Writing is a very
amorphous career. While you are trying to do it, there is a nagging feeling
that it may not materialize. Something may not work on the page. After its good
on the page, it may not get made. If it gets made and gets good reviews, it
might not do good business and you may not get to make your next film.
Writer’s block is a
constant thing. It’s always going to be there. You have to have a specific time
and place for writing every day, and you have to stick to it.
When you are trying to
write your first screenplay, a lot of you may get lost in saying – I want to
make this film. This is a story that will translate into a good screenplay and
I want this to be a film. You don’t know that. So instead of trying to get the
movie made, if you focus on trying to learn the craft, you will be much better
off. Use the opportunity to learn. Tell yourself that I am writing this because
I want to get better at writing. You don’t know if this is going to work or the
next thing is going to work. Don’t ignore everything else that the universe is
sending your way.
I don’t write a draft for
as long as I can avoid it because the screenplay format is very difficult to
solve problems in . It’s so dense. I spend a lot of time outlining the
characters and fleshing them out before writing a draft.
The plot-centric
screenplay versus the character-centric screenplay is the stupidest debate
ever. Both character and plot are so intertwined that to think of them
separately is stupid. What I do for myself is – I don’t think what happens next
because the universe of what can happen next is so vast that you can spend days
getting lost in the various beats of the story. I think – who is this person?
What does he/she want and what does he/she need? How can I take him/her from
his/her wants to his/her needs artfully?
It’s not stories that are
universal. It’s the telling of the stories. When you are writing, you
essentially boil down the human emotions that you have had or someone else has
had. Universal doesn’t mean watered down, it means going deeper into the
essence of that human experience. The truth is universal. Contrived stories are
not universal.
When I had interviewed
for the Sundance Labs, they had asked me what is the tone of my script The
Story of Ram. I had no idea what tone means. But I really grasped what tone
means and how important it is for the tone to be consistent, after making
shorts. As a director, your job is to primarily display the craft of your
actors in all its splendour and to keep the tone of the film consistent.
Another good guideline to follow is to know how your characters speak , both
internally and externally. That is important for being authentic to your
character because everyone speaks differently.
The real challenge of
doing something within a genre is to turn it around and do it your own way. In
The Lunchbox, I was thinking what if I take the conventions of the
romantic-comedy genre and do something else with them? If you follow genre
conventions, you will fail. But if you use them to your advantage, you might
succeed.
When writing becomes a
need, it doesn’t matter where you are and what you are doing. It doesn’t matter
how many jobs you are holding. You have to push yourself in a corner and write.
But writing is also a boring process; you have to come up with tricks to keep
it interesting for yourself.
Short films are a
wonderful way of getting back to the set. I keep seeking out opportunities for
making short films. It takes a long time for getting a feature script to work
on a page. It could take years to raise money. I am always hungry to make
shorts. If it travels, it’s great for you. If it doesn’t travel, it’s still
great because you get to be on a set. Even if you make a bad short, you will
learn something out of it.
Ritesh Batras 10 tips for screenwriters Source – http://dearcinema.com/
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