Film Courage: When did you read your first screenwriting book and which one was it?
Adam William Ward, Actor/Filmmaker: Oh...my first one?
I think my first book was actually Save The Cat [Author Blake Snyder], which was a really
good book and it was about outlining.
If anybody wants to be a filmmaker, I would suggest that book (Save The Cat).
If you want to be a filmmaker it lays out structure really well.
Not everything has to be formulaic but almost everything has been done at this point.
So even when I’m making now where I’m making this book Catch The White Tiger [Catch
the White Tiger: How I Achieved the American Dream With $28 by Authors Tony Assali and
Michael Ashley], it’s a biopic so I go and watch all biopics.
What kind of biopic do I want to make?
THE GULF OF WALL STREET is very different from THE FLOUNDER, you know what I mean?
So the blueprint is there in a way.
That helps you make a blueprint that book [Save The Cat].
That’s a very helpful book but I feel like watching movies was the most helpful for me.
My brother who is my writing partner will send me script and be like “Here.”
He just sent me three scripts yesterday of all of these biopics.
I’d rather watch the movies because I’m very much...I know that a script can change
so much compared to making a movie.
When you’re seeing it in the movie it might be improv, it might be whatever.
But that could still be a script.
Maybe it wasn’t a script, maybe it wasn’t a script but it could have been a script if
you wrote it that way.
So I kind of like watching the final product more than reading the script in the sense
of learning when it comes to GREATFELLAS reading the script or watching the movie I’d rather
watch the movie and analyze that.
But my brother is the opposite so it just depends on how you learn.
And with the Internet you can get your hands on so many scripts and learn so much.
You can read the script for GREATFELLAS.
When I was a young kid you could never get your hands on a script like that unless you
went to the American Film Institute or one of these big film schools that have those
kind of scripts and then you could read it and learn from it.
Nowadays people can learn so easily with the Internet.
It’s a great thing if you want to learn.
Film Courage: What three scripts did he send you?
Adam: He sent me THE GULF OF WALLSTREET.
He sent me THE FLOUNDER and he sent me GREATFELLAS (that’s why I brought them all up).
I think I opened THE GULF OF WALLSTREET and read the first couple of pages and was like “Ahhh.
I’ll watch the movie.”
I don’t know if I’ll read it or not.
But he’s read it and he’s my writing partner.
I would like to read them just for fun but I feel like now is not the time.
For me I get more from a movie than a script because I’m a filmmaker.
He’s a script writer.
He wants to just be a script writer (my brother Charlie Ward).
I want to be a filmmaker and an actor.
I write scripts out of necessity, I don’t really want to write scripts.
I write them because I don’t have a script.
I’ve been blessed with the fact that at least I know structure well and I’ve watched...I
used to watch two or three movies a day when I was a kid and I moved from Philadelphia
when I was a kid to Roseburg, OR and Glide, OR when I was 12 years old and there was nothing
to do.
I went from the mall and the skating rink to the like okay there’s a lot of trees
around, there’s nothing to do.
The first neighbor is like a mile away.
I would just watch movies like crazy, I’d watch two or three movies a day.
All of my free time was spent watching movies or running around.
I’ve heard it before that you have to spend 10,000 hours on your craft to really be a
master at it.
Well I easily watched over 10,000 hours of movies to be where I’ve gotten.
And honestly that’s what makes you an artist in a way because the things that used to shock
me and impress me and intrigue me as a kid watching movies are different than what I
do now because I’ve seen so many of them so it’s different.
You can think back to the time when it did but ultimately now I have so much more of
a library in my head of movies that now you’re competing with all of those as to where if
I only saw seven movies this movie is amazing but it is only competing with six but if you
watch 10,000 hours or whatever now I’ve seen GODFATHER and GREATFELLAS and they are
both crime movies and now they are competing against each other.
Some people these days say “This is my favorite movie.”
But they’ve never seen all of these movies in the 70’s and 80’s and I’m thinking
but yeah you don’t really know your craft.
You have to spend the time to watch all of those movies and really learn your craft.
Film Courage: Would you say that Charlie is good at one part of screenwriting and you’re
good at the other?
I mean how do you work together with a partner?
How is that?
Adam: With Seth it was different.
So Seth Hymes and me wrote WALLY GOT WASTED.
Charle is writing this new movie with me.
two very different writing partners for me.
Seth really wanted to put the words on the page.
And so I would basically do the outline and he would go off and write by himself and then
come bring it back to me and then I’d read it and make all of these corrections on the
page and be like this scene doesn’t hit this moment.
I need this moment.
This is like...(as an example) this is the low of the movie.
These guys have to turn on each other.
I need a good monologue here of him turning on him and no hope you know.”
And that was one of the scenes that Seth couldn’t end up doing on is own but most of them I’d
give different notes and he would go and make funny moments and do certain things that he
would change and write it.
And then the low of the movie in WALLY GOT WASTED there on a cliffside overlooking all
of Los Angeles he could never get that scene so I was like “Okay, I’ll write it.”
So then I wrote that scene and the joke is in her mind but the jokes and the other scene
are his.
It’s nice to write in a group.
ATTACHMENT THEORY I wrote on my own by myself.
But WALLY GOT WASTED was with Seth and then this new one is with my brother.
My brother and me have been writing scripts since I was a child so we have very much shorthand
with each other of thinking a lot of the same things and stuff like that.
Funny I have not found anybody that we like to write words on the page together.
It’s kind of like he goes off and writes, I go off and write, and we come together.
I’ve yet to find somebody who likes to write in the room together but that would be interesting.
It would be a dream come true in a way.
It would be fun.
And I’ve done that with my brother.
PAROLE OFFICERS we did together.
I acted out all of the characters in the living room and he sat there and would type.
So I’m like living the characters and saying what they would say and then he’s like writing
them down.
It was a very different process with PAROLE OFFICERS.
But most of them had people who wanted to write alone.
They want their creativity to be quiet and all of that kind of stuff so I was just different.