Film Courage: How has the screenwriting Master’s program transformed your screenwriting process? What do you do differently now?
Marty Lang, Screenwriter/Professor/Director: Well, I think a lot more about the structure from the very beginning than the way that I used to do it.
Previously if I had an idea for a movie I would just start writing and just sort of see where it went and sometimes good things would come from that. There definitely is a benefit to sort of free writing and just kind of seeing what comes from it.
But my experience has taught me that spending time to outline an idea before actually writing it makes the writing much more efficient. I’ve saved multiple drafts of screenplays because I’ve gone and outlined ahead of time and I figured out the major turning points of the film and that sort of thing. That’s something I really didn’t do beforehand because I sort of rebelled against it. I thought that structure is the enemy and the thing that I’ve learned is that structure is your friend. It helps point our errors before you get to them and it helps you stay on track.
If you know what the next thing is that you’re writing toward, it’s a lot better if it’s five pages away then if it’s 50 pages.
So you know you have a specific thing to write to, your scenes have more urgency, your scenes have more conflict as a result of that. So I think that’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned.
The other thing that I sort of picked up along the way is that the more personal you can make your stories and the more raw you can make them I think the more effective they are for the reader.
The story that I wrote about my dad, there were some really dark things that were in there. And it’s not a dark film per se. It’s a drama but really laying there some emotional things that I had dealt with a long time ago, it really helps with the writing. It makes it more engaging, it makes it more interesting for the reader.
The more you try to cover up sort of the raw things that your characters are dealing with the less interesting it becomes. So I think it’s kind of good to lay it all out there. It’s kind of a form of free therapy.
Film Courage: I know you’d said in another class from another professor that they talked about deciding what kind of protagonist you really want to focus on. Did you start to see parallels in who you wanted to write about?
Marty: And you know it’s funny, I have and I see…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
______________________________________________________
See Film Courage’s collection of Writing and Filmmaking and Acting videos on Youtube.
New videos 5:00 p.m. daily! Subscribe to the main Film Courage Youtube channel and our second Film Courage Youtube channel here…
Film Courage - Empowering Creatives 