Film Courage: How is being an artist very different from being the audience?
Glenn Gers, Screenwriter: That is one of the hardest things to get used to because we all begin
as an audience. I don't think there's an artist in the world who didn't start by being a fan.
We all want to do these things because we liked seeing them, absorbing them,
we were the best consumers and the truth is the artist never experiences their own work the way an
audience will because they first you know what's going to happen. You can't actually experience it
you have to reverse engineer that whole experience just like if you were building a roller coaster.
You can't be riding the roller coaster at the same time. You have to actually say I need a support
here and I need a dip here and you're being very mechanical and frankly artificial about it because
you're saying I want them to get a throw when they go over that hump and in order to do that
I’m going to have to have this amount of force up here and then it's going to have to have a
tailing out at that point and it's going to become very mechanical in order to give somebody else the
pleasure of riding that roller coaster. That's what you need to do as an artist is to say I love
the experience of going over that hump and then zooming down and for some reason I don't crash
at the bottom that's because someone knew how to get out of the freefall that I’m going through the
artist has to stop and learn the mechanics how you support the track that's going to do that how you
make the story twist and turn and provoke those experiences that you yourself will never have and
when you're actually doing it you get this weird kind of duality because as you're creating you
usually have like a little tiny bit of an audience's experience you'll be like I’m
actually enjoying the line I just thought of as an audience did you'll have that for a fraction
of a second while you're doing it and then after that you have to figure out the mechanics to make
that scene work so you're constantly going back and forth sort of saying I want to be an audience
now and now in order to get that audience I got to go back and become the mechanic
and you're constantly cycling through them you can never really give up being an audience
but you have to also become the person building the ride the other thing about artists and
audiences is that from the finished product you can never tell how it got made one of the things
I think artists really should do is try to read or hear podcasts or books about how things you
love got made because you'll always be amazed at how the people who set out to do it did not
know that the final result was going to be what we now think of as inevitable and the the stories are
actually I just read one about midnight cowboy and and when they brought the book Midnight Cowboy
John Schlesinger the director and the producer brought the book to MGM The studio and they
said we want to do this very dark story about this wannabe hustler going to Times Square and MGM said
we think this could be an Elvis Presley vehicle and we're going to put in some songs and we'll
take out that dark stuff so you know on a bad day MGM could have taken it over and it could have
been Elvis Presley in Midnight Cowboy which would have been something to see but the point is when
we watch midnight cowboy it never occurs to us how many different things had to go right or had to be
learned to make that happen and having worked behind the scenes having created things I can
tell you that there are things that I did not know going in somebody brought it to me sometimes whole
story ideas were not my idea in fact the script I'm best known for fracture wasn't my original
script someone else had written a very, very good script the studio wanted to make changes someone
else was hired after that then I was brought in so many of the plot twists I didn't come up with
I did a lot of the writing that made those plot twists work in that form that it did end up in
but when you watch that movie you come to me and say how did you think of that plot twist the
answer is I read it in somebody else's script and I used it because that's the job so the answer is
you can't just look at stuff you love and go oh I know how they did that you'll never know how they
did that and you'll never know how your work is going to come out you just don't you have
to get used to the experience of trying to get something done doing the best you can and seeing
how it plays you had talked about something in the artistic process abstract to concrete to abstract
yes what is that that's sort of a follow-up of the artist audience issue which is
you nothing will ever come out like it feels to you that is part of the art I don't I don't think
there's any artist who hasn't gotten hopefully used to it because it's part of learning how to do
it one of the things that brought this to me was I was once looking at a Picasso drawing and late
Picasso drawings especially are just like they're like scribbles you know it's it looks sort of like
a bull but how did he know to make the line go like how did he know to do that because it's
just a scribble but it's a bull and I suddenly realized he didn't know he knew that whatever
came out would be interesting he trusted that and that's what every artist has to learn that you
don't know exactly how it's going to come out you can outline I outline incredibly thoroughly and I
think I know what's going to happen but the truth is that there's going to be a process
after that the creative process good word for it you're creating something out of nothing
and when that happens it's going to be something that you're going to discover as you do it and
then you need to shape it and rework it and do all the other things that artists have to do
but the thing in your head there's this feeling or this idea or this line and then you put it on
the page and then somebody else performs it and then someone else sees it and in all of those
steps it's not what you thought it was going to be and the best thing an artist can do is get really
comfortable in a sense getting comfortable with a failure you're going to fail to get
your exact feeling and thought out to someone else that's that's life it will never ever happen that
someone gets exactly what you thought it was but what will happen is you'll get used to doing that
scribble and someone will go oh cool bowl and that's art that's the magic of it is that you
get used to bringing something abstract into a concrete form and someone else gets an
abstract experience out of it that's that's something that only art does it's beautiful
so get used to sounds like just experimenting and and trusting that I may not know where it's going
but this kind of feels right and knowing that that same thing you could see it could be changed
drastically and you have to be collaborative and okay with that get used to the process get used to
the experience of doing the thing over and over if you're playing tennis you get used to hitting the
ball you hit it over and over and then eventually you'll get to where you can control it more but
still there's going to be a lot of other elements and what only thing that you can get used to
is the process of making the swing likewise the process of thinking of something writing it in
a concrete form editing it shaping it rewriting it giving it to other people that process that's
what you have to practice that's what you have to get to enjoy and feel comfort in and the more
that you do it the more that you'll get lucky and things will work out and you'll be like
oh I think this line is funny and then you write it down and someone reads it and they laugh
that gives you so much power for the next time you do it because sometimes it's going
to work and sometimes it's going to not work but the more you do it the more it will work
Question
For The Viewers:
How is being an artist different than being the audience?