Screenwriters' Lecture Series 2014: Steven Knight

Screenwriters. On Screenwriting.

The BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters’ Lecture Series in association with The J J Charitable Trust 18–29 September 2014

There is one thing that you have to know, a deal breaker on all of it. You have to know human behaviour. You cannot pass go, you cannot move forward, you are dead stopped right here, right now, if you do not know human behaviour… And it’s more than understanding, you have to have empathy. You have to feel for these people, because – if you’re doing it right – you’re going to have to live out the movie through every one of them.

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elcome to the fifth year of the BAFTA International Screenwriters’ Lectures, in conjunction with the BFI and The JJ Charitable Trust. This year’s speakers include the legendary autodidact and multi-hyphenate James Schamus; the brilliant Oscar-nominated writer-director Steven Knight; and the two-time Oscar-winning and three-time BAFTA-winning actress and screenwriter Emma Thompson.

In narrative filmmaking, it is the screenwriter who creates the blueprint for what we eventually see and experience on the screen. However many talents are engaged in a film’s production, the screenplay remains the template from which all subsequent inspirations evolve. The complex relationship between screenplay and completed film comes under vivid scrutiny this year, as we invite an impressive line-up of speakers, who have combined their screenwriting talents with equally successful pursuits in directing, producing and acting.

Jeremy Brock Screenwriter and Founder of the Lecture Series

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James Schamus Screenwriter and producer James Schamus is behind some of the most critically acclaimed films of the last 25 years, and his creative partnership with director Ang Lee is one of modern cinema’s richest collaborations.

Their first three films, on which Schamus served as co-writer, were the remarkable Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994).

Schamus described their early ambition to find a laughter that is “a thoughtful, human response to life’s ever-changing circumstances”.

Together, Schamus and Lee have explored 1970s’ small town suburbia with The Ice Storm (1997), earning Schamus a BAFTA nomination for Adapted Screenplay; the American Civil War with Ride with the Devil (1999); and the Chinese epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), nominated for Adapted Screenplay and Best Film BAFTAs. The pair then re-booted a comic book franchise, Hulk (2003), before releasing Lust, Caution (2007), which was nominated for two BAFTAs, and Taking Woodstock (2009).

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Thursday 18 September, BFI Southbank

As a producer, Schamus’ credits include Brokeback Mountain (2005), which won Best Film and Director among its four BAFTAs, and, as CEO of Focus Pictures, he has helped steward such celebrated and much-loved films as The Pianist (2002), Lost in Translation (2003) and, most recently, Dallas Buyers Club (2013) to the big screen. Schamus is also Professor of Professional Practice at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

ANG LEE Many screenplays I’ve read feel like battleships – unsinkable and fully-equipped, written so that if you lost the script in the street, anyone else could pick it up and make a successful movie out of it. But the script is not the movie, it is the possibility of the movie. James Schamus always underwrites (a rare skill) but in such a way as to maximise inspiration.

At heart, he’s really more of a filmmaker than a writer – an unabashed appreciator of auteurist filmmaking, as gifted with images as with words. This is why I appreciate working with James as a writer so much.

The BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters’ Lecture Series

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Emma Thompson “The most moving things are often also funny, in life and in art,” noted Emma Thompson in her recent A Life In Pictures event for BAFTA, a nod to the warmth and humour which runs through her celebrated work as a screenwriter.

It is perhaps no surprise she began her career in comedy, writing sketches for stage, radio and television before making her feature screenwriting debut with Sense and Sensibility (1995) for Ang Lee. Her script remains one of the definitive Jane Austen screen adaptations, skilfully staying faithful to the author’s dry wit and observations of the class system while adding great humour and warmth. The film earned her both an Oscar and a BAFTA nomination for her screenplay; she remains the only woman in history to win both performance and writing Academy awards.

Returning to writing for television, Thompson penned the Golden Globenominated Wit (2001) for director Mike Nichols. And more recently, she has turned her hand to writing for family audiences with in association with The JJ Charitable Trust

Saturday 20 September, BFI Southbank Nanny McPhee (2005) and Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010), based on Christianna Brand’s bestselling Nurse Matilda books.

As one of the finest actors of her generation, Thompson’s credits include BAFTA-nominated performances in The Remains of the Day (1993), Love Actually (2003) and last year’s Saving Mr. Banks, as well as wins for Sense and Sensibility and Howards End (1992), both in the Leading Actress category.

