In an interview on the WGA site, Ethan and Joel Coen are uncharacteristically fulsome in their answers about their latest filmTrue Grit and offer some fascinating insights into how they write their scripts.
If anyone has to be convinced of my repeated plea for screenwriters to stop worrying about the '3-Act structure' or building a ready-made template for their story, the Coens have done a very persuasive job for me.
They don't set out with a clear outline and then squeeze everything in. Joel says:
'It’s much more the case that there’s a discussion about what comes next extending a certain way into the script that often gets batted about verbally and then just gets written as opposed to writing it all down with one subset of A, B, C, D, and E, you know? It’s like, "Okay, this will happen, and it will lead to this, and then we don’t know what."'
Ethan agreed: 'That’s true. It’s kinda mushy. We don’t do an outline in terms of mapping out the whole thing but then, on the other hand, we don’t exactly write scene A and then stop and say, "Ok, what’s scene B?"
Joel: Yeah, it might be, "Ok, this will happen and lead to this and this and then we get here, and we’ll figure it out." If we’re writing scene B, we have some clear idea of what scene C might be and a slightly fuzzier idea of what D might be and a vague idea of what the ramifications of that might be – or maybe not. It just kind of falls off into darkness.'
True inspiration for all screenwriters!
Read the full interview with the Coens by Dylan Callaghan at http://www.wga.org/
Sunday, 16 January 2011
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