A collective look at a solitary job

SCREENWRITERS Michael Arndt (“Little Miss Sunshine”), Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”), Peter Morgan (“The Queen”) and Iris Yamashita (“Letters From Iwo Jima”) were splayed across a lounge at the Writers Guild headquarters in Beverly Hills. They had just come from the official academy nominees luncheon and appeared relaxed and chatty, if a little bewildered by the attention.

These original-screenplay Oscar nominees -- the first time for each -- were invited to discuss their craft, their nominations and the state of screenwriting. But as they waited idly for the fifth nominee -- Guillermo Arriaga, still doing interviews at the hotel -- to show up, Morgan and Del Toro slipped into a duet of playful imitation of the “Babel” screenwriter.

Morgan (a Brit doing a Mexican accent): “Research? I spit on your research!”

Del Toro (a Mexican doing a Mexican accent): “Structure? I do not need structure.”

(True to Arriaga or not, it was entertaining, and a reminder never to be the last one to arrive.)

Screenwriting is the most solitary of filmmaking roles, but assemble a group of these talented craftsmen and the results are as combustible as they are insightful.

Here are some excerpts:

There has been talk of a

“crisis” in storytelling. Now that the types of stories you’ve all told in these scripts are

being honored, do you feel that there is greater hope?

ARRIAGA: I think that the capacity of fictionalizing life is diminishing. It’s less and less and less, because we are losing our inner life. We are losing our capacity of dialogue, of understanding human beings. We are more and more alienated, and the more alienated a society is the more difficult it is to fictionalize something.

DEL TORO: I think that the problem you have with the screenplay is a particular problem of the form. When you toil on a screenplay, you come out with a document that most people refuse to read. It’s not an easy form to write or to read. I think there are millions of stories, but the people that can tell them are choosing other forms.

YAMASHITA: I think the problem is also the system, because the studio system encourages the nonoriginal. Everything is an adaptation or something that they’re familiar with, and you come up with something that they’re unfamiliar with and they don’t know what to do with it.

MORGAN: I don’t know why we’re all so down on ourselves. I don’t think it’s so bad. I don’t think there are many good directors -- why don’t we talk about that?

[Everyone laughs]

Although there is something about screenwriting -- as

opposed to directing -- that many, many people walk around thinking that they could write one.

MORGAN: I disagree. I think lots of people think they can be a director. I think it’s the principal thing that everybody aspires to.... Pretty much everyone thinks they can produce a movie, they can market the movie, they can distribute the movie better.... We’re working in a field in which absolutely everybody is a fully qualified film critic.

ARNDT: I feel like film has become this very self-conscious medium. In a lot of art forms you see a movement from modernism to post-modernism, and I think right around the time of “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” ... It used to be that movies were about real life, and after the mid-’70s you started to have movies that were about other movies. As a reader -- I used to read screenplays for a living -- you read a lot of stories that are self-referential. I feel like that’s a poison on the industry. I know that one of my rules is, if I’ve seen it in a movie I don’t want to see it in my own script.

DEL TORO: Yes, it’s a meta-language. Some people in other arts have done it. During the folk-art movement, Lichtenstein started doing it beautifully. But there is a point where that becomes very emotionally sterile.

Is it reading too much into these writing nominations and the adapted nominees honors to see any trend here? Does this signify anything?

DEL TORO: There’s a compulsion from film to react to the times, always -- if it’s the ‘60s, if it’s the ‘40s, if it’s now. I remember when we were at Cannes with “Babel” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Indigenes” [“Days of Glory”], seven out of 10 of the films were about war or the effects of war.... Film reacts like a nervous system of a society.

MORGAN: I think there’s a direct correlation between the amount of fact-based films that have been made that are engaging in the real world and the extraordinary blinkered news coverage we get. News at the moment is telling us nothing.

Is the state of the original screenplay in bad shape?

ARNDT: I have to make a distinction between original screenplays in Hollywood and original screenplays in the rest of the world. I think everybody here is working to a greater or lesser degree kind of outside of the Hollywood system. For the example of “Little Miss Sunshine”.... the film wouldn’t have gotten made if it hadn’t been for independent money.

YAMASHITA: Yeah, I’m sure if Clint Eastwood didn’t come up with the idea to do a Japanese perspective on World War II it [“Letters from Iwo Jima”] would never have gotten made, that’s for sure. If I had written it as a spec and shopped it around, it would never have gotten made.

