Simple Stories/Complex Characters (Tip #95)

“I like simple stories and complex characters.”
Oscar-winning screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade)
Filmmaker Fills Simple Stories with Complex Folks/Roger Ebert

“I’m a big fan of simple stories, complex characters. I love when stories get from here to here. I know then I’ll have room for great character stuff to go on.”
Screenwriter Stuart Beattie (Collateral)

In Stuart Beattie’s screenplay for Collateral (2014) the story is simple, a hit man catches a cab at night with the goal to kill five people before he catches a morning flight out of LAX. That simplicity allowed Beattie to add some complexity to the characters played by Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. (Cruise’s character is a hit man with an appreciation and knowledge of jazz music.)

“[The jazz scene] is modeled after two favorite scenes of mine, True Romance with Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper…and the Luc Besson movie La Femme Nikita when he takes her to the restaurant and you think, oh great—he’s finally taking her out. And here’s the gun, here are the people. And the whole thing changes on a dime. I love those kind of scenes and I wanted that kind of scene in Collateral.”
Stuart Beattie
The Dialogue: Learning from the Masters (Part 1) interview with Mike De Luca

It’s worth noting that there are echoes of the jazz scene in the 1993 movie Schindler’s List when Amon Goeth (known as the “Butcher of Plaszow” and played by Ralph Fiennes) who appreciated classical music yet had no problem standing on his balcony and casually shooting a couple of Jewish workers in the forced labor camp. It may not be historically accurate, but it’s great cinema in conveying that one can be educated and sophisticated musically —and still be a savage killer.

Screenwriter Steve Zillian, who won an Oscar for writing Schindler’s List, is admired by Beattie. Chances are good that Schindler’s List is in what Beattie calls his “personal reference library.”

“I have a library of probably 100 scripts that are my favorite scripts and I’m going going back and referring to them again and again. How do they do that? How’s that set-up? How’s that written?”
Stuart Beattie

When you watch the below clips in light of the above scene from Collateral keep in mind these five quotes:

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”—Painter Salvador Dalí

”Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.”—Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch

“How does an artist look at the world? Well, first she asks herself, ‘What’s worth stealing?’ And second, she moves on to the next thing.”—Author Austin Kleon

“I think it’s fine for young (filmmakers) to out and out rip off people who come before them because you always make it your own.”
Writer/director Francis Ford Coppola

“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.”
Composer/ pianist Igor Stravinsky

P.S. Sometimes writers don’t sample or crib other writers, but their own work. Beattie points out that Lawrence Kasdan used two similar love scenes in both of his scripts for Raiders of the Lost Ark and Continental Divide.

Related Posts:

Inspiration Flying Under the Radar
“Steal Like An Artist”
“Impact. Energy. Emotion.” Nice quote from Mike Corrado (from a CreativeLive Rock and Roll Photography class) that describes the jazz scene in Collateral quite well.
Simplicity in Screenwriting (Tip #27) “Let this be our first lesson: Movie stories are usually simple…..Write simple stories and complex characters.”—Paul Lucey
Writing Good Bad Guys (Tip #85)

Scott W. Smith

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Stuart Beattie’s 5-Page Outline

“The best thing for me was reading other scripts and then writing, writing, writing.”
Stuart Beattie on launching his screenwriting career

Since 1999 Stuart Beattie has been screenwriting for a living. But before that success he wrote a dozen screenplays “and lots and lots of drafts of that dozen” that didn’t sell. He was working as a waiter in L.A. and while working in a deli he pitched his script of Collateral to Frank Darabont’s fiancé—who was a friend he knew at UCLA.

Collateral was a story that began as an idea just after Beattie graduated from high school in Australia. The sale of Collateral would launch his career. One that had roots back when he was in 3rd and 4th grade and writing 50-100 pages stories. Beattie also earned a journalism degree in Sydney before moving to L.A. to live.

“[Being from Australia] gave me an outsider perspective on everything—gave me a different look at things. And then once people met me it might helped stay in their minds a bit ’cause I had a funny accent. I had other stories than growing up in L.A.”
Stuart Beattie

And after coming to the United States he took classes from working professionals at the UCLA Extension program where Gary Ross (Seabiscuit) and David Koepp (Jurassic Park) were guest speakers he heard. It was there that he won a screenwriting award which led to him getting an agent.

“I like outlines a lot. I usually actually try and do a five-page outline. Act one is one page. Act two is [pages] two, three, four. And act three is page five. ‘Cause I know if I can boil it down to that essence then I’ve got  ‘what is the story?.’ I don’t like to do the 40 page outline because I think that takes away some of the creativity in the moment of writing the script.”
Screenwriter Stuart Beattie (Collateral, I, Frankenstein)
The Dialogue: Learning from the Masters interview with Mike De Luca

P.S. When Beattie was waiting tables at that deli in L.A. Darabont’s fiancé was technically not one of the tables he was waiting on, and he was a little embarrassed to talk to her since he was in fact waiting tables. As Christopher Lockhart says, “Take the shot when you think you’ve got that moment.” So many things had to fall in place for Collateral (2004) to get made that the odds are good that if Beattie doesn’t take that shot, Michael Mann never directs Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx from a screenplay that Beattie wrote.

