With screenwriter Andrew Findlay
Andrew Findlay with son Leo
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The Writing Show (WS): This is Paula B. It’s an old joke that if you ask anyone in L.A. how their screenplay is coming along, they’ll tell you without batting an eyelash. It’s obvious that few of them will ever make it, but in today’s Hollywood, even seasoned pros are having a hard time getting projects off the ground. What’s going on in the American film industry and how does it affect your chances of success?
Screenwriter Andrew Findlay, who’s written for TV and movies all over the world, offers some hard-won insights.
Welcome to the Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I’m your host, Paula B. My guest today is British screenwriter Andrew Findlay. Andrew Findlay has worked in film, TV, and theater in Europe and the U.S. In Europe, he consistently earns the highest audience ratings for TV movies, like “Delayed Exposure,” “Ultimate Trespass,” “Twisted Company,” and “Oh God! How I’d Love to Get a Good Night’s Sleep and Have Sex with the Missus Again.” His theatrical screenplays in France and the U.K. include “Blue Moon,” “Riders to the Sea,” “Big Bang,” “Legacy,” “Viva Acapulco,” “The Badger,” “Angkor,” and “Stop Light.” He is working on his second four-picture deal for Bertelsmann-owned RTL. He also directs for British television, drawing on his background in photography and the London fringe theater. After spending years working in Hollywood, Andrew has formed some strong opinions about the place. Let’s hear what he has to say.
WS: Welcome to the Writing Show, Andrew. I am absolutely thrilled to have you with us today.
Andrew Findlay (AF): Thank you. Very pleased to be here.
WS: Let’s talk about the entertainment business a little. You’ve worked in Germany and France and the U. S. and the U.K. Can you tell us a little bit about those environments as they affect screenwriters?
AF: That’s a tricky one to answer. Each environment is different. I lived in France, and I worked for Germany and England from France, so I worked in three different places, primarily in television, long forms, movie-of-the-week, that sort of thing. And each one was different. In France, what I tended to do was to translate and turn French material into American material, so their idea of an American screenplay was probably as far away from the way the Americans treat their screenplay format as you can get. And I used to have a lot of battles to cut a 300-page script down to 105, which usually meant cutting half a page of direction away, which is very, very important, as anybody who writes in America will know. Two or three lines maximum for any direction on the page because it shouldn’t be more than that; it complicates the flow of the script.
In France and indeed in Germany to some degree, they write a whole different way, so that was one sort of constraint that I had to work with. England is different. They don’t have quite the same wordiness that the French have, but it’s a similar kind of thing. And Germany was different because I was commissioned a lot by RTL, which is a German television company--the largest in Europe--for actually strangely, writing again American scripts but for German production and worldwide distribution. In that regard, it was quite free, because I was given a great deal of leeway. We would discuss a story, I’d find a story, or they had a story, and I’d work it up through the treatment stage to the full screenplay, but I had a great deal of freedom. So in a sense, to answer your question in a round-about way, those three areas, one was converting very, very heavy, weighty, word-heavy scripts in France; England was slightly different because I worked less there, in fact, but they are a little bit nearer to the American form; and Germany was a far more free way of working, which I appreciated hugely. And actually, from the writer’s point of view, the less interference, the better, and if you are able to deliver a first or a second draft at the most, you are doing very well. In fact, quite often they would shoot my first draft, but this is a translated draft, so it would go from English to German, but that’s the way they wanted it. They wanted a scant, much faster moving, crisper formula. So in that regard, there were those three different constraints. They all had a different effect on the way I wrote, but I think on the whole, I managed to find my way through them, but there were arguments in France, no arguments in Germany, and let us say “discussions” in England.
WS: That’s really funny.
AF: It’s work.
WS: You speak, obviously, French, German.
AF: I do. I speak French but not German. When I say “American scripts,” the American form is the standard, and I think in the world movie arena, that is the format. It is generally speaking very crisp. It has to be. Not the least of the fact that people’s attention spans are pretty slim, and you’ve got to get the point over very quickly in a very concise fashion. Also in Germany, I think this actually was in part the reason that they were much easier to work with was that many of the people, the executives, had been to the AFI or New York Film School or whatever, but they had been trained in the U.S., so they had either been to Los Angeles or New York and had a complete three-year training and had a complete idea of how the thing was done, so hence, they used to hire either American writers or, in my case, an English writer who worked in the American style. Germany’s a huge consumer of films and television, one of the largest in the world, and they had a massive viewership in television. So they were very initiated into the American style of filmmaking and television filmmaking.