DEL TORO: I was writer-producer-director, and even then it took over two years to get “Pan’s Labyrinth” made.

MORGAN: I think if you’re talking about a spec script, the longer you keep it yourself the greater power you’ve got.

DEL TORO: If they want it. [Laughs]

MORGAN: Yeah, if they want it. But it gives you the opportunity to go around, and if people don’t like it, that’s absolutely fine. It doesn’t then kill it. It might take time until you find the right home or the right people for it, and maybe that’s within the system and maybe that’s outside the system. But then I think you’ve got a so much better chance of making it...

DEL TORO: Good.

MORGAN: Yeah. And surviving. Of making it at all.

Would you ever hesitate to write a spec in the current filmmaking environment?

ARRIAGA: For me, no. I hope that the original screenplay form will be healthy, because it’s the only kind of screenplays I write. I have been refusing to adapt or to develop other people’s ideas for stories, and I have been very fortunate to have my screenplays sold.

ARNDT: Yeah, based on “Little Miss Sunshine” I’ve had meetings with a lot of producers and studio executives and even though they didn’t want to produce the script, I was offered a lot of jobs because they say, “Your voice is really original. You’re doing something really different.”

Did any of you either lose things from your screenplay that you really wished had stayed in the final film or keep things that you really fought for?

DEL TORO: One of the reasons why financing collapsed on “Pan’s Labyrinth” so many times is because the movie opened with a 10-year-old girl dying of a shot in the gut. And I kept telling people: By the time the movie’s over it is my hope that people realize it’s about rebirth. I said, “That’s the journey, that’s the trip in the movie.” And they really were set against that.

YAMASHITA: They weren’t so big to the story, but things like, “You know where you have the boat coming in from the mainland? Can you make that a small, light plane?” There were a lot of things that they had to cut out from a budgetary point of view.

ARNDT: The producers were always trying to make the script shorter. And it got to the point where there was this one line -- it was Alan Arkin saying, “Dwayne? That’s your name, right? Dwayne?” -- it had been taken out and I wanted to put it back in. They said, “Well, you can put it back in if you take out an equal number of syllables somewhere else.” I think I added in 11 syllables and took out nine.

MORGAN: Does that constitute a draft? Is it billable?

ARRIAGA: What was that, a haiku?

[Laughter]

MORGAN: We had a moment afterward, in the cutting room, where people concerned with the marketing of the film saw the film and said, “Well, it’s a hell of a movie. And right now, hers [Helen Mirren’s] is a good performance, but it’s not an Oscar performance. So, Pete, would you write an argument, or a scene where she’s angry, in the first act?” I said to Stephen [Frears], “I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is, there isn’t enough Tony Blair.” Which made them slowly begin to weep, because Tony Blair -- no international audience. “More Helen, more Helen, more Helen....” I explained to Stephen why, and Stephen put his foot down, and we shot four extra days of Tony Blair. The net effect was that by putting in counterpoints, his part feels no bigger, but her part feels enormous, without shooting a single extra frame of Helen Mirren.

ARNDT: I just want to jump in and say that everything that got added to the original script of “Little Miss Sunshine” was an improvement. There was nothing that I was forced to put in that I didn’t think was better, and there was nothing taken out that I wanted to be in there.

YAMASHITA: Clint Eastwood, I have to say, I wish all directors were like him because he just said, “Go with the first draft.” And don’t you wish more directors were like him, where they actually trust the writer?

DEL TORO: You know that it is part of our craft to deal with compromising. I think that the craft of dealing with the compromise should be in theory a joined effort between the director and the writer, always.

MORGAN: I couldn’t agree more. Writers are filmmakers! Why does everyone call a director a filmmaker and a writer a writer? Writers are filmmakers.

ARNDT: Guillermo [Arriaga], you said that in your contracts now, you’re not allowed to be replaced. You’re the writer on the movie.

How did you get that?

ARRIAGA: Stubbornness. I think the studios don’t like it, but if they are hiring you it’s because they trust you to say something original. If you’re saying something original, how come someone is going to improve it? I don’t understand. I think that when you are original you are presenting a particular world that cannot be changed. If you present yourself as a writer, you will be respected as a writer.

