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By, Jacob Krueger
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What makes writing a screenplay so much different from writing a play?
Transcript From Podcast:
The process of writing a screenplay is different from writing a play in many essential ways. The first is the difference in the use of action.
For screenwriters, action is the primary tool of structure. But for playwrights, the primary tool is dialogue.
Don’t get me wrong. As a playwright, you need to visualize to some degree what is happening on the stage in order to really create your dialogue, in order to create the piece. But you don’t have to communicate that to anybody else. People don’t need to see your play in their mind like they do when reading a screenplay; they need to hear it, and they need to see the big elements.
You get to rely on the director, because plays have this thing called rehearsals.
It is crazy that rehearsals, for the most part, don’t exist in filmmaking. Even though some of the really great film directors do rehearse-- for example Francis Ford Coppola had a history of bringing the cast up to his estate to rehearse-- most film directors don’t rehearse at all.
That’s for a very simple reason: stars cost about $20 million bucks, and who has that kind of money to spend on rehearsal?
So you end up in this very weird process where not only you are going to have no rehearsal, but also you are going to shoot all your scenes out of order. So you aren’t even going to have a continuity of knowing “this, leads to this and then this leads to this and then this leads to this…” as you shoot your film. So it becomes much harder to track the structure from scene to scene as you shoot, as you could if you were rehearsing a play.
Writing a play can take place on a much more intuitive level, because you don’t have to communicate what you’re seeing to anybody else beyond just the very basics. But for a screenplay you need a much more substantial infrastructure.
The second element that makes playwriting so different from screenwriting is that plays have fewer moving pieces than screenplays.
Screenplays have way too many moving pieces! And this is actually part of what led me to create Seven Act Structure for myself.
When I was a playwright, I didn’t need any way of consciously dealing with structure, because intuitively I am pretty good at structure. So, when I was a playwright I didn’t think about things like “Okay what is going to be the big turn or the big structural choice here?” I just got to dig in.
As a playwright, I always thought of writing like peeling the layers of an onion. I want to meet some people who want some stuff, and as they try to get the stuff that they want, slowly I am going to get to know who they really are and what they really want. Slowly they are going to reveal themselves to me, and to themselves, and to each other over the course of the play. And that is a very intuitive process; it is like getting to know someone. It’s the same thing that you do every day when you connect with someone… You meet somebody you think, “Oh they are cool!” So, you hang out.
You think you know who they are, then you start to learn things as you both pursue what you want in the relationship-- you start to learn who they really are, and who you really are with them, and who you both really are in relation to each other. And changes start to happen; sometimes they are beautiful changes, and sometimes they are catastrophic changes and usually they are both.
So that is a very intuitive process and it is one of the reasons we are able to channel it faster as playwrights.
The third thing about plays that is very different from screenplays is that playwriting audiences, theatre audiences, are much more comfortable with metaphor than filmmaking audiences.
And this is changing a little bit. For example, we saw magical realism in Narcos, we have real world human beings with surrealistic animal elements in Bojack Horseman, and even the new Wonder Woman, which most people certainly wouldn’t consider expressionistic in any way, has a character who exists for metaphorical, rather than plot driven reasons: a Native American character who randomly shows up at the German Front during World War 2.
He is there for a metaphorical reason. The metaphorical reason is, as we discussed fully in last week’s Wonder Woman Podcast, that the film is really an exploration of war, a look underneath the fundamental assumptions of most action movies: a movie that raises the question are people actually good?
Wonder Woman’s love interest in the film is an American spy, Steve. And, of course, as an American in a Hollywood movie, in relation to this theme, of course this character is the most fundamentally good among all the wacky good guy sidekicks.
And so they show up at the German front, and there’s a random Native American that joins the team. And one of the characters asks him the same damn thing that we’re asking-- “Why the hell are you here?”
And here’s his answer: “Well somebody took my land.” “Who took your land?” “That guy - the good guy? His people.” Which, is pretty impressive for a mainstream action movie-- and starts to deepen the theme, and deepen the question at the center of the movie-- that fundamental assumption of all action movies that we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys-- and that all we have to do to make a better world is find a way for the good guys to win.
In a play you just have the Native American show up. You just let him serve his metaphorical purpose. You don’t have to explain “Well I am also here for the money…. you see... well, there is nothing left for me in the United States…,” you don’t have to explain him, he is just there.
So this is the other difference-- the different level of tolerance for metaphor versus pragmatic content in plays and screenplays.
And this is just because screenwriting is a newer art form; playwriting has been around forever, and when it started off, it wasn’t all that metaphorical.
When they started off it wasn’t Theatre of the Absurd, it wasn’t Expressionism, it was- “all right let’s tell a bunch of stories-- and it is always going to be the same formula; there is going to be a good person, they are going to commit an act of hubris, and eventually through that act of hubris they are going to try to escape their fate, and eventually that hubris is going to lead everyone to die or suffer horribly.”
No matter what, the fate is going to happen. Like a Three Act Structure or Save The Cat! it is just a formula. Back from when theatre was young.
And then what happened was, over time, people saw play after play after play... and they started to realize, “this is frickin’ boring!”
It isn't that the plays are boring, but the same thing again and again is boring. And over time, new movements came up and theatre evolved, just as we’re seeing film-- even big action movies-- start to evolve now.
And as a result, people who see theatre are much more comfortable with the idea that weird stuff is going to happen on stage. In filmmaking, in the middle of a giant fight scene, you can have like a really funny quip, or you can kill somebody’s father, and they are sad for two seconds, and then we are on to the next scene and it is a love scene. Or you can jump off a building and land by catching with your pinky and we are comfortable with that.
We are used to that kind of expressionistic stuff in action movies-- “this is what it feels like to be an awesome action hero” versus, “this is what it actually looks like to be an action hero.”
So, most audiences are comfortable with that level of expressionism, but most audiences aren’t that comfortable yet with metaphor.
What this means is that in theatre, you can translate your instincts in a different way from the way you translate them in film.
In theatre, the line between dreams-- your interior world, your impulse, what it feels like to you, the random image that popped up into your mind-- and what makes it into the final draft is a much thinner line.
And that means, plain and simple, that screenplays often require more rewriting than plays do.
Part of the reason for that is, to some degree, theatre always looks fake, whereas most movies-- with the exception of art films like Where the Wild Things Are-- the adaptation of the children’s book that was actually purposely made to look fake-- that was made to look the way a child might imagine the place where the Wild Things are, as opposed to how a brilliant CGI artist would imagine it…
But with the exception of films like these, especially in the non-animated world, we haven't really seen a lot of movies that purposely try to look fake. Even our animation is moving more towards looking real.
In theatre, you can’t look real.
In theatre, people are very, very, very aware that there is a stage and there are actors up there. And if you do accomplish something that looks real, you will get applause, because people are so consciously aware of what it took! “Oh my god, how did they do that?”
A couple of years ago I took my niece Mia to see Mary Poppins on Broadway, which is one of the worst adaptation of a great film that has ever, ever, ever occurred.
But it was one of my proudest moments as an Uncle. She was so young; this is her first play, she was maybe five years old. And halfway through the play she looks at me and she says, “This is boring to Mia.”
The reason it was boring to Mia-- well first off, structurally, they took the story out! So,...
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