Christian Elder, Screenwriter: It is absolutely, absolutely
paramount that every writer get to that space…
Film Courage:
Should someone be fearful with building their entertainment career or at least cautious?
Christian: Yeah I guess so but you know mostly be fearless because what I mean by that is that
there are so many forces that want to strip you of your voice as a writer
and to make you compromise that voice and to make undermine that voice and confuse you into
thinking that you should undermine your voice and that's ridiculous, that's absolutely ridiculous.
The greatest writers in screenwriting we know who they are simply because
not only when we read the scripts you know their voice is apparent and rises to the
surface but when we see the finished products, it's apparent. I mean it's like how do you how
do you separate you know I mean you know the sound of Tarantino, it's like you know I mean, it's like
you know the sound of Diablo Cody, you know the sound of of Spike Lee. These people have sounds,
that's your voice and if you're not working, if you're not sharpening your quiver to towards that
direction then you're not going to ever sort of stand out from the crowd because that's
what ultimately is the goal, that's what makes if we're going back to our Michael Clayton analogy,
that makes you the commodity that cannot be avoided, that that people have to come to.
In the end it's going well we need him to do this, we need to call up
oh I'm forgetting her name it's a Phoebe Waller-Bridge,
we need to call her to punch up a script because we need that voice
and all you need to do is say her name and you know what her voice means to that to that project.
It is absolutely, absolutely paramount that every writer get to that space
because then you know people, you know agents, producers, executives,
they get bombarded with crap, they get bombarded with a lot of the same of this
or a lot of or people people that sound like saying back people that sound like this you
know people like you know that's you know that want to be David peoples people that you know
and they don't really want that, they want to know who you are,
they want something that's so unique and that they can go oh well you know nobody else has that,
so this is the one-stop shop where you can go to, you only can go to that store to get that,
I think writing screenplays specifically is a love for the art, storytelling yeah, yeah and
that sort of dovetails to what I was discussing before a little bit with mining the written word
but also just to elaborate on that it's really the classic example of having that command of telling
a story around a campfire and to take people through a journey that that keeps them entertained
but also leaves them with something something that sort of delights them in a special way, that is
The Art of Storytelling that is the thing that has occurred time and memorium since the cavemen were
drawing on drawing on the sides of the caves. That's what I'm speaking of, I'm speaking to
and that's what you do with the screenplays, the first the first brick in building that wall,
the wall where it will be projected eventually. The theater is the big cave that we all
huddle inside. I like that so it's not just the love of the final product which is seeing these
characters come to life and getting an audience reaction to will they laugh at this part,
will they gasp at this part but also just the real love for crafting it and ruminating over
this word or should this character enter here or there well I think that all filmmakers and what I
mean by all filmmakers is that all crafts people in the art of filmmaking from the writer, to
the production designer, to the actor, to the director to hopefully the producers have a passion
for telling stories and that's where everyone collaborates, that's where everyone comes together
because they go how can we tell this story in the best possible way because
everyone's excited about that prospect and that notion it's larger than any one one person's
aspect on the production is no one is the sole avatar of that of that objective. It's like
oh how can we tell this this great story we're all excited about, how can we succeed at that?