So why are writers so devalued in this industry?

MORGAN: Because they don’t have greenlight power. I don’t think it’s anything else.

ARNDT: When the script [for “Little Miss Sunshine”] was at Focus, the producers were committed to the script, the directors loved the script.... I ended up getting fired off the project, just because it wasn’t moving forward and the easiest way to make a change is to get rid of the writer and just bring somebody new in.

ARRIAGA: Writers have been disrespected everywhere. Not only in the States.

ARNDT: At the end of the day, films do feel like they are a director’s medium. “Little Miss Sunshine” was a 120-page screenplay, but [co-directors] Jonathan [Dayton] and Valerie [Faris], they were there through the development of the script, through the shooting of the movie and through the editing. I do feel like screenwriting is this awkward, bastard form, and we’d all like more respect and we’d all like to have our voices taken seriously.

Why is it different with film, though, just because it’s a bigger budget? Because writers in TV have much more control --

DEL TORO: It’s on a case-by-case basis. If Stephen Poliakoff [“Close My Eyes,” “The Tribe”] writes a screenplay and it’s directed by an itinerant director it will still be very strong. Sometimes, if a bad screenplay is well directed, it will survive into a movie with interesting moments.... The problem we have is that in Hollywood, everybody says, “It’s a director’s medium.” Sorry, dude. It’s a star medium. [Laughs] I think that entrenching these two positions, truly entrenching them, seeking for a general truth, is an absolute waste of time, unless you are willing to accept that for someone to claim full authorship on a film, he has to write it and direct it.

MORGAN: I think we all agree it’s a film by Guillermo del Toro.

[Laughter]

ARRIAGA: Acknowledging that it’s just a director’s medium, I completely disagree.... have you seen “Paris, Texas”?

ARNDT: Yes.

ARRIAGA: Who is the author, Sam Shepard or Wim Wenders?

DEL TORO: Or L.M. Kit Carson [who adapted Shepard’s play.]

ARNDT: It’s impossible to say.

ARRIAGA: You have been very generous to your directors, but I disagree with you.

MORGAN: They’re choosing music and possible locations, you’re choosing human beings, story, tone.

DEL TORO: But hold on. It’s as simple as this: When you’re married and have kids, and your kid [messes] up, you say, “Your kid.” When the kid wins an honor at school: “My kid.” It’s the same thing. We hit birth together, like that, and it’s horrible that somebody celebrates one side of the genetic makeup only. What we do is something where people should not lose time trying to trace the lineage, they should accept it as a great creation or not, and that’s it. We did it, and that’s the end of it. It’s such a beautiful, messy, anarchic orchestration of a birth of a piece that I truly think that’s the joy of it.

ARNDT: When I hold my screenplay in my hand, and I look at it and I read through it, I feel that’s mine, that is my screenplay. When I see the movie up on the screen, I don’t feel like it’s my movie. I feel like Jonathan and Valerie were the ones who went out and shot it, they edited it, they cast it, they used the music, and so I don’t feel like I can take that sense of ownership for the movie myself.

DEL TORO: But it’s your particular take.

ARRIAGA: But you are giving part of the film also.... You’re giving the world, you’re giving the tone, you’re giving the structure, you’re creating the characters.

Just to play devil’s advocate, you could argue that the choice of director on a film actually ends up affecting the voting

on the writing awards -- that

if they don’t match the right

director(s), you may not be

sitting here.

ARNDT: Completely. That is the most critical contribution.

ARRIAGA: No one is denying the importance of the director. Of course it’s important.... But that doesn’t make necessarily a film only by the director.

DEL TORO: But even the benign function of the producer, which is amazing when you have somebody, let’s say, Michael Douglas, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” -- I grab this screenplay, I find Milos Forman, I say, “Hey, what about this?” Fantastic. Beautiful. And now will we argue about it being a producer’s medium? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.

ARRIAGA: I’m proposing something: to publish the screenplays before making the film.

Here’s another thought: What if in voting on the best screenplay categories, people had to see the film and read the screenplay?

ARRIAGA: Yes! Perfect. That would be great.

DEL TORO: I think that if you’re voting for best picture -- like you do with foreign film, where you have to prove that you saw the five films in the theater -- you should prove that you saw the movie and read the screenplay.

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Fernandez writes the weekly Scriptland column, a feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters.