Film Courage: What are your core beliefs about pursuing a writing career?
Christian Elder, Screenwriter: That's like huge and what I mean by huge is
there's so many things, there the main thing is for me is you just have to be
committed and you have to have passion as a writer regardless of what genre of writing
you're working on. I think that first and foremost that you have to consider yourself
a writer not a screenwriter but rather a writer (that's just me) some people might say otherwise
but you really have to consider yourself a writer because if you don't understand how
to take writing out of the arena of solely just crafting spec scripts, pilots for tv
and and feature screenplays, you're never going to really develop some innovative skills,
actually doing those things that catch people's attention. I think that's very important so that
all falls under the ballpark of commitment and passion. That means that you basically your friend
is cup of coffee and your seat in front of the computer screen those are your friends
and you better get comfortable with them because
you're going to need them you know you have to you have to spend the time to to learn to do
what you want to do and also this is the other thing you know it's an excavation
and it's not an excavation of the of the work that's in front of you per se although it can
be it's an excavation of yourself because you start to realize who you are as a writer
you start to realize that like let's say like you know we're using a a baseball analogy you
throw a mean curveball you know you start doing you go oh wait wait I throw them being curveball
you know it's like well let me let me work on that a little bit you know sort of thing so that that's
what you start to learn about yourself but first you you might you might you know just think you're
just a good shortstop you know when you begin you know before you discover your own peculiar talents
when was that clear to you that's an interesting uh question and that's gonna be fun to talk about
when that was clear to me was I when I started writing in general I wrote a lot of poetry
and I enjoyed writing poetry and the craft of writing poetry and so I thought that maybe
it would be easy to use what I know from from poetry writing to to develop writing screenplays
I wrote my first screenplay and I had the great fortune to to meet and for a short period of time
receive some mentorship from from a guy who who took a little bit of interest in me
a director from old school from old school Hollywood
named ted post and he was very, very gracious and generous to to offer to read my first screenplay
and he read it and he got back in touch with me and he said to me goes Christian
you know I gotta tell you you know it's like I think you got some talent I think you know how
to write some dialogue but you have no idea how to tell a story it's like and I'm like oh wow okay
gee well tell me what you really do exactly you know but thanks you know and he's like I want you
to go out and I want you to buy this book and I bought this book called The Art of Dramatic
Writing [ Author Lajos Egri] the most important book I one of the most important books I should
say and I’ve read in terms of my writing definitely the the book that helped set me off
on the journey by Lajos agree I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly and and
the book is is not so much about writing for the movies as it is the the classical
elements of telling story as it relates to to the plays of Ibsen, Shakespeare even a a few more
modern plays of of the of the early the early 20th century such as O’Neill's plays and whatnot
and that really started to break down for me what I understood to be structure but even then I was
still a bit flummoxed on how to find a a way to have a confidence when I would attack a screenplay
because I was like okay there's this over here and I have I think I have a good idea of of of voicing
characters and and writing you know interesting dialogue but I'm not so sure how to marry the two
so I had written in one script and and some people were responding to it pretty well and almost like
a lukewarm fashion but they were like oh it's you know it's got a middle a beginning a middle and an
ending and I i stumbled across a copy of Shane black's the long kiss goodnight and I noticed
specifically how Shane wrote his screenplays these terse little bursts of of word formations
to to convey the atmosphere of of the of the action lines and the descriptions of each scene
just it was just so exciting to read that and to and how it was and how how he sort of
just kind of like broke rule certain rules not like not broke rules just to break rules but just
broke certain rules so that he could he can meet certain dumb objectives
in a very targeted fashion and I thought to myself well like I can do that that's not I canI
see what he's doing I see the architecture underneath it and I can I can definitely do that
and furthermore I found it very relate a great deal to to what it was like to writing poetry
because poetry is often very elastic with language and with words and Shane's work was very elastic
so with with words and sentences and the grammar was he had paid no attention to grammar really it
was just all about getting you to understand the scene and so I took that on and I rewrote that
that that screenplay that I had and then boom lots of people were all loved that script and in fact
it secured me a finalist position with Tribeca all soon after that and that's when I knew
I was on to something that's when I realized like hey I can do this now I
know what to do I have all my I have all all the paints in my and my box of paints so yeah.
Question For The Viewers:
What are
your core beliefs about pursuing a writing career?