Write, write, write

I've been deeply in love with films from the moment I first stared into the flickering lights of the TV and got caught up in duels, embraces, kidnappings, dances, battles and riding off into the sunset with the Duke. I'm in the business myself these days - that makes me no less fanboy-geeky about it all.

Made with pasta dough

E.g., when I met Roger Spottiswoode and he told me about the time on the shoot with Sam Peckinpah on "The Wild Bunch" - I was just grinning stupid I was so happy. Now on to the Coppola-Meister. Some of his movies will always be within the top films of all times. This morning I watched a little clip where he explains his creative process. I love the idea of the "great big bowl of dough" he uses. And yes, the fanboy in me was smiling when I watched the man explain the ways that, in his case, led to movie magic more than a few times.

Being a screenwriter, I love watching things as much as I love reading them. I love words. And, after watching FFC, I thought I'd actually want to preserve Francis' take on the creative process in a written post ... so feel free to watch it - but it's worth reading, too. And here then, for your reading pleasure, the words of Francis Ford Coppola:

"I'm most interested in the writing part, because that's the - ... I feel very confident that I can do production, I can make the film look good, I can have beautiful photography. Even if I can't afford big stars or actors, I can find new actors. I feel very comfortable and confident about that. Where I'm the least confident, the most insecure, is the writing because this is what I always considered - as a young person - I wanted to be a writer.

I have been writing ever since I was nineteen, eighteen years old and always felt, oh, I have no talent as a writer, I wish I could have talent. I think writing is one of those areas, acting is another, where, if you're not very good at it, if you try and work and you try and you write and you write and you write, or you act and you act, you can actually get better.

The way I write is like I have a great big bowl of dough, pasta. And I'm writing and, you know, once in a while I take some and I make a pizza, or I make a cake, or I make something. But it's all the pasta of my life, all the ideas I have. Something I saw, or a dream, or an observation. And the important thing is that it doesn't have to be a whole developped idea. It just has to be like a seed. And then, when I'm ready, I will just work on it every day, maybe in the morning because the morning is a time when you're very rested.

And then when I have, you know, whatever it is, maybe sixty seventy pages, then I'll read it. Then what I like to do now, I like to take it and write it as a short story. And the reason I like to write it as a short story is because I look at it from another way. And in a short story you're able to say things that you can't say in a screenplay. And very often, I just - one thing I've learned - write the ending. Cause the ending is obviously very important and is where everything has to go. Otherwise, if you don't just write the ending, then you're gonna be saying "Oh, I don't have an ending."

Very often I leave it as a short story and I even show it to my colleagues as a short story. And then we go and we look and we talk about the actors or we go look for locations, whatever. But we only have the short story. And we find locations - and sometimes the locations are very unusual and you say, wow, we could really use that. And you know that notes are important. And then, when we're starting to get closer, then it's time to write the screenplay. So in the screenplay I can incorporate some things about the actors we thought about, or the locations - at any rate - now is the first time that I translate it all into a screenplay. That's more or less my process."