Learning

I read all the right books. I bought a copy of Final Draft. I went to Arista seminars. I learned about structure and subtext and how the inciting incident should happen on page 16 (if you haven't seen it, Charlie Kaufmann's Adaptation is the sweetest riff on all of this). It was a steep learning curve. How could 100 pages with so much white space on the page be so difficult to master? It made novel writing seem simple.

Did it help? For sure. You need to know the rules before you start screwing with them. The most original writers understand the craft they're subverting. But, and it's a big BUT, I'm sick to death of all the formulaic crap that pours out of the sweatshops of the industry, and the film funding bodies that know all the right patterns that a script must conform to.

As one Gillies Mackinnon has said:

"You get the feeling that there’s a culture dominating now which I can only describe

 as ‘ticking boxes’ – the idea that you can make a commercial film if you tick all the boxes. And 

I just think this is very very dull thinking. The Full Monty would never have got made that way, and other films that you could mention would never have got made that way. There’s a terrible kind of ‘genre’ thing – it’s like all the time, ‘Well what’s the genre?’ as if that’s going to answer the question. I feel as if there’s a weird artistic bureaucracy that’s set in right now which probably does make it more difficult for there to be any proper creative flow – because when you’re confronted with a lot of boxes that have to be ticked, it isn’t really sympathetic to that."

So I digested all that stuff, and got on with writing a second draft of the script. This one at a more leisurely pace than the first white-hot effort. Some things got better, and others suffered. I was learning.

But we still needed a director...