The Blank Page : Part 5

The Screenwriter's Workbook
by Syd Field

(Page 5 of 5)

In my screenwriting workshops I always ask people, "What's your story about?" Invariably, I hear answers like, "I'm writing a love story about two cousins." Or "I'm writing about an Irish family in Boston at the turn of the century." Or "I'm writing about a group of parents who build their own school when their neighborhood school is closed."

When I hear ideas or vague notions like this, I ask the writer to dig deeper and find a personal expression of the story he or she wants to write. And it's not easy. Most of the time I have to badger him or her to be more specific, but after a while he or she begins to focus on who the story is about and what the story is about. That's the starting point: the subject, where the writer begins.

Thelma & Louise emerged as Callie Khouri was driving on the freeway and the idea suddenly popped into her mind: Two women go on a crime spree. That was the original impulse of the script. So Callie sat down and had to ask and answer some essential questions: Who are the two women? What crime did they commit? What made them commit the crime? What happens to them at the end? The answers to these questions led her to the subject, which resulted in the story line for Thelma & Louise. It's an extraordinary movie and I use it as a teaching film all over the world. And it all came out of the idea "two women go on a crime spree."

Your subject can be as simple as two old friends taking a wine-tasting trip through Santa Barbara wine fields the week before one of them gets married. That's the subject of Sideways. Once we know the subject, we have enough material to start asking some questions: Who are these two old friends? How long have they known each other? What do they do for a living? What happens to them on their trip that expands or affects their lives? What happens to them at the end of the story? Are they changed, either emotionally, physically, mentally, or spiritually by their journey? What are the emotional or psychological forces working on them when the story begins? Why do they go on a wine-tasting trip in the first place? In this case, their journey gives them the opportunity to explore their lives, their friendship, their dreams, and possibly their loneliness too.

This is the power of the subject. It allows you to create a starting point to begin the creative process of clearly identifying and defining your story line. If you can't articulate your subject, who can?

Writing a screenplay is a step-by-step process, and it's important to prepare one step at a time. First, you generate the idea, then break down the idea into the subject, a character and action. Once you have the subject, you know enough to structure it by determining the ending, the beginning, and Plot Points I and II. Once that's done, you can build and expand your characters by writing character biographies, along with any other research you may need to do. Then you can structure the scenes and sequences, the content, of Act I on fourteen 3 3 5 cards. Next write up the back story, what happens a day, a week, or an hour before the story begins. Only after you've completed this preparation work can you begin writing the screenplay.

When you've completed this first words-on-paper draft, you'll do basic revisions to this second stage of this first draft, and any rewriting that's necessary to polish and hone your material until it's ready to be shown. Screenwriting is a process, a living thing that changes from day to day. As a result, what you write today may be out of date tomorrow. And what you write tomorrow may be out of date the next day or the day after that. You have to be clear every step of the way and know where you're going and what you're doing.

When you're writing an action movie or war film, you have to be very clear about your subject because there are so many different perspectives to explore. Saving Private Ryan (Robert Rodat), Schindler's List (Steven Zaillian), Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick), and Apocalypse Now (John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola) express interesting points of view on the cost of war. So does Three Kings, David O. Russell's extraordinary film about the Gulf War, a script that explores the nature of war by focusing more on the humanitarian aspect of what happens to both victors and losers alike. It's a story about the price of war and the physical loss of life and limb, as well as the emotional cost of shattered psyches, and the cultural uprooting of an entire way of life.

The action takes place the day after the war ends. Three soldiers (played by Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze) find a map on a captured Iraqi soldier. Their superior officer (George Clooney) joins them and they discover the map leads to a bunker filled with millions of dollars of Kuwaiti gold. And so, with the war over, the story line begins as the men embark on a treasure-finding mission. But what they find are Iraqi people in desperate need of assistance. This is the starting point of a film that explores the physical and emotional landscape of the effect of war upon the human spirit as well as the human body.

'Breaker' Morant (Jonathan Hardy, Bruce Beresford), an Australian film made in 1980, based on the play by Kenneth Ross, is the story of an Australian military lieutenant in the Boer War (1899-1902) who is court-martialed and executed for fighting the enemy in an "unorthodox and uncivilized" fashion, meaning using guerrilla tactics, or as it's now called, insurgent warfare. The subject questions what a soldier can and can't do in a combat situation. At that time, there was a certain "convention" of war, and it was determined by a military tribunal that 'Breaker' Morant's actions had broken the so-called code of organized warfare, which is a joke to begin with. The lieutenant is tried, convicted, and executed for political reasons, a pawn on the chessboard of international politics. His fighting tactics, issued under direct orders (later denied by his superiors, of course), had nothing to do with what he did or how he did it. The English army had to make clear to the world that they did not permit this sort of unorthodox or "uncivilized" fighting and this had to be dramatized on the world stage. They needed a political scapegoat, and 'Breaker' Morant was chosen to be the fall guy. Just look at the prison scandals in the Iraqi War; it's basically the same story told in a different time and a different place.

Copyright © 2006 by Syd Field.

About the Author

Syd Field is a screenwriter, producer, teacher, international lecturer, and author of the bestselling books Screenplay, The Screenwriter's Workbook, Selling a Screenplay, and Four Screenplays. Published in 1982, Screenplay has been translated into sixteen languages, and is used in more than 250 colleges and universities across the country. At present he is creative consultant to the governments of Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Austria, and South Africa, and has been a script consultant for Roland Jaffe's film production company, for Alfonso Arau and Laura Esquivel on Like Water for Chocolate, and for Tri-Star Pictures. He lives in Beverly Hills, California.