WS: You mentioned AFI. Just for our listeners, I want to tell them that’s the American Film Institute. Let’s talk a little more about Hollywood, too because you just touched on that a little bit. What does Hollywood look for? You said that everything has to be tight and concise, but can you talk a little more about what Hollywood’s looking for from screenwriters?
AF: Well, that’s a hard one to answer simply because I think it certainly has changed in recent, since I’ve been here. I came here in 1997.
WS: “Here” meaning the U.S.
AF: Yes, Los Angeles is where I am at the moment. I came at the suggestion of my William Morris agent, who said if you want to write for American markets you’ve got to be there, because I had been submitting material from France, which is where I was living, and I used to come over quite a lot from there to have meetings and what not. But as for what is required, all I can think is that the remake is still very much in, not so much “demand,” but in vogue. It’s what they seem to think will make the studios money. Prior to 1997, in fact, during the mid-1990s and before by ten to fifteen years, there was an air of originality, which I think went right back to the 1970s to the sort of “Five Easy Pieces,” Bob Rafelson and Hal Ashby days of original writing, original stories, “Chinatown,” all of that period that fizzled out. Certainly by the end of 1990s, it changed, and it became formularized. The people I know who are quite prominent directors and producers who simply couldn’t get their projects moving in the end of 1990s and certainly in the new millennium have all said that they had been cornered by the fact that the studios just play it safe, go to the formula, go to someone who’s been produced before. And the sad thing about that, of course, is first of all, it has diminished the amount of original material that’s been made here on the studio level, and secondly, a lot of the material they do make basically disappears. It comes and it disappears over the weekend, and the box office is appalling, and they’ve spent $85 million doing it, and it’s gone, and they thought it was a good bet. So it could be that, as everything is cyclical, it might come back to actually buying original material from writers or hearing pitches of stories that come out of the news or true life rather than remake of “Bugs Bunny” or whatever--“The Hulk,” stuff like that, which they seem to think is going to work. And there’s a real fear, and I think most writers who’ve had original material would agree that they’re too frightened to take a chance at the box office on original material.
WS: Is this strategy actually working for them?
AF: Well, they might say yes. I think it’s a pretty mixed bag. I hesitate to quote you any numbers because I don’t really know them, but they are these days freely available on the Internet and in Variety and whatnot, but you can see how massively publicized remakes have just disappeared, and their weekend numbers are almost an immediate indication that they are going to go to DVD. I can’t answer for the studios, obviously, but if I had to say, I’d say no, because people are getting fed up with the sort of crap that comes out.
In the 1970s, 80s, early 90s, there were some fantastic movies. If you look back at “Groundhog Day” and “Peggy Sue Got Married” and all of that genre of original, really original thinking and even “Pay It Forward,” they’re fantastic stories. You don’t see anything like that, and that’s only yesterday in comparative terms. Anybody who is 17, 18, 19, 20 isn’t going to know those titles, and that’s their real film loss, but basically that was only twelve years ago, fifteen years ago, fantastic stories that you don’t see now, really, unless it’s been made on a very low budget and found its way into the system through Sundance or other channels. But in my view, that’s a very lamentable thing because it completely steers where screenwriters turn their attention story-wise and the sort of material they develop, because in the past, you could develop an original story, take it, and get it heard with some degree of potential success, but now, take an original story, take something that isn’t of a certain genre, a certain mold, that’s in there right now, you don’t have a leg to stand on. It’s hardly worth going in.
WS: What about the independent film market?
AF: I’m not qualified to talk about that particularly. Anything that I’ve done is usually dealing with television or independent producers who have studio deals or whatever, but the independent film community clearly are the people who have, let’s say, covered and still do cover the areas that I was just speaking about. I think it’s because there aren’t the massive costs attached to it, and they have a certain amount of freedom, not massive because of the financial constraints, but nevertheless, if you really want to make your own film and you have decided that’s what it’s going to be, and you can raise the necessary $100,000 or $500,000 to shoot it on DV, the product will be different and perhaps more heartfelt and original and taken as such. But generally speaking, that has always been a place from which original filmmakers and original thinkers have come from in terms of film.
