Emmy and BAFTA winner and Oscar-nominated producer, director, writer Edward Zwick has a book out titled Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Forty Years in Hollywood. I bought the audio book yesterday and will pull some quotes from it in the coming weeks. But Zwick has had an amazing career starting out writing prestige television (Thirtysomething) back in the ’80s before anyone was talking about ”prestige television.”
Then he went on to make prestige movies (Glory, Shakespeare in Love, The Last Samurai) working with many prestige actors including Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, and Denzel Washington. And he’s learned from many of the most talented people Aaron Spelling, Woody Allen and Sydney Pollack in the entertainment business.
In a podcast interview with Marc Maron, Zwick said as he was defending a plot of a script he was working on Sydney Pollack told him ”Plot is the meat that the burglars throw to the dogs when they climb over the walls to get to the jewels—which are the characters.” In other words, the plot serves the characters. It doesn’t matter how cool the plot is if the characters aren’t strong.
That reminds of the this Stephen King quote:
“Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored. I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story . . . . I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work free.”
—Stephen King
On Writing, A Memory of Craft (2000 version), page 164
Related posts: Screenwriting Quote #148 (Edward Zwick)
Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles and runs the Filmmaking With Brass Knuckles YouTube channel.