The Bluecat Screenplay Competition blog recently alerted me to this excellent TED Talk given by Phil Lord, the co-writer and co-director of 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie. Phil gives a great speech on the process of writing and rewriting.
And if you feel like binge watching TED Talks, our friends over at Screencraft have put together a great list (complete with videos) of ten of the best TED Talks about creativity, storytelling, and writing. Enjoy!
All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.
This early draft of the original X-Men script (the one that came out in 2000) was written by Ed Soloman and Christopher McQuarrie. The X-Men 2 script was written by David Hayter. Enjoy!
The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that’s where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don’t come home your best self.
The Fault in Our Stars script was written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber based on the novel by John Green. Scott and Michael are also the scribes behind (500) Days of Summer and The Spectacular Now. Check out our interview with Scott.
Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.
This is an interesting clip of Quentin Tarantino trying to dissect his signature style of dialogue on Charlie Rose.
Tarantino is always an interesting example, because he regularly has scenes where the action is compelling the story forward, but the dialogue has little or nothing to do with what’s actually happening (consider the “Royale with Cheese” car scene in Pulp Fiction). If you take the dialogue away, you still have an action-packed story, it’s just not as colorful.
My three Ps: passion, patience, perseverance. You have to do this if you’ve got to be a filmmaker.
Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.
The Writer:
Joss Whedon is one of the most inventive writer/directors working in Hollywood today. He’s known for his strong female characters, his love of monsters, and the clever way he mashes genres together to create compelling, highly entertaining stories. Joss is the creative mind behind such cult classic TV shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, and he’s the screenwriter of such films as The Avengers, Toy Story, and The Cabin in the Woods.
One of the great things about Joss is that he only does projects that he loves, whether their big budget super hero movies or micro-budget indies that he shoots in his own house. Check out Joss Whedon’s ten rules of screenwriting to take your writing to the next level.
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