Film Courage: What’s your process for developing an idea?
Matthew Berkowitz, Filmmaker: That’s difficult.
Film Courage: What are you doing before you write the screenplay?
Matthew: Well I’ll come up with an idea right?
Or I’ll come up with a character or I’ll come up with a theory and most of the time
for me it’s like a thesis, it’s something and I think that might be because I love to
read so much literature and I kind of come from philosophy and I develop a thesis or
something that I want to say and then I find characters that I think can embody that purpose
and that can function in a story that kind of carries this idea throughout it so I can
communicate what I want to say in a story and through characters.
So it always starts with an idea or a thesis or a theory that I to talk about and the characters
in the story kind of fall in line from there.
Then I’ll just kind of binge watch a bunch of movies that apply and I’ll just write…you
know I carry a little notebook around me everywhere I go because I don’t really type.
I mean I type but I don’t really write my script until I’ve handwritten it a bunch
of times and a bunch of different ways and I’ve kind of flushed out my characters and
only then do I write the plot because I think that at least right now in the stories that
I’m trying to tell it’s the characters motivate the plot rather than the plot motivating
the characters.
So I want to really know the characters like they are friends of mine.
Like they are my best friends, my childhood friends.
So once I know them, I kind of know the world.
Once I know the world, I know the story…so that’s my process.
Film Courage: Interesting.
Do you ever get lonely when you finish writing something because they were like your best
friend?
Because in a sense if it stops you’re almost losing them for a little bit?
Matthew: I’ve never really thought about it like that?
After you finish a film or finish a script you’re kind of like “What now?”
You know?
“What do I do know?”
Because you’ve spent this three month period of time every day thinking about these characters,
thinking about writing and thinking about what’s next, thinking about how they say
this, think about how they’d say that.
So when it’s done you’re kind of like “Oh man, I don’t want it to be over yet.”
And I think it’s the same thing when you finish a film and you’re like “Oh my gosh,
I’m done shooting…that’s it?”
It happened so quickly.
That’s why you’ve got to get into editing so you can keep it alive somehow and then
by the time you’re done you’ve got this file that’s like a 120 gigabytes and it
took you a year and a half to make it and you’re like “A year and a half turns into
a 120 gigabyte file or a DVD?”
So it’s kind of a weird sensation that you have when you’re like all this boiled down
to this little thing that you can double-click in a place and you just put it in the DVD
player and it plays.
But I think that’s what the whole process is, it justifies the characters that you want
to write because they do get to play.
They do get to be on a big screen, they do get to go someplace and other people can watch
and live and experience it for two hours.
So although when you are done with the script it’s kind of over, it’s not really over
because the audience gets to live through them, your audience gets to view it and it’s
like the second reincarnation of your film is like having other people be touched by
what you’ve made.