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| Walk away? Me!? |
"Great scripts are forged in battle, and it's not a battle that either side should win."
I don't know where the above quote comes from, but I love it. William Nicholson rightly argues that we should insist on being trusted to get the script right. He says - and I commend him for his passion: "I'll go on rewriting until the cow's come home. I'll find an answer to your problem - but do not rewrite it yourself and do not get in another writer. I'm fallible, I'll get it wrong. Tell me and I'll fix it - but it's go to come through my head."
We may be tossed off a project regardless of what we say or do - a producer may choose a different writer for many reasons (most of them flawed) - but nonetheless, we should always try our hardest to stay on board - we owe it to the story. I've often enough been in situations where I just wanted to walk away, where that inner siren tempted with a soothing "You don't need this hassle. It'll all be so peaceful again, if you just call it quits."
We're not quitters - we're screenwriters. We have decided to be in this impossible business - we were nuts to begin with. We will not walk away from our stories, from our characters, from those fictitious worlds of ours that are as real to us as our very lives - we will not walk away without a fight.
Those battles mentioned in the title, they're worth fighting, every time, at every draft, at every step. Because those fighting people want to make the best film possible. And, just like William Nicholson, they're all fallible. We all make mistakes, we need to be challenged, we need to be forced to argue on behalf of our decisions. Every such challenge improves the script, makes it more powerful, maybe even makes it - great.
We're not quitters - we're screenwriters. We have decided to be in this impossible business - we were nuts to begin with. We will not walk away from our stories, from our characters, from those fictitious worlds of ours that are as real to us as our very lives - we will not walk away without a fight.
Those battles mentioned in the title, they're worth fighting, every time, at every draft, at every step. Because those fighting people want to make the best film possible. And, just like William Nicholson, they're all fallible. We all make mistakes, we need to be challenged, we need to be forced to argue on behalf of our decisions. Every such challenge improves the script, makes it more powerful, maybe even makes it - great.
