I tweeted these forever ago, but the internet just noticed and I figure I should probably at least put them on my blog. I’m glad people are finding them useful.
Here they are, a mix of things learned from directors & coworkers at Pixar, listening to writers & directors talk about their craft, and via trial and error in the making of my own films.
Positive movies do not necessarily have happy endings; their characters’ personal relationships trump personal achievements; and male and female viewers differ in how they define a character’s accomplishments.
Check.
“Audiences don’t care about an accomplishment unless it’s shared with someone else. What makes an audience happy is not the moment of victory but the moment afterwards when the winners shares that victory with someone they love.”
Check, check.
“the accomplishment the audience values most is resilience.”
The word most of creative people are familiar with in their lives.
“I think the thing that they’re getting out of it is that the ‘happy ending,’ the one that is most memorable and might make people go back to see the film a second time, might not be about winning. It might be about not winning, about finding something deeper that means more than victory.”
Very new definition of Hollywood ending? Easy to preach, hard to accomplish, IMO.
Sorkin: My very first movie was A Few Good Men, which was an adaptation of my play. There was an executive on the movie who gave me a note: “If Tom Cruise and Demi Moore aren’t going to sleep with each other, why is Demi Moore a woman?” I said the obvious answer: Women have purposes other than to sleep with Tom Cruise.
That is hilarious.
Almodovar: When I’m not writing or directing, I’m promoting. This is how I summarize my life. So many of the ideas I have come when I am flying or even in a taxi … when I’m in movement, going from somewhere to somewhere.
Black: That’s the challenge with these real-life stories, which a lot of us have done. Lives aren’t lived by Aristotle’s poetics. They’re not. They’re not necessarily in those acts. So for me, I get all these wonderful, interesting things that I learn about people, and I put them all on note cards. And then I have this very small table in my house and I arrange them into something that fits … I love the constraint of the counter because it makes it so that it will fit into a movie. If you’ve found that spine, hopefully at the end of the day you have a movie instead of just a timeline.
I should try this method.
