Christian Elder, Screenwriter: It's not what he's playing, it's not the chord
that he's hitting, it's what's between. It's the stop. It's in between it,
that is where you feel the story he's telling in the music.
Film Courage: How did you figure out your voice?
Christian: I yelped into the wind and no… you know when you asked me that question immediately the
first thing that popped into my mind and it really has nothing to do with anything we're discussing
was the first few lines of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and what that story and that book means as a tale about this modernist tale
that is descriptive of how an artist reaches his voice that is descriptive in the way that it tells
how that artist reaches his voice because anybody familiar with Portrait of the Artist knows that
it starts with these kind of weird little phonetics because
he's like he's just a he's just a baby and he like he's like looking out on a pastor and he sees
cows and he's like moo cow and stuff like that and it's and and then it slowly develops into
what becomes a language that starts to become sophisticated which is the the
is considered like what people said was brilliant about James Joyce and it is brilliant
um also they said that James Joyce apparently he was very very influenced it was like he was
the very first generation of of of novelists that were influenced by cinema had influence on
writing the novel as opposed to and that was early cinema very early sooner
yeah because I just got lost in thinking about portrait of the artist it's such a good book
we'll put a link down to it below you know it's okay so how I figured it out I talked a little bit
about that before and that that really was kind of discovering how to write in these terse sentences
I already had a a a a sense of how to write decent dialogue and I was just honing that along with
creating these little terse bursts of of description to create the scene structure
that was working for me simultaneously I learned how to outline now outlining
for me at that time was something I used a structure of 12 beats I think it's a I think
in the beginning the way I worked it out and also the way I was taught because there was various
areas that I picked up some of the the skill set that I had I’d read of course the art of dramatic
screenwriting I mean dramatic writing I also was very fond of
of some of David Mamet's essays and books I took a couple courses here and there and so
I distilled it down to writing a premise or a log line for the for the the overall um idea of
what the story would be and that that premise or log line has the is is elastic in itself meaning
that it it can evolve it can change over time you can always return to it and augment it in some way
as you are going through the writing process and then for each of the 12 beats of my screenplay
so basically when I say 12 beats is if a screenplay is technically 120 pages
there's a beat for every 10 pages all right and then you're thinking of
of the story and we're talking the story now as an ekg all right so what I mean by an ekg
and you can also apply this to Christopher Vogler's ideas on The Hero's Journey as well
the ekg is like you are you are lifting off with your inciting incident the inciting incident
technically should occur anywhere from like the five page to to like well in the old days it was a
five page defer to 30 page but like it's it's really just five pages now you really don't go
farther than that and then and then what you do is you you plateau off as you get towards the
towards the middle of the ekg so that's like page 60 and that means basically that your
characters or your protagonist is on his way to towards his journey and so that's beat six
and then on on beat nine you are you are you are coming all the way down on your ekg
you're spiking downward because they are facing all their adversity and all of their obstacles
that they must overcome that they may never they may never recover from
and then if they do recover and they do succeed and they win in the end then that ekg comes
all the way back up at 12. if they don't if they don't win then that ekg comes all the way up at 11
and then goes sharply down at 12. so that is that is basically that 12 point beat
outline now with the 12 point beat outline each one of those beats 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 has
its own premise so every 10 pages or approximately 10 pages because you don't have to adhere here
strictly to 10 pages because you know maybe you have a shorter script
has its own log line so you go this is know when such and such happens such and such occurs cause
and effect it's a cause and effect statement that is something that is that has a whole chapter
in Author Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing is the cause and effect statement
that goes all the way back that that can apply all the way back to the greeks and he takes it there
so so you you you do that for each one of those beats and then from each one of those
log lines you use those as a basis to to work on to script those 10 pages or roughly those 10 pages
and then if you adhere to that you'll you'll you'll probably get yourself a
first draft it may not be much of a first draft but it'll be something that you can you
can rewrite and that you can work on now that was my process back in the early days and that's how
I figured things out once once you're writing the second draft once I was rewriting at that point
that's where I start to apply a little bit of those tricks a little bit of the fun stuff that's
that's a whole other bit of tools and things like that there's there's there's refining
that goes in with that sort of thing you want to look at your script as
what is necessary in the story and what and tried to take out what is not necessary now
this is one thing that I do believe many storytellers fail to do
and it doesn't make them bad storytellers it's just their choice but some some some storytellers
just overload their scenes and they just want to do so much inside of the scene
and it's not that you don't need to do that to do a movie to tell to tell a story for the service
of a screenplay that is to be interpreted into a movie or a film does not require it to be a play
you know if you're going to beat a play you can make a play you know I write plays myself as well
I think that's fun but it's not required it's a it's it's something that you you it's a it's
a story that you tell in pictures if I want to strike another analogy that analogy for me is that
at a certain point for me and this goes towards the root of the question is that when you get
you you you you figure out your your voice it becomes a lot like playing music it's like you're
not reading music anymore you you while you play it you're just kind of improvising a little bit
and you're you're just kind of like going with the feel you know while you're you know you're jamming
or whatever and the classic example for me is Thelonious Monk because the thing about Thelonious
Monk that I loved that reminds me of screenwriting is that he has this syncopation it sounds Ray
Charles too it's very it's also a great one he has a syncopation that it's not the it's not what he's
playing it's not the court that he's hitting you know it's what's between it it's the stop
it's in between it that that that is where you feel the story he's telling in the music
and then the same thing I believe applies towards towards a good screenplay you know.
Question For The Viewers:
How did you figure out your voice?