Ray-Anne Carr

Michael Clayton Shooting Script

 Billie Mernit may have written a bestselling book on ‘Writing the Romantic Comedy’, but he also has an entertaining, but professional blog covering topical aspects of the Screenwriting Business and Craft.

I found his recent post ‘The Movie on the Page’ on Tony Gilroy and his script for Michael Clayton was particularly insightful.

 http://livingromcom.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/the-movie-on-th.html 

“The primary thing in a screenplay is to make the reading experience as identical to seeing the movie as possible…  I want the prose to match the tone of the movie.  I want it to smell as much like the movie as it possibly can.” Tony Gilroy

Cinematic storytelling — the term that’s come to define this particular approach to screenwriting — involves a kind of three-step process (though these steps are often enacted simultaneously):

1)       you conceive your story in filmic terms,

2)       you see the movie in your head, and

3)       you write the story in a language that vividly communicates that movie’s sounds and images.

 ‘Their writers have put the movie in their minds on the screenplay page — so specifically that any director worth his lens-knowledge could tell what the movie was supposed to look, sound and feel like.

This technique is not new to Screenwriters – and it may surprise you to know that it is certainly not a new concept for writers of Fiction novels.

For Billie, these award winning screenplays ALL benefit from the technical skill and craft of the screenwriter to vividly and passionately transfer the images and scenes played out inside their own heads onto paper.

Three dimensional sensory images, sensations, settings must be accurately and faithfully re-created on the page so that the reader can re-experience them.

Otherwise, how can the reader – or in this case, cinematographer, recreate that emotional experience for themselves, and live through the life of that character?

That’s our job.  Want to read the Shooting Script for Michael Clayton – go here.

Well worth it. http://bigscreenlittlescreen.net/2008/01/30/michael-clayton-script/ 

For other Oscar movie scripts, try here; http://bigscreenlittlescreen.net/2008/01/10/get-your-scripts/ 

Miramax:–

No Country for Old Men: script (PDF). Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. Based on the book by Cormac McCarthy. Starring Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and Tommy Lee Jones.–

 The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: script (PDF). Screenplay by Ronald Harwood. Based on the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby. Directed by Julien Schnabel. Starring Mathieu Amalric.

– The Hoax: script (PDF). Screenplay by William Wheeler. Based on the book by Clifford Irving. Directed by Lasse Hallström. Starring Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis, Julie Delpy, and Stanley Tucci.

pic = Warner Bros

Tony Gilroy is the screenwriter responsible for Michael Clayton and the Bourne Trilogy and clearly a master of the thriller genre.

John Truby * commented in his October newsletter on the story techniques Tony Gilroy used to create the effective and compelling movie experience in Michael Clayton.

One of the most powerful of these is to clearly establish the Personal Need of the Main character, and then connect that need to the crime that character must solve. If you make this a powerful, personal connection, then the audience has the cathartic pleasure of seeing the hero solve his personal problems at the same time as he solves the crime.

You are controlling the emotional experience of the person in the audience watching the movie at the same time as the hero achieves the double goal.

This aspect of the craft hit home to me today in a powerful way as I read ‘The Abduction’ by Mark Gimenez **. The novel opens with one of the main characters, Ben Brice and sets up his personal need and ghost in the two opening chapters.

As the story progresses it is revealed that [and I am trying to avoid spoilers here];

* there is a direct, personal connection between the crime Ben goes out to solve and his own ghost and pain, and the anatagonist is deeply linked to him at 3 or 4 levels - Ben is still causing the villain pain, just as the villain is still causing Ben pain

* the crime is carried out because decisions Ben made as a result of actions in the past by that same criminal - these are complex, and revealed step by step to explain the motivation for the crime and the reaction from the characters

* each of the other main characters in the book, including the victim, is involved because of that connection

* the compulsory one to one scene at the end is between, for the most part, Ben and the criminal face to face

* the crime is solved, the bad guys are defeated, Ben is at peace.

Powerful technique indeed.

 * http://www.truby.com/

** http://www.abductionthebook.com/