Film Courage: Please correct me if I’m wrong but was ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN an adaptation?
Woodward and Bernstein’s book?
Dr. Ken Atchity, Producer/Author: Yes.
Film Courage: I just remember in so many scenes they were running.
Can you talk about the script in any way?
Ken: You know, I’m not as familiar with the script as I’d like to be because I’d
like to have recently read the book and the script.
One of the things you do in a story like that is you add the running because there probably
is not a lot of running in real life.
I mean these journalists are probably too heavy to be running in real life.
Film Courage: They may not look like Robert Redford either?
Ken: Some of them might but that’s the big challenge.
Like SPOTLIGHT is an example.
They took a lot of, lot of reporting from Boston Globe and turned it into a dramatic
movie that covered…that collapsed many years into a few years.
You have to take those liberties and that’s why you end up saying ‘Inspired by a true
story’ instead of ‘Based on a true story,’ etc.
I’ve been through that many times.
But adding action and adding drama is what you have to do.
Film Courage: Right and the scene in SPOTLIGHT where Stanely Tucci, you don’t see him yet
but you hear him yelling at his assistant and I think something is thrown and then the
look on Mark Ruffalo’s face [who is waiting to see him] and that right there is enough
to set the stakes.
Ken: Right, exactly.
It’s good drama.
It involves the audience immediately because you don’t see what’s happening, so you
see a reaction to what’s happening so you have to figure out what’s happening.
And one of the common mistakes that younger writers make is that they patronize the audience
by explaining too much, by thinking that every single thing has to be there.
And I always say when you’re editing, one of the top 10 rules of editing are all the
same…cut…cut…cut…cut…cut.
Because when you’re in doubt about whether you need something, that alone is a reason
for cutting it.
You don’t need it.
The audience will make the jump and fill in the blanks.
And if you don’t let them fill in the blanks (it’s called painting-by-the-numbers) then
you come across as patronizing to the audience and they get bored.
They don’t want to hear every detail.
You don’t have to say “Your Honor” in the court scene every single sentence.
You don’t have to say the character’s name every time you talk to the character.
People get this out of their system after 10 years of writing, but at the beginning,
you don’t know where the lines are.
And sense of the audience.
One of the things I like to talk about is the psychology of the audience.
It’s not the psychology of the author that makes you read a book, you don’t care about
that.
It’s just like your listening to your friend talking about his latest bout in the hospital.
I mean how much do you care about how he felt about every little thing?
You care as long as you can, but if he has any sense at all he’ll cut it down.
And the truth is you don’t care about the psychology of the characters either.
That’s not what’s important, what’s important is your psychology as always, the
audience’s psychology.
And that’s why Hitchcock and Peter Weir really know what they’re doing.
That drive away in WITNESS is one of the most brilliant parts of the film because of the
length of the driveway.
So it was the location choice.
He’s telling the location manager I need a place that has a long, long, long, driveway
that will give me a 60-second tracking shot.
And in THE BIRDS when the heroine takes the flashlight without even testing whether it
works or not and starts heading up the wooden steps because she hears rustling in the attic,
that is the longest walk up the steps you’ve ever seen in a film because it is so stupid
that the audience needs at least three or four steps to get it out of their system.
Oh c’mon why does every actress, and why does she have to have white underwear on,
and why is it always at the end of a horror film, and why doesn’t she test it…so once
you get past that…okay now she’s on the middle step…and then you go through “Oh,
my God, why is she…this doesn’t make any sense…I don’t want to go through this.
This doesn’t make any sense.
And then by the time she gets to the top step…you’re ready, like okay, I paid to get scared, this
is it.
And that is using the psychology of audience, that’s the timing that the audience needs
to get into the exact right mood.
It’s just like the speech in JULIUS CESAR where Marc Anthony comes up after Brutus’s
brilliant speech on the corpse of Julius Cesar.
And Anthony praises Brutus’s speech and calls him the honorable Brutus and by the
end of his speech he’s turned the entire crowd against Brutus even though they were
all cheering for Brutus at the beginning of his speech.
He takes the psychology of the audience and twists it around in a way that you can see
it coming but you don’t care, you just want to go there.
And nobody cares about Anthony’s psychology and nobody cares about Brutus’s psychology
(that’s not important) and nobody cares about Shakespeare’s psychology because nobody
knows that his psychology is.
They said the greatness of Shakespeare and Homer is that they themselves were nowhere
to be found in their work, their characters were everywhere.
And the characters speak directly to the audience.
That’s the hardest thing about writing is figuring that out.