WS: But it sounds like if those are the kinds of budgets you’re talking about, there’s not that much money for screenwriters in it unless they happen to get particularly lucky. Would that be true?
AF: Yeah. Generally speaking, you’d find perhaps the director would be allied with a writer to make an independent or indeed the director would write the script his- or herself. No, you wouldn’t be able to live off it, it’s more of a passion, I think, and quite often people make their first and second features doing it themselves or with a partner with a view to moving into the big league or bigger league if they get lucky.
But I think that goes back to the thing about writers in the Hollywood system, and I know a few, and I know many that aren’t working and have not worked and have found it tremendously difficult to get projects off the ground over certainly the last five or six years because of the swing to very kind of basic material, very basic, play-it-safe subjects, comedies, love stories, action adventure. It’s pretty basic stuff. It doesn’t go out of a certain parameter. Studio-dictated. And if you want to try to get a project going and you have some degree of establishment in the system, I think that’s how you end up thinking. You think, “How are we going to sell this?” We’ve got to live. We’ve got to pay the mortgage, and we have a couple of kids, or car lease to pay, whatever it is, you’ve got to live if that’s what you do as a job, and thus, you don’t really have the encouragement to think of ideas that you might otherwise want to present to the system. And the system is exactly what it is. It is a system.
WS: So what is it that a screenwriter needs in order to be successful today or in order just to get work today? How do you compete?
AF: I think that work would be the first place to be, but again, that’s an almost impossible question to answer, because despite the fact that there are 300 books about screenwriting on the shelves of any bookstore or at Amazon, in my view, and having been doing it pretty much for twenty years, there is no rhyme and reason and particularly now for some of the aforementioned reasons is that you simply can’t guess what will stick and what won’t. People say do what you believe, do what you really love, and if you do that, the chances are that you’ll never even get in through the door, so you might as well go to the formula and say “I’ll try and do a bit of this, a bit of that” and patch it together given what you see up on the screens in any theater.
So there is really no way. It’s a lottery. All I can say is it’s a lottery. You have as much chance of getting a script accepted whether you are currently an established writer or a writer who just came out of NYU or anywhere basically, as you do from being actually out of the studio yourself. In other words, knowing what’s going to happen, bearing in mind that when you see something on the screen, it’s already been up to three years in development or more, sometimes, five years or more depending on what it is but an average of two to three years at an absolute minimum. So what you are seeing is already basically out of date, so to try and replicate that for the next three years hence is an impossible guess. So in many ways, it’s better to do what you feel you want to do and do it the best way that you can and take your chances. But taking chances is what I would say to anybody who wants to try and work in cinema as a screenwriter, you really are taking your chances. The odds are stacked as heavily against you as the lottery.
WS: Is there any component of who you know or your skill as a writer or your reliability or any of those factors?
AF: Yeah. There’s a huge amount of that. I think who you know has always been key in anybody’s career strategy. Being good: you have to be good. You have to be at the least skillful. In other words, you have to be able to write something that is the bare minimum of what industry standards are. The dialogue has to read well. The script has to read well. It has to have a balance to it, but it may not be brilliant writing, and screenwriting is not prose. It’s different. It’s a completely different discipline. It’s image-driven. It’s not a play. It’s not word-driven, and hence, it has to fit into a mold that anybody at a studio would read and say, “This person knows how to write. They may not be a brilliant writer, but they’ve got the message over.”
Indeed, if you know somebody, you might get hired, but then you might get fired and somebody else comes on. It’s the oldest story in the book, the writer being fired after the first draft and somebody else coming on and then three or four writers come on, and quite often, you have a committee-built project because it’s basically committee-run. There aren’t two people who make a decision on something. There are maybe ten or twelve or twenty who will ultimately have some influence on the way the project goes. So yes, yes indeed, knowing somebody helps. Being half good at it would perhaps get you through because you know somebody. Generally speaking, it has to be good, and the really good scripts do read really well, and those writers, some of them, have continued to work for years and perhaps today don’t because they don’t like this stuff any more or they don’t need to, or life has changed for them, but basically yes, I think fundamentally, you really have to have it off pretty tight.
