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Personal Filmmaking: A Conversation With Lawrence Kasdan
From: American Film Institute
| By:
Ron SilvermanLawrence Kasdan |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Shortly after he sold his second script, Lawrence Kasdan was introduced to George Lucas--a meeting that launched Kasdan's famed screenwriting career during which he scripted Indiana Jones' signature brown-leather jacket and detailed Han Solo's escape from Jabba the Hutt's carbon-freezing chamber. Kasdan's work with Lucas laid a strong foundation for his work as a screenwriter-director on such films as Body Heat, The Big Chill and Accidental Tourist.
In 1994, Kasdan sat down with Fellows at the American Film Institute's Conservatory to describe his early screenwriting and directing career and to discuss the rigors of filmmaking. |
On Screenwriting
Lawrence Kasdan: I realized last night that for 27 years I've been writing screenplays and I've been a great believer in screenplays. I've been a defender of screenplays, a champion for screenplays, and I've finally arrived at the point where I think there's less and less connection in my mind between the screenplay and the movie. |
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An edited transcript of Lawrence Kasdan's discussion of his films and filmmaking career. |
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The problem that people get in at the studios is that they want the screenplay to reflect everything they think the movie is going to be and they keep adding stuff--"Why can't it be funnier? Why can't it be more sympathetic? Why can't it be happier?" But, in fact, a movie is something quite apart from the screenplay. The screenplay is terribly important, vitally important; it should make sense, it should have some sort of integrity to it and it should be involving. But the fact is that once there is a camera, actors, a score and lighting, everything changes. And movies are an emotional experience, not an intellectual one.
It's taken me years to finally accept it. Even the greatest movies that I thought were intellectual experiences, on re-viewing I see that they are emotional experiences. Movies sweep you up and make you accept things that you would never accept if someone were quietly explaining it to you, and a screenplay is actually a quiet explanation in your ear. There's a quiet explanation in the movie but it has very little connection to all the elements that are confronting you. |
Screenwriting is about instinct, it's about power. It's about knowing what you can get away with, which you learn from experience, partially: seeing what works for you, that you can make this moment work, even though everyone around you is saying, "This'll never work, this is never going to work." And you say, "Trust me. This'll work." And sometimes you're right. Sometimes it's gut and you say, "I think at this moment something big has to happen, something dramatic." For example: she's been teasing him all along and she's kissed him and then she tells him to leave and then she gave him a look and she locked the door behind her. What does she want? Does she want him to leave? Or why is she standing there looking at him like that? Something's got to happen here, something's got to break. How about this: Let's break the door down and get at it; that is what it's all about. |
There is no right answer to this because all of writing and all of directing is about knowing when that's supposed to happen. Are you in the right place? Are you seeing what you want to see at the time you want to see it? That, to me, is what movies are about. |
Kasdan's early screenwriting career
Kasdan: Steven Spielberg purchased the second script that I sold and he immediately said, "I want you to meet with me and George Lucas because we're going to do this adventure movie and I think you'd be perfect to write it."
I walked in and they said, "Oh, we're doing this thing and the guy has a whip and leather jacket and he's named after my dog, Indiana, and it's sort of like a serial. What do you think?"
And I said, "Sounds great." |
This was actually two weeks after I had gotten in the business and I'm suddenly in this room with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and they said, "Do you want to do it?" and I said, "Yeah." [Laughter]
Twenty minutes into the meeting, George said, "Alright, let's shake hands. This is going to be...let's hope this is the script." And this was after seven years of trying to get a job.
And then we went off--George, Steve and I went to a house in Sherman Oaks for two weeks and sort of hammered out the story. A lot of it was, "...and you figure out the rest, but we want to see this and we've gotta see this." |
I went off, and it took me six months, between the research and the writing and procrastination. I finished it and I took it up to Marin County and I gave George the script and he said, "Let's go out to lunch. Leigh Brackett, who was writing The Empire Strikes Back, has died and we are really under the gun. Will you write The Empire Strikes Back?"
