Film Courage: How has the screenwriting Master’s program transformed your screenwriting process?
What do you do differently now?
Marty Lang, Screenwriter/Professor/Director: Well I think a lot more about the structure
from the very beginning then the way that I used to do it.
Previously if I had an idea for a movie I would just start writing and just sort of
see where it went and sometimes good things would come from that.
There definitely is a benefit to sort of free writing and just kind of seeing what comes
from it.
But my experience has taught me that spending time to outline an idea before actually writing
it makes the writing much more efficient.
I’ve saved multiple drafts of screenplays because I’ve gone and outlined ahead of
time and I figured out the major turning points of the film and that sort of thing.
That’s something I really didn’t do beforehand because I sort of rebelled against it.
I thought that structure is the enemy and the thing that I’ve learned is that structure
is your friend.
It helps point our errors before you get to them and it helps you stay on track.
If you know what the next thing is that you’re writing towards, it’s a lot better if it’s
five pages away then if it’s 50 pages.
So you know you have a specific thing to write to, your scenes have more urgency, your scenes
have more conflict as a result of that.
So I think that’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned.
The other thing that I sort of picked up along the way is that the more personal you can
make your stories and the more raw you can make them I think the more effective they
are for the reader.
The story that I wrote about my dad, there were some really dark things that were in
there.
And it’s not a dark film per se.
It’s a drama but really laying there some emotional things that I had dealt with a long
time ago, it really helps with the writing.
It makes it more engaging, it makes it more interesting for the reader.
The more you try to cover up sort of the raw things that your characters are dealing with
the less interesting it becomes.
So I think it’s kind of good to lay it all out there.
It’s kind of a form of free therapy.
Film Courage: I know you’d said in another class from another professor that they talked
about deciding what kind of protagonist you really want to focus on.
Did you start to see parallels in who you wanted to write about?
Marty: And you know it’s funny, I have and I see it now in the film that I’m making
now that it really is...even though the characters in this film that we’re making now have
nothing to do with me and my time in my life because they’re all in their 20’s, their
struggles are exactly what I’m dealing with now.
It really is interesting how subliminally you sort of inform your work with the stuff
that you are dealing with in your life and the issues that you really care about in end
that you struggle with.
It’s really an interesting thing.
I thought I was trying to get away from that but you really can’t.
It really was there.
Film Courage: So you see that a lot of the movies that you’ve been drawn toward have
a similar protagonist?
Marty: I think so.
You know, please that are trying to do good but have come from really hardscrabble, really
struggling circumstances, you know either emotionally or socioeconomically, those are
the kinds of characters that I really gravitate to.
One of my favorite films ever was a film called SHORT-TERM 12 that was Brie Larson’s first
real leading role before she got into A ROOM that won her the Oscar.
And that film is about a woman who works at a home for troubled teens and she herself
was a troubled teen when she was growing up so she sort fo enmeshed in that world and
she’s struggling to get out of it.
But it’s hard because you are surrounded by all this trauma.
You know, that really resonated with me because sometimes it’s hard to break out of that
kind of life when you grow up on it and eventually you know here character she does move on in
way.
So that was a film I really loved.
So those kind of character you know that are really struggling with moving on from a world
that they know even though it’s negative, that kind of story really connects with me.