WS: You mentioned being fired and having somebody else come in and having the whole committee thing, and I know that there are writers who make a pretty good living, even if their work is never produced or they just do rewrites or whatever, and I suppose everybody wants to have creative control themselves, but given that that’s almost impossible, is it enough just to be able to make a living at it even if you’re thrown about, buffeted about in the system, or is it just not writing as you think of writing, it’s just a job? I don’t even know if I’m asking this right.
AF: I know what you’re saying. The thing is, I think there are two ways of approaching this. I think any screenwriter who has been commissioned or has, let us say, sold a pitch to a studio or a producer, they want to see it completed. You don’t want to write a draft of a novel and never see it in print; it’s sitting on a shelf like a pile of paper. That’s no good. It’s the same way with a script. A script you can be paid for, and some people get paid really handsomely. It’s, I think, a lot of the motivation for many people who want to get into the motion picture industry because they think they are going to make millions out of it, and a very, very tiny proportion of those people do, and maybe those films will never see the light of day, but they may have been paid $1,000,000, $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 for it or at the least $500,000 or $750,000 or whatever, and it never sees the light of day. Of course, the motivation is to write it, do it, but then after a while, and indeed you get pretty quickly used to the fact that--perhaps less today, maybe ten, fifteen years ago, they threw an awful lot of money at development, and those scripts will just almost intentionally not go anywhere because they may have wanted to secure a book deal and then write the script with the book and then decide not to make it, but they own it. They own the book and the script, and that’s that. It was shelved.
And that went on a lot but I don’t think quite so much today, but nevertheless, it’s a kind of an industry standard, really. Stuff goes on like that that you write, nothing happens with it, and they get shelved, but you got paid, and I think, like anybody, you have to live. It’s a job. At the bottom line, it’s a job, even if it’s a passion as well. You have to live, and if you have managed to get commissioned to write a script and it doesn’t go anywhere or it takes so long that it finally is given up on or it becomes irrelevant, then yes, you got paid, and thank you, move on. You were paid for your job as a writer, so you performed your function as a job, you fulfilled your contractual duties and obligations. Of course everybody wants to see their work through to the final product, but I would say that the writer’s task is always--on a screenplay level--it’s going to be a blueprint, regardless of whether you write it or somebody else re-writes it and then somebody else re-re-writes it, it’s always going to be the blueprint anyway, so in terms of final creative control, there isn’t anything except on the product that you handed in.
WS: You say that it’s a blueprint, and I know that when you read a screenplay, it reads extremely differently from a novel or even a play. I just wonder, you mentioned that it was image-driven a minute ago. Can you just explain a little more about that? What does a screenplay look like, and how does this image….
AF: When I said image-driven, obviously the movies are image, tell stories through images more than they do words, and the words steer the images. That’s the whole point of a script. A script is a blueprint. It will describe a scene and what happens in it and the various camera shots or angles that the writer perceives will make the scene work, and the dialogue equally. The dialogue is not going to over-burden the scene. It’s all going to be imagery, obviously. In terms of a screenplay itself, for anybody who hasn’t seen one, and I can’t imagine that many people listening to the show have not at least seen one or books with screenplays in them, it’s a whole different format, and just the way you read down the page--intercutting, dissolving-- you have to understand something of that discipline to be able to actually read it. Otherwise, you can’t read it like a play, because a play is word-driven, obviously.
WS: Right, and a screenplay is really directions to various people involved in the production, pre-production, production, and post-production of the movie.
