Two of the Greatest Quotes on Art & the Craft of Writing

My wife had back surgery last month so it’s temporarily slowed down my blogging and YouTubing output. While helping her on the mend I’ve been listening to every teaching video and interview I can featuring Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Arndt. On one podcast he dropped a Tarkovsky quote that I had never heard and it instantly went to the top of my list of favorite quotes about art.

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
—Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky
BAFTA Film Award, The Sacrifice

Come on—to “plough and harrow” the soul. That‘s great imagery. I’m putting that quote up there with a quote written by Oscar-winning co-writer of Shakespeare in Love :

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.” 
Above quote spoken by the character Henry in The Real Thing: A Play written by playwright/screenwriter Tom Stoppard 

Now the Greek dramatists would agree with Tarkovsky and Stoppard. But I am aware that here are plenty of other writers who say the purpose of film is simply to amuse and entertain. No need to argue that here.

But I hope you get the right words in the right order today in whatever you’re writing. May your words plough and harrow the soul, nudge the world a little, and prepare a person for death.

Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles and runs the Filmmaking With Brass Knuckles YouTube channel.

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Screenwriting Quote #206 (John Milius)

“I had a wonderful teacher, Irwin Blacker, and he was feared by everyone at the school because he took a very interesting position. He gave you the screenplay form, which I hated so much, and if you made one mistake on the form, you flunked the class. His attitude was that the least you can learn is the form. ‘I can’t grade you on the content. I can’t tell you whether this is a better story for you to write than that, you know? And I can’t teach you how to write the content, but I can certainly demand that you do it in the proper form.’ He never talked about character arcs or anything like that; he simply talked about telling a good yarn, telling a good story. He said, ‘Do whatever you need to do. Be as radical and as outrageous as you can be. Take any kind of approach you want to take. Feel free to flash back, feel free to flash forward, feel free to flash back in the middle of a flashback. Feel free to use narration, all the tools are there for you to use.’ I used to tell a screenwriting class, ‘I could teach you all the basic techniques in fifteen minutes. After that, it’s up to you.’”
Screenwriter John Milius (Apocalypse Now )
Creative Screenwriting, March/April 2000

Related posts:

Screenwriting #142 (Irwin R. Blacker)
The Four Functions of Dialogue 
Screenwriting Quote #14 (Irwin R. Blacker)

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting Quote #205 (Francis Ford Coppola)

“It’s true I rewrite a lot. You know, I don’t have that kind of talent that, you know,  I saw of kids who could draw beautiful pictures…my talent is I just try and try, and try and try again, and little by little it comes to something that I think is okay.”
Five time Oscar winning writer/director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather)
Inside the Actor’s Studio interview with James Lipton

Related post: That Time William Goldman Got a ‘C’ in Creative Writing

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Screenwriting Quote #204 (Edward Dmytrk)

“Need is undoubtedly the most common, the most useful, the most malleable, and the most easily understood and accepted basis for a story…In The African Queen two completely diverse personalities are forced to ride the length of a dangerous African river in a dilapidated boat—that is the situation. Their need is two-fold; first, to leave the territory, which is occupied by the enemy, and second, to blow up the German gunboat at the end of their journey. The conflict is also two-fold; first that of the diametrically opposed characters, and second, their battles with the perils of the journey, By the end of the film they have conquered the situation, fulfilled their needs, and resolved both their physical and personality conflicts.”
Director Edward Dmytrk (The Caine Mutiny)
On Screen Writing
page 20

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Screenwriting Quote #203 (Steve Koren)

“There’s a giant group of people who want to be writers, and a smaller group who actually write, and an even smaller group who are actually going to strive so hard that someone’s going to pay attention to them…I was obsessed at one point. I took every course, I read magazines, and I just kept going to movies. I remember at one point, I sat down and wrote down (copied) Rocky beat by beat.”
Steve Koren (Bruce Almighty, Seinfeld)
Tales from the Script
page 273

 

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Screenwriting Quote #202 (Jordan Peele)

“I’m the kind of guy who wants to know the entire movie before I write it.”
Screenwriter Jordan Peele (Get Out)
Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast

P.S. Peele also said on that podcast that while he wrote the first draft of Get Out in 2 1/2—3 months, the idea had been kicking around in his head for five years. “Follow the fun,” is his bonus writing advice.

P.P.S. Just to point out how different writers are, Stephen King says that the story comes to him as he writes his novels. He’s the first reader as well as the writer. That’s the exact opposite method that Jordan Peele used. “Different strokes for different folks.”

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Screenwriting Quote #201 (Barry Jenkins)

The first book I ever read in creative writing class was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and my favorite chapter from that is ‘Shitty First Drafts.’ So I have no problem writing a terrible first draft. I pretty much journal until I get to the point when I say, Okay, now there needs to be a first draft of this….Once I’m in the writing phase of something, I do try to write something every day, seven days a week, even of it’s terrible. I think it’s important to stay in the world of the characters.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Barry Jenkins (Moonlight)
Written by February/March 2017 
Interview with Ernest Hardy

Related posts:

Bird by Bird
Writing Quote #27 (Anne Lamott)
Screenwriting Quote #58 (Anne Lamott)
La La Liberty City 

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting Quote #200 (Chayefsky)

“Who is your hero, what does he want, and what stands in his way?”
Three-time Oscar winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (Network)
From the book The Craft of the Screenwriter by John Brady

Note: I pulled this quote from my 2009 post, Starting Your Screenplay.

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Screenwriting Quote #199 (Gene Wilder)

“Always and consciously, I try to hook the audience in the first five minutes. I want them right from the start to feel something—BOOM! I want an explosion right at the beginning. I always want that.”
Writer/actor Gene Wilder (Young Frankenstein)

Between the years that playwright Tennessee Williams and screenwriter Diablo Cody graduating from the University of Iowa there was this quirky actor named Gene Wilder who also studied theater and communications and graduated from the Iowa City school on his way to becoming a Hollywood star and playing the iconic character Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971).

More about Wilder and his career tomorrow.

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting Quote #198 (Sidney Lumet)

“When I first meet with the scriptwriter, I never tell him anything, even if I feel there’s a lot to be done. Instead I ask him the same questions I’ve asked myself: What is the story about? What did you see? What was your intention? Ideally, if we do this well, what do you hope the audience will feel, think, sense? In what mode do you want them to leave the theater?”
Director Sidney Lumet (Network, The Verdict)
Making Movies 

P.S. This quote is actually a nice bridge between the worlds of podcasting/radio and filmmaking. One of the things that makes Ira Glass’s work stand out is he is known to sometimes ask over 150 questions to decide if a person or topic is worthy of a radio program on This American Life. That and he’s also said to have a 40% kill rate of shows they start to produce but do materialize in a way that is worthy of the program. The great thing about asking questions is they’re quite inexpensive.

Related posts:
‘Out on a Wire’ Podcast (A good list of sample questions to ask?)
The Major of Central Dramatic Question
Screenwriting Quote #194 (John Jarrell)
Is It a Movie?
What is it about? (An Oscar-winner weighs in on asking questions.)
What’s Changed (Tip #102)

Scott W. Smith

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