feeling of freedom. That’s why questions like; is this too expensive or, should I make it smaller so that maybe some independent producer will like it, should be forgotten. To make a film less expensive is something that you can do when the first draft is finished. There are always ways of finding the easier and less expensive solutions for scenes and sequences, or the whole scope of the picture.

There is a big difference between a cheap movie and a low budget movie. A low budget movie is a picture that’s designed to cost a certain amount of money that is not overwhelmingly high. A cheap movie is “Ben Hur” made with two horses and a few extras. Again, this idea of what’s expensive should not be on your mind at the time you are writing the script. It’s another form of censorship, and you don’t need that.

The most difficult thing, especially in the beginning years, is to trust yourself and to discover that you’ve got stories to tell, and a lot of stories at that. That realization usually comes as a surprise for most of the students at the moment when they begin to deal with only material that’s theirs and that nobody else can take, i.e. when they start utilizing their own experiences — when they begin to see that everybody they meet and talk to is a possible story or at least a character for a story.

You can sit on an airplane and next to you sits a lady or man, and if you encourage them, if you help them a little bit, and show that you are willing to listen, you get a story immediately. You can do that every day when you meet people. You should learn to listen and create this absolutely genuine interest in people around you, because that is the material that you write about.

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