AF: Well, it’s primarily director and cinematographer. It goes to the director and cinematographer. Director first, who will then probably re-work the script with his vision, regardless of how the script is written. They’ll look at the scene and extract from the scene the way they feel that it will be best told in visual terms, in terms of interaction of actors and dialogue where that occurs in a scene. Again, it’s down to the director and the manner in which he or she decides to shoot it. So going back to the blueprint thing, it really is a very simple, basic ground-level number one place, and the director’s script, obviously in conjunction with the writer who is finally on the project, the shooting script--in other words, the final one they will actually follow--will go to the storyboard. And the storyboard, which is a series of key frames, what they call key frames, for anybody who doesn’t know, are drawings of the actual scene. So you might have a wide shot of people, and then you have a close-up of two people, and then a reverse angle, and then there are three key scenes, so that would all be on the wall in the studio somewhere or in a book or whatever, and that’s how they follow [the script]. It’s a quick way of shooting so everybody knows what’s going on at a glance, so they don’t have to read something. But that’s all developed from the screenplay, from the very basic blueprint.
WS: Let’s talk about some of your scripts. I’ve read several of them. I think they’re wonderful, and you actually cover a variety of genres. You sent me a comedy. You sent me a thriller/short of a horror movie. You sent me a fantasy sci-fi, and you sent me a treatment of, I’m not sure what I would call the Chief Longwolf treatment.
AF: That’s sort of a biopic, really. It’s a true story. Yeah, in terms of the material that I sent you, some of it has been optioned and come out of option. Some of it has never been optioned. I’ve been doing it for quite a long time, certainly nearly twenty years. Going back to the early 1990s, I wrote a script called “Anomalon,” which is a fantasy, very much CGI-driven. It’s something that interests me because it’s about subatomic particles and quantum physics and how that can work its way into a kind of child/kid fantasy story, which it is, and that I just did because I love that sort of thing. I wrote that as a spec script. I couldn’t sell it here. I haven’t managed to sell it at all, but I’ve had the same producer come back to me every two years saying, “Is that script still available?” So I had the same guy, just one guy in Hollywood come back every two years and say, “Do you still have that?” He said, “I like it, and I am still going to try and do something,” and then they go away, and I haven’t heard from him for several years. But that’s to me a wonderful way just to let…. for the sheer pleasure of writing something fantastic. It hasn’t found its place yet.
There is a kind of youth chiller which is called “Silo,” which I think you read and which is about three guys and a girl who get trapped inside a disused ICBM silo in the Midwest, and they find a community of people who have been locked in since 1974, and it’s a horror flick because they’re completely mad, and they’re perceived as being fresh meat, and so they have to escape this tomb under the ground which has a nuclear missile in it from the Cold War days, so it’s a bit of a mystery/intrigue as well as being a chiller. That has come and gone with interest and may just have some interest in it now. But again, these are spec scripts, so these are the ones that are written non-commissioned that I would try to sell and have tried to sell.
The treatment I sent you is called “Chief Longwolf, Take Me Home.” It’s about a woman in England who discovered the remains of a Sioux Indian chief who had died in London when he was traveling with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the late 19th Century—1895--and something in her just strikes her. She has to repatriate him to his native land, so she moves heaven and earth to get his body interred in the burial ground in the Oglala tribe ancestral burial grounds in North Dakota. It’s a great story, a very heart-warming story, a true story. That’s actually with a director in England, but it’s at the treatment stage so far. We haven’t gotten to the script yet.
WS: And you sent me “Love by Learning,” which is a comedy.
AF: Yes, that was a television movie for the German television company that I mentioned before, RTL. Again, it’s a sort of a fantasy where a man is… I wrote a lot of what they call women-driven stories. They have all kinds of elements of relationships, and one of them was about a rape victim who carried the child of the rapist, and this one was a comedy, kind of in the “What Women Want” vein--the really horrible guy who is sort of a misogynist, can’t stand women, threatened by them, bullies them, and then one day, trying to impress some girlfriend with a skydiving antic, his parachute doesn’t open, and by the time his safety chute opens, he’s too near the ground, and he hits the ground very hard, and something really strange happens to him. He survives, but something strange happens, and his personality splits, transfers into a woman, to a woman’s body who then becomes his girlfriend, and he has to see from his male perspective, he can see both sides of himself, so the woman is actually a part of him and talking back. So he’s talking to himself, two sides of his personality at the same time, trying to date this person, and the person, this woman will not have anything to do with him, so he kind of sees himself through… Rather in the manner…was it Mel Gibson? I can’t remember .
WS: Yeah, it was.
