story or message

HKB

HKB

Well-known member
Asking this for a friend.... when creating a film script, how should one develop it?
Should one start with the message and create a story based on this message. Or should one create the story first then find a message in that story?

Does anyone know what most famous film writers normally do?
 
I am not famous, not even slightly, LOL. But for me, the message/theme is very important, because that is what motivates me to write the story, then rewrite, then rewrite, then rewrite, survive the energy needed to see it to the finish line. But some how-to authors talk about how the theme will emerge during the writing; if theme changes during the writing that is okay with me, but i need a theme important to *me* from the start of the process. A theme, a universal statement of the human condition that interests me.
 
I tend to get those moments of, "hey I got a great idea for a movie". I write it down and file it away. When I come back to my file of ideas, the ones I still feel passionate about get saved and the so-so ones get chucked.

At some point, a resonance is struck with what is going on in the world and one of my film ideas and I can see the emergent theme from the idea. I sit down and write the film treatment and register it.

This happened to me last year and although it took up most of the year I managed to get through two registered drafts of the screenplay. The theme was always there to anchor the process.

Now I'm working through the steps to get it produced and at the moment, DPing a feature for another local producer. Who knows how many more drafts it will go through until its, "in the can".
 
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Everyone of my films have a message. I develop based on the message. The key is the film is not about the message it's about characters. People may watch a film about a message but for the most part films about messages suck. But there are a lot of good films with messages.

-Nate
 
Lajos Egry (The Art of Dramatic Writing) suggests that you first identify your 'premise' (by which he means a positive proposition about the world, which is to say your message) which your story is going to prove true. This also has some applicability to characters: who do they have to be, and what experiences must they have (which is to to say, your story) in order to communicate the truth of the proposition you aim to prove?
 
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A while ago someone who had just sold his first screenplay posted in here and his big advice was to ALWAYS write from theme.
 
That would be kylekmd.

IIRC, he said that he had little success until he started writing from theme. He recommended what has since become one of my favorite books on screenwriting (and I've read a lot of 'em): "Inside Story" by Dara Marks. She makes one of the most compelling, articulately stated cases for writing from theme I've ever seen, and does so in a comprehensive, extremely well-organized, crystal-clear style. *Highest* recommendation...

And no, I don't know or work for her... : )
 
I too second Inside Story. It gives you a road map as to what makes a movie not just good but great. Instead of telling you that your protag mest have a character arc, it gives you a step by step process into theme and char arc. The best screenwriting book I have read. The rest are just books on basic structure retold in their own way.

Actually The art of dramatic writing was similar to Inside story, but
I find the more recently written version works for me.
 
Though I may start with concept or character, the next step is theme - because it influences everything else. Character and scenes and dialogue and actions.

- Bill
 
wcmartell said:
Though I may start with concept or character, the next step is theme - because it influences everything else. Character and scenes and dialogue and actions.

- Bill
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Is 'theme' equivalent to 'message'... A while ago, I watched several Val Lewton produced films, "Cat People"(1942), "Isle of the Dead"(1945), I'm still at a loss as to what was 'the message', as it is claimed that he was told to make no more films with messages...
 
Haha.

I think it's important to have a premise in your head of what point you're trying to get across. I was taught to keep this as simple as possible: "Necessity overcomes fear" or "Jealousy can be put to good use". These are different from "messages" such as "the war in Iraq is wrong" or "abortion is murder", but they still give you a central place from which to write, which is good. "Message" films are usually disastrously ham-fisted and awful.

What I have been doing (and granted, I haven't sold any screenplays, but this is working for me and makes sense) is coming up with a belief for a central character to act upon. Then I come up with other beliefs for other characters to act upon that are possibly in alignment, but probably in conflict. The first draft is a clusterfuck because I am just letting these characters more of less stream out of their central beliefs and backstories. But left to their own devices in this way they will NATURALLY create drama and get themselves into trouble and have natural, believable conflicts based on their beliefs. From that first draft it's then time to go back and trim the branches down to a couple of cohesive stories.
 
I always wondered about telegrams that had to make a lot of use of the word "stop"...

"If your stop payments threats don't stop I will have to stop you with legal action stop"

Sadly, I have no idea why I think of these things...
 
Ted Spencer said:
I always wondered about telegrams that had to make a lot of use of the word "stop"...

"If your stop payments threats don't stop I will have to stop you with legal action stop"

Sadly, I have no idea why I think of these things...
Click to expand...

-------------- from: http://www.telegraph-office.com/pages/telegram.html

This word "stop" may have perplexed you the first time you encountered it in a message. Use of this word in telegraphic communications was greatly increased during the World War, when the Government employed it widely as a precaution against having messages garbled or misunderstood, as a result of the misplacement or emission of the tiny dot or period.
---------------------

The 'war' being refered to is WWI...

For anyone doing a 'period' piece... not a 'stop' piece... I think this guide to telegram writing would be a benefit...

---------------------

Worse yet, is not only thinking about such things... but also looking them up...
 
I sit down and write: Theme, Character's, Story - its all there by the time you finish, if you think about it you won't surprise yourself and wont enjoy the telling.
 
I believe that cinema can be made to express a message, however, I think that the most expedient way to do that, it through the documentary film form. The documentary has undergone a revolution in the last 10 to 15 years and has, I think, finally become an art form.

If you are making fictional narrative films, then I think that the form, i.e, established conventions of fictional narrative story telling, are not well suited to telling a "Message", so as to be accepted by a popular audience. The fictional narrative film does have massive power to express, with moving pictures and sounds, stories that fulfill our myths.

We all love the "Star Wars" saga. The "Star War" saga, does not have a theme, or message, IMHO. The "Star Wars" saga is a retelling of our basic myths. The "Star Wars" saga, is the story of the "Heroes" journey. Even though it is set in a, "Galaxy, Far, Far Away", it is a mythological, archetypical story of the human condition.

If you want to make a film with a message, then make a documentary, if you want to make a fictional narrative film that address an issue of the human condition, then study human mythology, in all of it's forms
 
This may be a bizarre stance, but I always think it's weird when someone asks "How should I go about writing (anything)" To me you write what you write and it is what it is. All of this designing and structuring to serve some saleable or entertainment purpose is just morbid. A writer should write what he's compelled to write and be done with it. If you're doing anything else, please go do something else because you're clogging up the pipes with your bile.

EDITING, however, is a completely different animal. With regards to editing, STORY is and will forever be paramount. Nothing, no message, no character insights, nothing is more important than story. E.g. message is fine, character insight is fine, so long as it pertains to and doesn't take you out of the story. If you're not telling a story, if you're doing something abstract, then feel free to make character or message paramount.

Theme and message aren't the same thing, btw. Theme is the underpinnings, the thread. A message is just that -- a specific point. A message can't be a theme anymore than your main character can be a theme. A message is a (sometimes) component of your story whereas the theme is an aspect of the storytelling process.

Again, though, if your friend is asking HOW to write, tell him to stop and go do something else. I've never read a decent writer who ever listened to anyone who told them how they should create. They wrote because they were compelled to and they had something to say. If you find yourself reading books on writing, clamboring to know how other famous writers construct their prose or screenplays, chances are you shouldn't be writing and are only doing so to achieve cash, station or a specific kind of lifestyle and you have nothing genuine or unique to bring to the human condition.

But yeah, when editing -- story is what counts. Kill off everything that doesn't serve it.
 
David G. Smith said:
If you are making fictional narrative films, then I think that the form, i.e, established conventions of fictional narrative story telling, are not well suited to telling a "Message", so as to be accepted by a popular audience. The fictional narrative film does have massive power to express, with moving pictures and sounds, stories that fulfill our myths.

We all love the "Star Wars" saga. The "Star War" saga, does not have a theme, or message, IMHO. The "Star Wars" saga is a retelling of our basic myths. The "Star Wars" saga, is the story of the "Heroes" journey. Even though it is set in a, "Galaxy, Far, Far Away", it is a mythological, archetypical story of the human condition.
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I completely, thoroughly, utterly disagree. I think documentaries are a wonderful source of information, but they are very, very rarely a gateway for people to broaden their horizons. What I mean by this is simple: very few people watch documentaries about subjects that are not already of interest to them. Whereas there is tremendous potential for narrative films to expand a person's interest to new topics they previously disregarded. I do not think this makes one or the other "better" but they are suited to different educational tasks. I can think of MANY narrative films that carry themes related to the world in which we live, and do so extremely successfully.

How many people didn't know about the Rwandan genocide before HOTEL RWANDA? How many people didn't care about America's crumbling inner cities before THE WIRE? How many people didn't know anything about what happened in Mogadishu before BLACK HAWK DOWN? LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. SYRIANA. MUNICH. DOWNFALL. BAND OF BROTHERS. These films/shows all mix fact and fiction (or embellishment) to one degree or another, but they all carry important thematic messages about our world and can be seen as truly important as a result of opening people up to information they were not explicitly seeking.

The same is only very rarely true of documentaries. I believe there is TREMENDOUS power in narrative storytelling to call attention to under-served topics.
 
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