Related post:
Getting Your Script Read (Tip #51)
Who to Blame for Your Failures Paul Haggis echoes Beattie’s words about what it takes to become a working screenwriter, “In order to get any good at it you have to write and write and write. It took me a long time to get any good.”
The Outsider Advantage

Scott W. Smith

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‘Unbroken’ Louis Zamperini (2.0)

“His story is a lesson in the potential that lies within all of us to summon strength amid suffering, love in the face of cruelty, joy from sorrow. Of the myriad gifts he has left us, the greatest is the lesson of forgiveness.”
Laura Hillenbrand on the passing of Louis Zamperini

“We are all so grateful for how enriched our lives are for having known him.”
Actress/director Angelina Jolie

Two days ago Louis Zamperini died at the age of 97. July 4—Independence Day here in the United States—seems like a fitting day to repost what I wrote about him in 2011. The extraordinary life of the former World War II prisoner of war is the central figure in the Angelina Jolie directed movie of his life Unbroken that is scheduled to be released this December.

Here’s the original post on Zamperini from April 2011:

“I’ve got so many scars, they’re criss-crossing each other!”
Louis Zamperini

“As the writer, you need to burn down houses. You need to push characters out of their safe places into the big scary world — and make sure they can never get back. Sure, their stated quest might be to get home, but your job is to make sure that wherever they end up is a new and different place.”
Screenwriter John August
Burn it down  

The story of Louis Zamperini would an amazing one if it were merely fictional. But the fact that he’s a real person who lived a real heartbreaking but redemptive story is beyond words I can adequately express. I just finished Laura Hillenbrand’s book on Zamperini’s life, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, and it’s one of those rare books that can invade your soul.

The story of Zamperini’s survival of not only a plane crash during World War II, but his enduring weeks lost at sea followed by two year’s of abuse as a POW is rich with conflict.  The book was named by Time magazine as the best book of 2010 and it spent several weeks atop the New York Times best seller list and even now after 21 weeks on the list it is still number two.

One of the reasons that I think the book Unbroken connects with people is not only because it is a great story well told, but because it’s a timeless story that resonates with people in difficult times. While we may never have to survive a plane crash or being tortured as a prisoner of war, we have our own battles—our own scars. And we are surrounded by a world at war.

And it is inspirational in the truest sense to read a survivor’s story. To learn about somebody who was once an Olympic runner who not only had his dreams ripped away, but was taken to depths that few humans will ever have to endure. To see somebody rise from those ashes is a story of hope.

From a writer’s perspective one of the great things to learn from Hillenbrand is her success comes not from telling original stories. But to build and add life to old stories. Her first book was the bestseller Seabiscuit. (The movie poster of the movie based on the book is the only movie poster I have in my office.) And just as Seabiscuit was once a story of national fame that had largely faded from memory, the same is true of Zamperini.

Though Zamperini had twice written his autobiography (Devil at My Heals) I don’t recall ever hearing his name before Hillenbrand’s book. Like documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, Hillenbrand has a way of tapping into stories that enrich our lives.

And for whatever reason Hollywood has not been able to bring Zamperini’s story to the big screen. Not that they haven’t tried—back in 1957 Tony Curtis was set to play the young Zamperini. More recently Universal Studios bought the rights to Hillenbrand’s book, and when I least heard Scott Copper (Crazy Heart) was set to write the script and Francis Lawerence (I Am Legend)was lined up to direct.

4/11/14 Update: Jolie directed Unbroken and the credited screenwriters are Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, and William Nicholson.

P.S. It’s also worth noting that Hillenbrand, who has her own physical afflictions, took seven years to write Unbroken.

Related Posts: Writing “Seabiscuit”

Seabiscuit Revisited in 2008 

Scott W. Smith

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“What is it about?”

“thirtysomething was the first sort of comedy/drama on which I really figured out how to write. And that was due to the show runners and wonderful filmmakers, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick. I wrote my first script for them, and they came to me and said, ‘really good script Paul, now what is it about?’ I didn’t know what they were saying, because it was all there.