AF: Mel Gibson, yeah, could hear or psychically interpret what women were thinking. It was a similar kind of thing. That was a commissioned project. Again, going back to that, that was something where they wanted me to come up with a story, and we tried to work around what fitted into their particular parameters for that particular season, what they wanted to fit in with the other dramas that they had or comedies, so we came up with that. So in a sense, it was kind of derivative of that film, but it was very different. The only thing was that I suppose that it was a sort of split personality, and somebody learned the very fundamental rules of decency in regards particularly to women through seeing the other side of the story.
WS: So you write in a variety of genres, really. I know some of them are commissioned, but how do you decide that you’re going to do a particular subject or a particular idea, even if it’s not always in the same genre as something else that you’ve done or had produced?
AF: Well, certainly on the level of television writing, I have had several great stories that I’ve either seen on the news or read in the paper or seen on the Internet. I have to say that the script “Silo,” which is the one about the kids in the old ICBM silo, that came from the Internet and is based partially on a true story of some kids that would go around breaking into old disused silos. I just decided it was a fantastic horror film.
Several projects that have gone to development here were from the newspaper. One in particular was about a boy whose parents sent him to what is called a behavioral modification camp, which gets in the news quite frequently because kids die on a regular basis in these unregulated boot camps to try and straighten out unruly children. This was a true story that actually went worldwide about six years ago. I picked it up about a year after it happened and got the rights to it> So in a sense, if I ever find a story, if it’s a true story, then I try and chase the life rights, so called, meaning that you go to the individuals concerned, and you negotiate to try to bring that story to the screen via television or film. That’s something I’ve done a lot, which is to do my own sort of negotiation and my own chasing up and detective work, which isn’t very difficult, but sometimes you have to dig around.
Like in the case of “Chief Longwolf,” the lady in England was very, very hard to find four years after the event, and I finally tracked her down and managed to get the rights to her story, but again, I think that was on the news. I saw it here on the news, and there was some reference to what she did. It’s such a fabulous story I jumped on it as quickly as I could. Others, some of them just popped into my head. I’ve taken a thought to the next level and just expanded and expanded it.
But generally speaking, on the commission level, it’s rare that you can do that. It’s not just you. You either get somebody else’s idea to rewrite, or a studio or TV company will have a story that they have either bought in the past or they just decided they want to do, and they say, “Look, he can do this,” or “She can do this.” In my case, they say, “This is the story. Can you work it out to a treatment and then we’ll go to script?” And that’s how it’s worked for me in the past.
WS: I want to ask you more about treatments in a second, but I was just curious about this life rights issue. What does it cost to buy somebody’s life rights?
AF: Well, that depends on who it is, what it is, and how you approach it. Quite often you can obtain it for a small amount of money depending on what it is, or you can contract somebody with a kind of a deferred fee. An agreement to work with you, you would take it to a producer and then they would pay the person for their rights to the fullest extent. Even if it’s a nominal kind of option to begin with, it’s generally speaking just a token. That can be done through an agent or a lawyer. It depends on each situation.
WS: But you get exclusive rights? Is it always exclusive?
AF: It depends on how it’s written, but generally speaking, yes. When you take an option on anything, a book or story or somebody’s life rights, you have to have exclusive rights during a period of six months or a year or whatever it is simply because you couldn’t possibly waste your time if somebody else was trying to poach the same thing. So you have to have a movement in that period, and that’s all contractual stuff. It’s all stated in fairly standard….. the Director’s Guild or the Writer’s Guild contracts. They have a whole variety of different things that state what you can and can’t do and then you negotiate accordingly.
WS: When does somebody’s life pass into the public domain?
AF: I don’t know actually. That could be a hundred years. I’m not sure, but I think it’s something long. It’s seventy-five or a hundred years or something. I’m not sure. It’s something in that order.
WS: I would love to talk about your treatment. First of all, can you explain what a treatment is?
