Film Courage: In The Science of Screenwriting, what’s your favorite chapter or maybe a
chapter you felt was most challenging?
Dr. Connie Shears, Professor Crean at Chapman University: I think my favorite chapter is
one because we got to give the overview of the dance we were going to try to do for the
potential screenwriter or anyone really who is interested in why movies are so fascinating.
Why human beings will go into a dark place with dozens of total strangers and sit quietly
for hours.
I mean that behavior alone is worth a good thorough psychological investigation.
So in Chapter 1 I think we had a lot of fun building up what we were going to do in the
rest of the book.
But I like the chapter that is on the creative stages of the screenwriter.
That’s a chapter that involved quite a bit of research in studying how the creative process
itself plays out in any artist, in any creative act.
But in screenwriting, the importance of the story itself.
So you had asked [Paul Joseph Gulino, the co-writer of the book] a question about yes
or no, if you focus on the audience would that make your screenplay a success.
My answer would be a flat out no!
You must have the story.
The story is what will make your screenplay a success, the ability to pace your story,
to weave your story, to tell your story in a way that’s respectful, even playful with
the human brain that is going to be processing it.
That will give your story the attraction and the further success.
But without the story, you can play people all you want.
If you don’t have something to tell them, there is no reason to engage.
And in the chapter on the creative processes The Stages of Creativity, I got to do quite
a bit of research on what we know about creativity.
Creativity is considered the ultimate cognitive process.
So we do all of these things in our brains, right?
We pay attention, we perceive all of our different sensory activities happen in the brain.
So you don’t see with the brain.
You see with your occipital lobe.
You don’t hear with your ears.
You hear with your auditory cortex.
So all of these amazing things happen in the brain but they happen in parallel processing
simultaneously so you’re hearing and seeing while you’re thinking about what you’re
hearing and seeing.
While you’re remembering what you’ve seen and heard while you’re predicting what may
come.
So our brains are these beautiful orchestrations of simultaneous processes and creativity emerges
from that unique, totally individual, no two brains do anything exactly alike so
what helps creativity, what hinders creativity and what the screenwriter can use to get over
schlumps, you know?
Use to break through blocks.
So that was my favorite I think.
Film Courage: When thinking of your favorite films are you able to look at it from another
perspective and see why…see the science behind why you like certain films?
Dr. Shears: Sometimes…rarely.
I’m a devotee of stories.
I love going to movies and I don’t pretend to be a scientist.
I’m just a movie watcher in there.
I can train myself to take (like Paul does) take clips or sequences and then I can take
apart pieces of movies but then if I’m given an opportunity to be told the story I take
it.
Storytelling is the…it’s the human gift.
There are (as far as we know) no other vertebrate animals that engage in fantasy, that engage
in storytelling.
It makes us uniquely human.
And from my perspective it’s this connection to language that as I was saying (has begun
before birth).
We listen in-utero for that voice that is closest to us so the person carrying us is
the most important voice that we hear.
And I think that it’s magic to me and I’m a scientist, I’m all about data.
But it is magic to me that we communicate at all that we get each other even vaguely
and that we do it so effortlessly and so successfully.
The gift of language, the gift of storytelling is what I’ve taught for decades and it’s
just the magical, mystery tour and it’s amazing how we don’t run out of language,
we don’t run out of stories.
Boy meets girl or these kind of repetitive plots but each in every movie about boy meets
girl captures us as an audience, holds us.
We are as if we’ve never seen the whole scenario before, that’s a good movie, right?
The ones that don’t make it are the ones that have not added enough of that individual
creativity to the storytelling.
Film Courage: So even language if it’s not our native language we can still relate?
You know how people love seeing foreign films, is there something different about this?
Dr. Shears: That’s a great question and I love talking about it as if you were deaf,
as if you did not have auditory processing and so you were following along closed-caption,
you are reading the subtitles.
You still get all of the emotion that is portrayed visually but there is a lot of data that suggests
the sound not just the language but including the language but the background music, the
tension sounds, the relaxing sounds, the auditory cues that a screenwriter adds to their film
to create that emotional mood.
When those are missing the movie is much more of an intellectual process and much less of
a full-body emotional “I’m in this story.”
So watching foreign films takes a different mindset when you go to watch a foreign film
and you know you are going to be watching the subtitles to get the dialogue.
If you are a hearing person and you know you are going to be watching the subtitles to
get the dialogue.
If you are hearing person and you can still get the background cues to what is going on,
it’s much more successful.
For people who have auditory disabilities movie watching is an entirely different experience.