Film Courage: Never let anyone tell you that a story has already been told?
Jeff Kitchen, Dramatist / Author / Founder / Consultant: That’s a fun one.
It goes back to being a bull in a china shop as a writer. That
your attack as a storyteller is so key to succeeding as a writer. Lazy writing, limp writing
it’s often so forgettable and the key word in the entertainment industry is outrageousness. People
go to the movies or watch a TV show or go to the theater to see something extraordinary, something
different, something energizing, something fun or exciting or meaningful or cathartic so
it has to do with a rebellious streak where
you know many people have heard the saying There is nothing new under the sun,
Every story's been told, There's only seven basic stories or three basic stories (or whatever) and
part of me completely understands that and part of me - that just pisses me off! It’s like you
can’t tell me that I can’t come up with something
that you’ve never seen that will - it’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
It’s just makes me mad and it brings out the attack in me and the desire to shatter
people’s expectations and blow people’s minds and take them where they have never been and
just violate their expectations, violate my own storytelling rut.
You know think of a movie like BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, it’s like so off the beaten track
and I’m sure there was someone telling the writer “Oh you shouldn’t do that. That’s not how stories
go.” It’s just weak and it’s such a lack of adventure and a lack of courage and one of
my favorite terms is ‘Attack as a storyteller.’ How much attack do you bring to the table? What
are the ways that you can dazzle an audience? Take them on a ride that they have never been on
and if you accept the idea that you can’t possibly come up with something that nobody has ever seen
then it kind of takes the wind out of your sails in a certain
way because you’re not all that creative. You can’t come up with something. It’s like
I refuse to play that way. I go the other end of the spectrum. I always want to
know what are the extremes in any story idea. Just to see what they are.
Often you will find yourself if you’re trying to solve a story problem where you’ve got to
figure out a specific thing in a story where there is kind of a normal set of possibilities
and then there are unusual possibilities and then there’s extreme possibilities
and for instance the Coen Brothers say that if somebody can figure out
our next move…if they had a week to figure it out and they can figure it out in a week,
we're not going to use it. They go way above and beyond shaking up your expectations,
violating your expectations. If you're trying to solve a story problem and you have
a selection of possibilities for ways you can get out of that situation or whatever,
one of the things I've found is really fun is to not only look at
the extremes because it gets you out of the stock choices in the ordinary
but what I also want to know is just out of pure curiosity what is the single, craziest possibility
in the whole universe for that particular choice? What is like
wildly crazy and usually it won’t work at all but sometimes it's like well that's interesting. If I
backed it down a few notches it could start to fit into my arena and it’s really fresh and different
and it takes the story in a different direction and shakes up the character and
every once in a while that single craziest idea works brilliantly in a completely unexpected way.
I’ve had that happen to me where I said what’s the single craziest idea and it would be like
that and I’d be like Whoah! I’d never wold have thought of that and I’m using
that. It’s great. That’s part of attack as a storyteller, just going for it and
not just stretching the envelope but obliterating it and just having fun you know? Writing is fun.
Film Courage: You are using analogies similar to war or combat in some way. Is
facing the page every day like combat?
Jeff:
It’s a good question because it depends in many ways on who you are because if you are
someone with the martial arts skills of Bruce Lee say and then you get into the ring with pretty
much any fighter you can figure something out. So it’s not like “I don’t know what I’m going to do?
I’m staring at the blank page.” It’s like “No, I can make this work. This guy weighs 600 pounds so
I’ve got to figure something out.” But Bruce Lee is going to bring a lot of stuff to the table.
So the more skill you have as a storyteller and as a scriptwriter as a dramatist
the less intimidated you are by a normal array of writing challenges. Now you really
want to get in over your head. If it’s all too easy then you are not doing your job right.
If I am starting in on a script and it starts to get complex and deep, part of my brain goes Uh-oh,
we’re getting in over our head here and the other part of my brain goes Yeah! That’s
good. That’s where you want to be. And they say that writers are like show horses. They
are not happy unless they’re trying to jump over something that could harm them and I was thinking
about that last night and I found actually a much better analogy is that writers are like extreme
rock climbers or something. They are not happy climbing something unless it could well kill
them. If it’s too less of a challenge they are like bored. They get their adrenaline
from the fact that nobody has ever climbed this cliff and they’re doing it with no ropes
and they’re hanging by two fingers on a piece of rock that big and they are like This is fun!
This is life! And they don't want to do anything else. They’ve even found that the combat nurses
and medics who came back from Vietnam couldn't go back to a normal job…it was too…I can’t sit
in a corner and file papers. So they ended up as like emergency room physicians and frontline
cops…they had to be in the deep stuff because it didn’t cut it anymore for them. So they more craft
you bring to the table, the less intimated you are by the material but you also want to be
in over your head. They said that Bob Marley when they grew up on the water when they got bored,
he and his brother would swim out to sea as far as they could until they were completely exhausted
and they’d tried to make it back to shore. That was their idea of like a fun afternoon.
So it's kind of like that, it's like the material should challenge you but you should also be
throwing hands into your own story ideas to make your job harder to challenge yourself so
that like a rock climber is like I’m not going to take that safe route, I’m going to do this
dangerous route over here that nobody’s ever done before and it may well hurt me but I can’t live
without that level of challenge. So I’m not sure if that answered your question exactly?
Film Courage: I think it does. So I think basically you’re saying you need to be
stimulated, not bored and it’s can’t be too easy and so it’s kind of like playing chess…a
hobbyist playing chess with an expert versus a hobbyist playing chess with another hobbyist.
Jeff: Right and the more substantial the craft as a writer
the less it seems like How can I possibly do this? It’s a job, it’s a story and
of course it’s challenging and it’s hard but like Bruce Lee facing whatever opponent he’s like
I may get a whippin’ but I know what I’m doing and can take this on.
It’s not like what am I going to do? What am I going to do? It’s like no, I know exactly
what I’m going to do. I just have to figure out how to do it for this particular thing.
Question For The Viewers: Do
you get mad when people tell you every story has already been told?