“They amplified what they were saying with ‘where does it come from within you, what questions are you asking about yourself?’ I thought, ‘I’m suppose to do that?’ It was an epiphany to me that writers had to look inside themselves. You can date most of my writing from that moment, when I began to really look inside myself.”
Two-time Oscar-winning producer/writer/director Paul Haggis
Hollywood Chicago interview with Patrick McDonald

Note: The TV show thirtysomething began airing in 1987 and Haggis was born in 1953 so he’d have been thirty something himself (35ish) when he had his writing epiphany. It would be hard to find a more electic writer than Haggis. His early credits include writing Scooby-Doo cartoons and The Love Boat, the sitcoms One Day at a Time and Diff’ent Strokes, the TV dramas L.A. Law and thirtysomething, he was one of the creators of Walker, Texas Ranger, he’s written two James Bond movies, co-wrote the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and most remarkable wrote and co-wrote the Oscar-winning best pictures of 2005 and 2006—Million Dollar Baby and Crash. His most recent film is Third Person.

Related posts:

Emotional Autobiography (2.0)
Cheap Therapy
Finding Your Voice

Scott W. Smith

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“All stories are emotionally based.”

“I think all stories are emotionally based. From comedies to action adventures. If you don’t have the emotional center of a piece then you lose everything else.”
Writer/director Paul Haggis

“In L.A. nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”
Det. Graham Waters (Don Cheadle) in Crash

“I was carjacked in 1991 and we writers don’t react like human beings, rather than rage or anger I became curious about who these kids were that stuck guns in my face. It took a long time, every year I’d ask myself questions about them because they were never caught. I just wondered who they were. Were they best friends? Had they just met each other that night? What was their worldview? I didn’t know. I never  intended to write about them, but about ten years later I woke up in the middle of the night…and I just kept following the characters. So 10 o’clock in the morning I had this entire 30 page outline done. I thought it was a TV series at first and tried to pitch it and no one wanted to buy it. And a year later after writing Million Dollar Baby on spec I was still unemployed, so I called my friend Bobby Moresco and I said, ‘I’ve got these pages and I think it’s a movie,’ and he said,’no it’s not.’ I said, ‘I think it is.’ He said, ‘we can make it into one,’ and two weeks later we had a first draft.”
Writer/ Director Paul Haggis
The Dialogue: Learning from the Masters interview with Mike De Luca

Haggis and Moresco won an Oscar for their Crash (2004) screenplay and the film won the Oscar for Best Film of the Year. And Haggis’ gut was right in the  Crash (2008-2009) was developed by creator Glen Mazzara into a TV series in 2008 starring Dennis Hopper.

Related Posts:

Emotional Archaeology
Emotional Autobiography (2.0)
Goal: Elicit Emotion (Tip #77)
Four Emotional Needs
40 Days of Emotions

Scott W. Smith

 

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Who to Blame for Your Failures

“In order to get any good at it you have to write and write and write. It took me a long time to get any good.”
Screenwriter Paul Haggis (Collateral)

“We’ve all had broken hearts—in life and in work…but being a writer you get to draw from that stuff…You can’t get a thick skin, because if you have a thick skin you won’t be able to feel what you need to feel in order to write. So you have to feel every inch of that failure. And be able to able to experience that and move on…I think one thing I always did from the very beginning is I knew that if something didn’t sell it was my fault—it wasn’t anyone else’s. And so I never blamed my agent or my manager. I didn’t beat myself up for it. I didn’t say, my god, you’ll never be able to write. I’d say you can’t write, right now. Maybe next week you’ll be able to write and maybe you’ll get better. And so I tried to learn lessons from those things. I think it’s too easy, especially in this town to say, ‘oh, it’s these stupid producers, it’s the stupid network or the stupid studio.’ I’ve never met any stupid people in this town. There’s a lot of bright people. They just have different visions than you have.”
Screenwriter Paul Haggis (Flag of Our Fathers, Casino Royale)
The Dialogue: Learning from the Masters interview with Mike De Luca

P.S. Haggis says knew he wanted to be a writer starting in fifth grade, but before he wrote for film and TV he wrote plays and did construction in Canada, and when he first arrived in Hollywood he moved furniture “for a couple of years.”  When he was in his late twenties he began writing sitcoms (Diff’rent Strokes, Facts of Life, One Day at a Time) and in his thirties and forties TV dramas (L.A. Law, Thirtysomething). He was 50 years old when he finally had a feature film produced from one of his scripts. That was Crash for which he won two Oscar Awards. One for co-writing the script with Richard Moresco, and the other (with Cathy Schulman) for Best Picture of the Year.

Related post:
The 99% Rule Focus Rule (Tip #70)
How to Become  a Successful Screenwriter (Tip #41)
The Secret to Becoming a Successful Screenwriter (Seriously)
Screenwriter’s Work Ethic (Tip #2)
Preparing for an Oscar Speech (David Seidler-Style)

Failure related posts:
Susannah Grant on Failure
Commitment in the Face of Failure
J.K. Rowling on the Benefits of Failure
‘Failure is an Option’
Aaron Sorkin on Failure

Scott W. Smith

 

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