AF: It’s the bare bones of the story. In the case of film, generally speaking, it takes the three-act dramatic form, and you can write act one, act two, act three if you want in the treatment, or you can just tell the story, and the story in itself, like any good book, will have a beginning, middle, and end and round off at the end with a surprise conclusion or whatever. But the fact is, it’s a short story of the longer story. It can go from one page to twenty-five, but generally speaking, the one-pager is usually the thing that people… If you pitched something and said, “I want to do this. This, this, and this happen, it’s about this, that, and the other person,” and they say, “Can you give me a page on it,” a page is a page, literally, one page which tells the story as concisely as possible with its beginning, middle, and end and its high points so you can see the dramatic shape of it. And then a longer treatment would be seven, eight, twelve pages, something like that. Not much longer because people don’t like to read so they don’t want to spend time reading stuff. It has to come over very quickly, and if you’ve got that far, the chances are that the twelve pages will get looked at because it will give a far greater detail of the story. But often, it doesn’t go beyond one or two pages simply because it may or may not stick.
WS: Would you like to give us a little feeling, a little flavor of your treatment?
AF: Yeah. I’ve got a treatment. It’s not yet a script, but it was an optioned story called “The Enemy at the Bar,” which is a comedy, and I’ll read the one-pager. It’s short. “The Enemy at the Bar,” a comedy by Andrew Findlay, based on a true story.
[He reads.]
AF: That’s the end of the one-pager.
WS: Oh. That is fantastic.AF: Actually a true story.
WS: Really?
AF: That’s a true story, yeah. [UC 60] hid from the war and hid in Ireland for a year, and then the captain scuttled the ship. Anyway, this is actually not scripted. I haven’t done it yet, but it’s being optioned by a European film company.
WS: That’s wonderful.
AF: Yes. That came to me actually, my cousin is a filmmaker, a marine filmmaker, and he heard the story and told me about it, and he and I worked the idea up to a degree.
WS: But you know, you write in such a stylish way. This is something that is just a pitch, really. It’s not going to be consumed by the public.
AF: Oh, yeah. This is a one-pager. This doesn’t go into any detail. The detail is in a twelve-page treatment of the same story, which is the one that was actually optioned, and this one-pager I wrote after writing the twelve-page story, so they just needed a one-pager to go and pitch it to various people in Europe.
WS: But see, one of the things that really comes across is that you don’t write, “and then this happened” and then and then and then. You have a lot of sort of teasers and very stylish way of putting things. Like you said, “It is soon clear that,” or “Which we will discover when we meet.” It’s sort of almost like a promo in a way.
AF: That’s what it is.
WS: Yeah. I love that.
AF: That’s the shorthand. Like screenwriting itself, you’re writing shorthand for almost everything. You don’t have to go into detail. Lavish detail is irrelevant. You just have to state as cleverly as possible. This is adjective-driven. You have to use a very clever selection of adjectives in any two-line description of a scene. You have to get it over very quickly, very succinctly, and so there are certain tools that you have to return to without repeating yourself and without getting top-heavy.
WS: And keeping the reader’s interest.
AF: Bearing in mind that when you write anything, the only thing that anybody trying to do this should know is that almost without exception nobody reads anything, so you better keep it very crisp, very short, and very to the point with the necessary little sweetness to keep you moving along a little. As you say, promo-like terms or language.
WS: With a lot of mystery. You really sort of, oooh, you know, I want to know more about this because, oooh, this sounds like there’s some foreshadowing going on here. Yeah. I love that. Thank you, Andrew. That’s fantastic. I know I have a million other questions, but you have to go, so is there anything that you would like to talk about in the few seconds we have left?
AF: I feel much more now akin to writing in narrative and prose. I don’t, particularly now from a personal perspective, want to try to push in an impossible market any more film projects. I wrote a novel last year, and I am going to write another one, I hope, this year or certainly next year. From the point of view of people trying to break in, obviously, if you’ve got an idea, and you’re passionate, you’ve got to do it. Everybody has to follow their dream, but I’d say beware, beware to anyone entering, even the idea of going to film school trying to become a screenwriter. I’m only speaking from that point of view, but I did direct for ten years when I was living in London.