I said, "Maybe you ought to read the script before you..." [Laughter] |
And he said, "Well, I'll read it this afternoon. If I don't like it, I'll call you back and take back the assignment. But I get an instinct about people." |
And he called me that night and said, "I really like Raiders. Let's go ahead with The Empire Strikes Back." So now I had another job. I was sort of stuck in Lucasland, and I wound up working around a year and a half with George, who is great fun, a wonderful guy and very funny; he's sort of like a cartoon character. In fact his voice, I think, is about ten different cartoon characters, and he has that kind of jumpy enthusiasm and energy and enormous confidence in himself and his vision. |
Raiders was very much the three of us putting that story together and then I sort of stepped out and went on to direct Body Heat. But with the Star Wars movies, whatever he wanted was OK with me. They were making the second Star Wars movie, he had already started building the monsters and the spaceships and we were sort of writing to that. I was up there working with him and Irwin Kerschner--who was going to direct Empire--and the three of us would be working and George would say, "Oh, come on. Let's go down to the model shop and I'll show what this looks like," and we were still writing the scene while they were building the ship. So he was sort of ahead of himself and there was enormous time pressure and it was all George's money, too, so I was just sort of there to serve: "how are we going from here to here?; what does Han say, what does Luke say?," and so on. |
After a year and a half I came out of there in a position to demand to direct, because everybody wanted me to write stuff for them. "No way. I'm not writing any more and I'm going to direct." And because they had these two enormous movies, not yet released but being made, they said, "OK, what do you want to direct?" So it turned out to be very valuable for me. |
On the rigors of directing
Question: When you've got your script on paper the way you want it, how do you prepare yourself to direct?
Kasdan: I think one of the advantages of writing movies is that you get this incredible saturation education in the movie while you're writing it. And one of the challenges of directing someone else's material is that you haven't had that and you have to figure out what they meant. I did that once and it was hard and I'm about to do it again--I then come to a movie very much like an actor comes to it, trying to understand what the script was about and what was intended and what are the nuances and what isn't there and should be there. |
When you've written a movie, in my experience, I've made the movie in my head so I do very little storyboarding--it's sort of there. It's just running in my head, and each day if I want a reminder, I go to the script and it's a very strong sense memory for me of what I had in mind. And now I try to get that on film. |
There are a lot of things conspiring against you: the location isn't exactly what you had in mind, and the actor doesn't say it exactly that way, yet sometimes they say it exactly the way you imagined. Sometimes you've written it for a particular actor and they're there. Sometimes you're able to design the location in a particular way. |
So for me, writing movies has been an enormous help in terms of knowing what I wanted to do every day, because most directors do not write. And many of the directors I was impatient with didn't understand my scripts back in those days. I'm more sympathetic to their problem now, which is they are coming to it and sort of saying, "Well, what were we supposed to do today? OK, now how should we do this?" |
Q: How important are the production designers on your projects?
Kasdan: Very important. You know you want someone that's like an editor or cinematographer. You want someone whose taste you really trust, who's going to bring you ideas, who's going to understand what you want and yet challenge you all the time. Someone who will say, "Yeah I know you want this, but look at this," and when you don't have a thought they're going to throw one in the pot and they're going to say, "We think it'll look like this," and you can say, "Oh, that's great but could we just move the sofa over there?" |
It's an important member of the team that's going to make the movie look a certain way. And the costume designer is another member of that team. Those are the important people and everything is built on what they do. |
On the art of filmmaking
Kasdan: It always amazes me when people generally, not critics, say that they didn't like the movie. That it was slow, they didn't get it: "It wasn't fun. I don't need to see that crap--I'd rather be entertained." And these comments just eliminate the whole: everything that we do, that you guys, perhaps like me, will spend your life working to perfect, even if what you do does not succeed, even if you have a scene that does not work, even for you. |
The big failure is if the scene does not work even for you. You will bring enormous amounts of work and discipline and experience to it just to achieve a bad scene. To achieve a good scene will be a miracle. When it happens you will be revived. That'll keep you going through the long hours and the years of disappointment and frustration and people saying no. It's so hard to do one scene, you know. And all the people out there, all the civilians and all the critics who are civilians don't get it. They just don't get it. In fact anyone who doesn't make art, it's very hard. No matter how sympathetic they are, they just don't get it. They don't get what we do. |
And I think it's vital that you recognize that it's really what you're trying to achieve so that you aim high and say how can a scene work on five different levels at once and how can it draw on all the traditions that are important in storytelling to man? And add this medium that can go anywhere and do anything and show you anything. This is really hard and it demands my greatest reverence every time I sit down to write a scene. And if I can actually get it on film, involve all the people and all the money that that requires, that will be an enormous undertaking. And have respect for that, and know that money can never be the thing that makes you do this kind of work, not if it comes from inside you and you're drawing on all your experience and all the years and all the training. It could never be about anything as trivial as money. |
That's what makes making art different from a lot of other jobs, which are perfectly honorable jobs but where it's clear that you do it because you can make a living and you can shelter your family and feed them--a lot of honorable jobs are like that. This is not like that; this requires much more and has to be treated with enormous respect. |
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