Global Screenwriting Today
Drink Locally and Write For the World

FIVE COMMANDMENTS OF GLOBAL SCREENWRITING

1) Drink locally.

My emphasis is on a global perspective to writing, but everything begins at home, wherever and whatever that is. This is the advice writers have always received about "write what you know" and what better place do you know than your locale? That goes for your internal locales of your spirit as well as your postal address in town.

A friend, Milcho Manchevski, from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, went to college in the States and started working very successfully in MTV production while also writing "Hollywood genre" scripts on the side. I read many of them and tried to suggest how they seemed to be lacking elements that would make them hot items in Los Angeles.

I encouraged him, as did others, to write something "closer to home" and closer to his roots. When he finally went back home after years of being away, he found a country torn by deep nationalistic and religious divisions. The Bosnian war was still going up the coast from Macedonia, and Milcho was deeply moved by what he saw, felt, and learned "at home."

He sat down and swiftly wrote the script that became the Oscar nominated "Best Foreign Film" in 1994, Before The Rain. And as a British, French, Macedonian co-production, what could be more global! It was, therefore, the drinking of the local waters of his imagination that paid off so powerfully, not the effort to tap into the fast foods of Hollywood.

2) Live for at least a year abroad.

If you are American, go abroad. If you are Korean, go to Europe. If you are French, try New Zealand or India. The point is simple: living in a foreign land gives you new insights, perspectives, and possibilities. Consider also how many good films from Casablanca and Il Postino to The Piano and Witness are "fish out of water" stories of characters in unfamiliar landscapes and cultures. If you personally have had such an experience, think of the pleasure and rewards of writing scripts that cross national boundaries.

Gray Frederickson whose producing credits include all three Godfather films as well as Apocalypse Now and about twenty-five other films, firmly believes in this command. He says, loud and clear, that he really got his start by living, working and studying in Switzerland years ago. That experience allowed him to be in touch with a number of European film folk, mostly Italians. And he wound up helping a number of Italian productions that wanted to shoot in America. From that opportunity, he launched into a career in Hollywood, based on the experiences that began "over there!"

3) Write with a partner from another country.

Many happy projects for me have been such "trans-national" efforts. To date, I have written with Yugoslav, Hungarian, Norwegian, Greek, Russian, British and New Zealand script partners, and I have a great idea for an Antarctic script but have not yet found an Antarctic partner!

Quite simply, one of the profound joys of "global screenwriting" is the chance to go beyond your own world, quite literally. It is a pleasure not only to travel abroad but to really begin to get to know another country and culture. Screenwriting offers this opportunity more often than many realize.

I offer just one example here. My latest project is a New Zealand jazz sheep farm comedy I wrote last year with a New Zealand friend, Russell Campbell. We met on my first visit to New Zealand several years ago. A friendship developed as I taught screenwriting courses as a visiting professor for Victoria University in Wellington, and Russell taught Film Studies and Film Production.

When the New Zealand Film Commission that year had a competition for comic screenplay ideas, we decided to enter "for the hell of it" and actually won a grant to develop our idea with the help of a local producer. We were even funded for a second draft, and the script is now awaiting final funding for production.

But the question is, what was it like to bring two completely different cultural backgrounds to a project? The answer is simple: a whole carnival of possibilities opens up because we have such different areas of expertise and experience. In our case, for the project that came to be titled Make A Joyful Noise, Russell began with an actual incident that had occurred several years before in which a Russian cruise ship had crashed onto the South Island of New Zealand and the Russians had no money to get back home, so the New Zealand government wound up footing the bill to get these Russian and Thai and Pakistani sailors and crew members home.

Of course any time screenwriters work in pairs you enjoy "playing off" each other, building on ideas springing from either writer. Yet in cross-cultural situations the possibilities increase even further. In this case, I built on my 20 years of living in New Orleans to add to this "true story" a "what if" element. What if on that Russian cruise ship there was a New Orleans jazz band familyÛAfrican AmericanÛwho had not been paid by the Russians and were thus very broke. And what if when the ship crashed they did not want to deal with government officials, for certain legal reasons from their past, and therefore to get back to New Orleans, they wind up getting jobs on a sheep farm in order to raise some cash for tickets home.

It became a "fish out of water" tale, with a lot of music too, of course! But with this simple set up, we had a lot of fun developing the New Orleans and the New Zealand sheep farm characters. Russell could make sure I was not falling into hopeless stereotypes on the New Zealand front, and my knowledge of New Orleans characters and music helped the script become more, we feel, than a slapstick Scary Movie or Nutty Professor II script.

Finally, I would add, not only did we have a lot of fun working together on Make A Joyful Noise, but we learned a lot too. Neither of us had spent time on a sheep farm, for instance. So we did a week of "research," traveling the South Island and visiting farms, talking with farmers and families, and getting to know the landscape and the customs literally.

This is not just one of my stories. Multiply this times the creation of many memorable films that, in large part, are unforgettable because several different "nations" worked on the script, and my "command" becomes even clearer.

Award winning Greek director Theo Angelopoulos has worked on many of his scripts such as The Beekeeper (1986), Landscape in the Mist (1988), The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), UlyssesÌ Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998) with Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra who wrote scripts for Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovski. Although Shakespeare in Love was a Hollywood-backed production with an original script by an American writer, Marc Norman, the spirit and texture of the screenplay gained much the collaboration of British-Czech playwright Tom Stoppard. Finally, would Monty Python be quite as "Pythonesque" if they did not have that one Yank, Terry Guilliam, on board?

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