Film Courage: When a student does begin a screenplay, how should they start?
Paul Joseph Gulino, Associate Professor at Chapman University Dodge College of Film and
Media Arts: How should they start?
I can tell you how I start because they will have their own approaches.
If they are beginning a screenplay, if they have a treatment already then obviously they
should just pour it on the page.
What do they see?
Hallucinate, what is it and set aside the critical element.
Is it this or is it accomplishing this tool or that.
Follow this and hallucinate what is happening.
Imagine what it is and write it down.
That is how they begin.
When I am writing a draft of a script I don’t format it in anyway, it’s just the dialogue.
Just a long list of the dialogue just so it will keep flowing and it is not and the key
is to make it feel like it is fully alive.
And people don’t live with properly formatted dialogue.
Things just flow.
So when they are just starting out, it’s just pour it on the page, hallucinate, try
to have fun with it, be excited about it, to me music makes all of the difference, come
up with the right score that gets you excited and when I say hallucinate, imagine it, imagine
what the audience can experience.
Have the fun that they are going to have with it.
There is this idea of imagination.
In order to do a screenplay you’ve got to have imagination.
But most people think that means the imagination involved with coming up with an interesting
character, an interesting story.
That is true but it’s only part of it.
There are really three parts that imagination comes into play.
The second part is coming up with imaginative solutions to story problems because you will
run into those.
You will come into those.
You will write your draft and somebody will say “It doesn’t work until page 30 on
because of that.”
And you don’t want to throw out 90 pages so you say “Well why isn’t it working?
I’ll be we can solve it this way.
We go this way.”
And then that will take care of that problem and sometimes it can be something very simple
but being imaginative about solving these problems.
But then the third part is being able to constantly imagine that you are the audience that hasn’t
seen it before, that you are watching it for the first time and keeping track of that.
What do we see, what are my expectations, what am I afraid of (that part of it) and
that is fun.
You are inspired to make movies because you are thrilled by movies.
So it will be that, let that thrill happen.
When you’re writing it this is exciting what you are doing.
Film Courage: Should a writer be more dialed in to what the audience is thinking or what
the character…what if I am so in the mindset of the character that I’m writing about
(the protagonist) how am I able to remove myself and imagine the audience?
Paul: Well if you can get so into the character that you lose track of what is going on, that’s
great and you can always fix it in the rewrite (that is what rewrites are for).
You’ve got a character who is fully alive and immersed and doing things and then you
give it to someone and then you reread it and something is either confusing or it has
lost its thread or this or that then you can always go back and construct it in an interesting
way but getting the characters to come fully alive is.
It’s a great accomplishment that will help you.
This phenomena that the writers do talk about and I’ve seen it again in 19 century writing
about the theater, this experience that the character “I didn’t really write that.
The character wrote it.
The character is really alive and they did that.
I’ve had that experience and other writers when it’s good, that is what it feels like.
“I’m just the witness that writes down what they are saying.
I don’t know where it came from?”
I think it comes from somewhere inside
So at some point that is more of the critical side but still it’s fun to imagine you are
the audience and wondering and being involved in experiencing this and watching that character
do these things and wondering how are they going to deal with the next crisis whatever
it might be?