Doubt's John Patrick Shanley lends his advice to writers

I am concerned about Madison st. Nicholas school academically I was not inviting a guessing game sister Raymond what's this mr. Conroy I don't know sister they're all uniformly terrified of you that's how it works boy come up here dragon is hungry it's a new time sister the church needs to change the point being we should be friendlier no doubt is set in a church school in 1964 and the Bronx is a very quiet working-class Enclave world unto itself but just over the hill you can hear a noise coming and that's the sixties and things are going to going to get very blown up and these women who are in these habits and the way the masses said and the way that people are dressed on the street and what they're saying all of that is going to change me swept away in a very short period of time though there's almost no current a conscious knowledge at that among the people in the story modern plays are different than players from 40 years ago in that the economics of theater have changed and back then you know you wrote a plague-like inherit the wind or streetcar named desire or of mice and men and when the time came to turn them into a film you had this host of characters to work with and multiple locales and what's happened since is that now we're down to doubt as four characters and a few locales and so when you go to take something like that and turn it into a film you have to first recognize that you hypnotized yourself as a playwright into thinking that it was a good idea to only have four characters or five characters or six characters and to find a way to tell the whole story of a great economy using very few people and so when you look at that same material and say I'm now going to tell the story using the materials of film you have to break the spell I want to see what the audience wants to say and what is natural for them to see and so that starts to suggest right away a lot of ways that the film organically grows into a larger item I always write to guitar hydride in other words I think any writer a writer of screenplays ultimately is directing the movie now then the director may come in and give all sorts of notes to get a handle on it to get a hold of it to make it go in the way that they want but that's the initial impulse that's just you know you're you screw screenwriting is point of view and you're looking with one eye through the camera it's not binocular vision that's why we've had some very good one-eyed film director the best kind of writing comes when you connect with the physical world you get grounded in the physical world and the earth or the ocean by Joseph Conrad or the Stars and then you connect to those things and then you view human events through that connection you know the most dangerous kind of writing I do is and I don't mean that in the best sense is whimsical because you know I have a sort of Irish fairy side to my personality and if I could sort of leave the earth if I get to up in the fairy realm I am NOT speaking from the most substantive part of myself I never want to lose that side but I have to when I'm running that way I have to keep bringing it down and finding a way to get my hands into the earth again my father said to me when I was a kid we had a bunch of chores that we were gonna do together and we had like three chores and one of them was really hard it was going to be doing some roofing and another was washing a car which I like to do and the third one was cut in the grass and he said which one do you want to do first and I said I like to wash the car and my father said yeah well you could do that but I you know I always think the best thing to do is do the hardest thing first because later you'll be tired that's a good piece of advice for a writer do the hardest things first so what is the hardest thing for you every day it's a different thing you know what is that thing that you don't want to tackle because it's a do that or you know where's the part that you're actually gonna have to open your heart and speak truthfully about something you don't want to do that do the hard thing do the hard thing a lot of people is to sit down and write

Channel: WGA West

Views: 16,151

Rating: 4.9000001 out of 5

Keywords: Meryl, Streep, Philip, Seymour, Hoffman, Amy, Adams, Viola, Davis, screenwriters, screenwriting, how, to, write, scripts, screenplays

Id: dk1WN83nJYQ

Length: 5min 17sec (317 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 17 2008