ERIC FELLNER CBE Emma is a goddess and she writes like one.

Surprisingly though, given she is a film star and a goddess, she is also the epitome of a creative partner as a writer. She will bravely, and in no uncertain terms, tell you when she thinks you are wrong, but will also embrace and enhance every good idea you throw at her. We adore working with her as we know that the work will not only be great but the process will be hugely enjoyable and usually take you places you wouldn’t expect. If I could persuade her to, I would have her writing with us all day, every day.

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Words of Wisdom BRIAN HELGELAND LA Confidential, Mystic River Movie dialogue has never been how people really talk. It’s not supposed to be how people really talk, it’s how we wish people talked. It’s what you wish you said to somebody when they insulted you; it’s what you wish you had said in a romantic situation…

The trick to dialogue is that it’s about rhythm. You want to say it out loud, you want to say it often; you want to repeat it over and over again. And above all you want to shorten it.

Full transcripts and videos of the Screenwriters’ Lecture Series are available on www.bafta.org/guru

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If our Screenwriters’ Lecture Series has revealed anything it’s that there’s no set rulebook to screenwriting. Every writer has their own approach, as these thoughts from past lecturers reveal…

This page, from top: Brian Helgeland, Tony Gilroy. Opposite, from top: David S Goyer, Abi Morgan, Julian Fellowes, Scott Frank.

Overleaf, from top: Richard Curtis, Susannah Grant, Peter Straughan, Hossein Amini

TO N Y G I L ROY The Bourne series, Michael Clayton Everybody here has been going to the movies; you’ve been sucking up narrative since you were born. You grow up in a culture [where] you don’t have to till fields, you don’t have to bang stones together to clean your clothes, you have all this leisure time and you’ve filled it with narrative…

You know instinctively what a movie looks like… You know what it feels like. You don’t need Joseph Campbell to tell you what a hero’s journey is, you know what it is. It’s already way down deep inside you.

The BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters’ Lecture Series

DAV I D S G OY E R The Dark Knight trilogy, Man of Steel When you’re trying to write for screen, you’re trying to convince someone to make your script… For every film that gets made, a thousand scripts are written... It’s a big deal, because in order to even get a small film made someone else has to spend a million dollars, or $2 million dollars or $300 million. So part of writing a good script is actually convincing people to risk all their money and their livelihoods in making your film.

J U L I A N F E L L OW E S Gosford Park, The Young Victoria A film script is never finished because they cut the scene by the swimming pool, and you have to relocate it into a telephone box… Somehow, you just have to negotiate your way through it. That’s part of making a film. There must be a part of you that is a businessman, or woman, and you are working to see this gets made and reaches an audience.

You can’t keep fainting onto your chaise longue and saying, ‘That was my favourite scene.’

In my experience, if you fight about everything you don’t win any of them.

in association with The JJ Charitable Trust

and enjo rial possessio And for all people k y. And for let ns we have steal th ill all the In ting us white ourselve eir tribal lan dians and children s like pigs, e ds. And stuff ve in Asia are beinn though g ABI MORGAN The Iron Lady, Shame I do quite tight outlines and treatments. That’s a new thing for me because when I wrote plays I never did that.

I like treatments, they’re really essential to me, but I also quite like the freefall sometimes, and I suppose that’s what the rewriting is, it’s a way of me freefalling again. I’ll often write something that feels very good on paper, and then I’ll work it, and then I’ll throw it all away again. I’m quite good at throwing stuff away.

S C OT T F R A N K Minority Report, Out of Sight I have to know the ending because hopefully the ending is one of the six great scenes in the script. And so I want to set it up properly. Screenplays are unique in that way: there are a lot of set-ups and pay-offs…

Oftentimes, a movie has an ending that doesn’t work because the beginning doesn’t work. It’s not set up properly, or the characters aren’t that interesting. You don’t have enough dough to roll out with them to get all the way to the end.

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R I C H A R D C U RT I S C B E Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually Films can’t be infatuations, they’ve got to be relationships.

I think the difference between having a good idea for a film and a finished film that you like is the same as seeing a pretty girl at a party and being there when your wife delivers the third baby. It’s an incredibly long journey, and a good idea is only the tiny little spark at the beginning of this immense process.