But from the writing point of view, it is one of the most difficult professions to enter now and be heard. The so-called development departments of independent film companies and studios are really there just to field the tidal wave of material, and indeed it does come through agents and official channels because nobody will accept anything unsolicited, so it has to come through an agent. That’s something everybody should know. Getting an agent is practically impossible because of the nature of the industry at the moment, and the odds are against you. And it’s daunting, and it should be seen as such. I have twenty years of experience, and now I can say hand-on-the-heart that it is the hardest thing I have ever done, and the easy bit is writing. The hard bit is getting something going, and it can take years and many disappointments. I have basically spent years in development in what they call development hell, which has now found its way into the vernacular. You go from one project to another. You go so far, it gets dumped, you practically get it made, then they pull out the rug, and it goes on and on, and that’s when you kind of have a foot in the door. If you’re beginning, you have to be fully aware that it’s just basically incredibly difficult, and again, it’s the lottery. I think because there are so many young people in the industry coming in, obviously it takes that resilience, I think, and also the ability to take the blows, because there are many, many blows. [Those at] the fullest extent are merely waiting or hoping or hoping that somebody will return their call or read their material or trying to get an agent. It’s more of that than anything else. It’s more of the practical stuff than it is the writing stuff. Writing you can do at home fine, but then when you send your script out and you don’t get a response or nobody will look at it and you can’t get an agent, it goes on and on like that, so it’s really, really difficult, but then most things in life are difficult.
But I would say this in particular simply because in my experience everybody wants to write and direct. It’s the old thing. “I really want to direct,” and it’s no joke. Anybody who really wants to direct will know what I’m talking about because they’ll say, “I really want to direct,” but that’s a really hard thing to do. If you really want to write, write, but don’t expect success, and don’t expect immediate responses, let alone any kind of feedback or commissioning. It sounds like a really depressing kind of take on it, but it’s a very realistic one. And I’m not alone. I have many, many friends who are veterans at television and writing, directing, and their projects don’t fly. I know several very well-known movie directors who still can’t get a film made, and that alone is a kind of pointer that at the moment, and indeed probably for the last five or six years, the industry is in a state of flux, and production has dropped, it has moved. The mere fact that they’ve virtually stopped making television movies compared to the terrific outflow in America due to reality television, stuff like that. You can’t write reality television. You can come up with an idea as a concept, and then if you want to be that person, then you can be the creator of a reality show, which may have far more success than trying to float a sit-com or a drama series, because it’s all moved, it’s all changed. Not so that people don’t get in, but it’s very interesting to go on the Internet, find out the statistics of how many actors are in Hollywood, how many writers are in Hollywood, and I’m only talking about that. I’m not talking about any other film or television infrastructure elsewhere but just here. The lion’s den, basically, is where it is. It’s the lion’s den. It’s as hard and difficult as it gets, and don’t get me started.
WS: All I can say is that the pendulum does swing, and let’s just hope that it swings back in a more positive direction, with the Internet and a lot more video and broadband and everything….
AF: In that regard, you’re absolutely right. There is a whole new area growing and opening up, and I think that will in itself probably open new doors for new people and change the old system, which has had an enormous amount of power obviously since the inception of movies. But yeah, it’s bound to come around again. Everything does. It’s all, what goes around comes around. But at the moment, and indeed, there is a producer called Jim Wilson who is the partner of Kevin Costner, and I got to know him a few years ago, and we were talking about how hard it was. I was saying I was trying to get this going and that going and it was very, very difficult, and he himself said, I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him, but he said, “Since 1997, the whole industry changed. They couldn’t get things going. The studios changed their whole attitude.” And that was the people who made the Oscar-winning film “Dances With Wolves” and others, and they couldn’t get a project going, and even then and some years later, he still couldn’t get something going, and these are really high-end people. So in other words, it’s gone into a downturn. But it’s bound to come back, so I wouldn’t say to people, “Don’t bother.” “Beware” is what I would say, “Be fully aware. Go in with your eyes open and have no illusion that it’s the toughest game out there.”
WS: Thank you, Andrew. This has been so interesting. Thank you so much for stopping by and talking with us. I hope that when you get your novels published that you’ll come back. I’d love to have you back anyway, but I really hope that you will come back and talk about your novels.
AF: Well, the first one was published. The second one hasn’t been written yet, but I’ve got an idea.
WS: Okay. Well, I hope you’ll come back to talk about either one or both of them.
AF: Okay. Good.
WS: Thank you so much.
AF: It was a pleasure.
© Paula Hollywood, Inc. 2008