P E T E R S T R AU G H A N Sixty Six, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy The process of writing [original screenplays and adaptations] is much more similar than you’d think, because even when you’re adapting someone else’s work, you still haven’t decided what you’re going to say with it…

If you’re really writing then the script will be guided by your own preoccupations, your own desires and your own emotions. You won’t know it, because all of this happens at a level that you don’t want to go to, but every decision you make will be completely guided by this.

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SUSANNAH GRANT Charlotte’s Web, Erin Brockovich Everyone has a unique voice.

Everyone has his or her own personal ‘penguin song’. And maybe that song is one that millions of people will respond to and find interesting, and if that’s the case you’ll go on to be JJ Abrams. Or maybe it will only captivate a few. The popularity of your unique voice is not what matters.

What matters is staying true to it, writing in the voice that is uniquely yours, not selling it out to chase some amorphous public’s idea of what you should sound like or be like to be profitable.

HOSSEIN AMINI Drive, Snow White and the Huntsman Something I’d recommend to any writer is to spend time in a cutting room, because you learn so many things, like how long a scene usually can be, what goes out, and all those rules... The thing I’d always underestimated is how important momentum is and that’s something you learn in the cutting room more than on the page.

The BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters’ Lecture Series

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Steven Knight Screenwriter and director Steven Knight is perhaps best known for muscular thrillers that shine a light on the dark corners rarely seen in film; from the vulnerable experience of illegal immigrants in his BAFTA and Oscar-nominated debut Dirty Pretty Things (2002) for Stephen Frears, to the secrets of Russian crime syndicates in London in Eastern Promises (2007) for David Cronenberg, and the life of British anti-slavery politician William Wilberforce in Amazing Grace (2006).

Latterly, he has taken to directing his own scripts – his debut, Hummingbird (2013), focused on a damaged ex-special forces soldier living on the streets of London. This year saw the release of the critically-acclaimed Locke, an intense thriller about an ordinary working man whose life changes over the course of a single evening, which won Knight a BIFA for Best Screenplay.

Directing has helped develop his writing, he told our BAFTA Guru website. “What I hope I’ve learned in particular is many of the lines you write don’t actually need to be said on the in association with The JJ Charitable Trust

Monday 29 September, BAFTA, 195 Piccadilly

day,” he notes. “When you’re writing, it’s like having your eyes closed. When you direct you must have your eyes firmly open. The more silence you can have the better.”

Knight’s writing career also spans novels, plays and television – a little known fact about Knight is he began his career co-writing material for hit gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, which he also co-created. He recently returned to television to devise and executive produce BAFTA-winner Peaky Blinders.

DAV I D C RO N E N B E R G [I was] immediately sucked into this intense little world of the criminal subculture in London. In a sense, Steve reinvented the crime movie, because the [ Eastern Promises] script accessed all the great parts of that genre while inverting and subverting them in an interesting way. It’s not a retro movie; instead, it’s very modern and intense. What I also found was that it offered a wonderful character study – particularly of Nikolai – and that I wanted to bring these characters to life.

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THANKS

E V E N T S TA F F

Steven Knight James Schamus Emma Thompson

Series Founder and Programmer Jeremy Brock

British Airways Julie Brinkman Stuart Brown David Cronenberg Georgina Cunningham Daniel Dalton Ryan Doherty Eric Fellner C BE Lucy Guard Briony Hanson Pippa Harris Viv Irish Ang Lee Cassandra Neal Sally O’Neill Catherine Olim Tanya Seghatchian Tricia Tuttle Mark Woodruff With special thanks to Kindred PR

Event Programmers Katie Campbell (BAFTA) Laura Adams (BFI) Director of Learning & Events Tim Hunter (BAFTA) Event Coordinators Julia Carruthers, Evan Horan (BAFTA) David Mayes, Isabel Shapiro, Tim Smith (BFI) Graphic Designer Adam Tuck Brochure Editor Toby Weidmann Photo Shoot Producer Janette Dalley Portrait photography by Craig Blankenhorn ( James Schamus), Rich Hardcastle (Steven Knight) and Nick Haddow (Emma Thompson).

James Schamus biography quote from: Introduction, in Two Films by Ang Lee. New York: The Overlook Press

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Maybe that’s what art should offer: an opportunity to recognise our common humanity and vulnerability.

C H AR LIE K AUFMAN Watch, Listen, Read, Explore.

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