Eight Months
This is an essay I wrote about the eight months of writing of my screenplay "Next Exit".
Eight Months
By Matt KIeley
Since mid-September, 2006, after shelving "Seeing Red" the film I was originally going to shoot in the fall, I was floating around trying to figure out what I was going to do instead. I had an idea for a road movie a long time ago. I had a brief paragraph-long note to myself about what the film was. That was the seed of the screenplay that's now known as "Next Exit". I was thinking about that little idea, and I was hit with a brush of inspiration. It was late at night when I started writing a vague outline. I continued to re-write the outline and re-think the idea of the film, until a few hours later, when I started writing the script. The first fifty-something pages poured out of me effortlessly. Eventually I hit a wall creatively and stopped writing that night, and over the course of three more months, I gradually wrote the rest of the script, and re-wrote some of what I had already written. By December, the script came in at 109 pages. Then it was vacation time.
For a couple of months my mother and I had been planning a trip to Utah to visit my grandparents, uncles, and cousins. This trip would mark the first time seeing my cousin Scott in four years, the first two of which he spent doing missionary work in Italy. He used to live in San Diego, where I'd go every Christmas and Summer, and sometimes Thanksgiving, so we were pretty close. His best freind, Kent, had graduated film school sometime earlier, and so my cousin Scott had helped him out a few times with short films. Cousin Scott was into films, so natually, I showed him my script. He wrote some notes inside of it, which didn't really change my opinion of my script. I was already not entirely happy with the work, which is constantly happening to me. I'm not sure if I'll ever be satisfied with my scripts. So that January, it was back to the drawing board, sort of.
I wrote the second draft fairly quickly, which wasn't much of a full-on re-write. I had removed things I didn't like, re-arranged other things, played with different ideas, combined characters, and wrote new dialogue scenes, which brought it to a 104 pages. But there was still something wrong with it. I couldn't put my finger on it exactly, so I got to work immediately on a third draft. In August 2006, I had auditions for "Seeing Red" at the spotlight theatre. The project was cancelled, but I didn't want good auditions to go to waste, so of course I sent my script to all the actors who auditioned that I liked. I was worrying about sending a third draft so soon. I had already sent them two in just a couple of months. I began to fear that I might have created a flaky and indecisive image for myself. But I bit the bullet and re-wrote it again anyway. It was for the good of the film.
This time around the script had mutated substantially. Here we are at February 2007. It was now tonally very different. It became much more of a comedy, whith lots of witty, snappy, Kevin Smith esuqe dialogue. I liked it and was ready to film it. But this is when a question of who I am creeped in. I looked at the script and gave it some serious thought. The more I read the dialogue, the more it sounded like sit-com dialogue. I hate sit-coms. It had also begun to sound like the illegitimate love-child of Noah Baumbach and Kevin Smith, who was pretending to be Woody Allen. I love their films, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn't me. I had become interested in doing comedy. I fell in love with clever dialogue, and comedic scenes. It had become very contrived and less real, less human. It was a movie. I didn't want to write a movie script. I wanted to write something that sounded like real life, something that IS real life.
I was kidding myself, in more ways than one, about my life, about my friendships, my relationships. The script ended with the lead character going to tell the girl of his dreams how he felt about her, but would end up finding out she was already with someone. She let him down gently, he took it, and left. All this after a script full of clever dialogue and comedy. It was dishonest. It wasn't my life. It was as if I was saying my life is all laughter and jokes, and occasinally disappointing, which is too general, too cliche, too simple. The only real complication was that the girl the main character was infatuated with was with someone else and lived hundreds of miles away. That's it. Life, especially my own, is much more complicated than that. The third draft was a representation of my image. I try to act like everything is funny. Acting funny is my way of hiding my true self. The character had to be that, not the actual script. As a result of writing this comedy script, the characters had become mere caricatures. They weren't real enough, there wasn't enough of me or my friends or lost loves inside the characters. They were just moutpieces to this obviously written, contrived comedic dialogue.
Some might say it's self-indulgent and narcissisitic to write about yourself, but what writer doesn't do that? Every writer puts a little bit of themselves in their work, otherwise it's impersonal, it means nothing to them, thus, there's no point in doing it, unless you're financially motivated. I make my films for myself first, then if anyone likes it, fine. It's also my personal belief that if you're honest about yourself, it can't possibly be self-indulgent or narcissistic. It was in the previous drafts, because I had made the character to be this funny guy without flaws. He was Ferris Bueller: a slacker, who's a liar, and kind of an asshole, but gets away with it because he's so charming and funny. I didn't want that. The character now is funny and likeable, but also a needy, sometimes desperate, sometimes self-centered jerk. Everyone manages to contradict themselves. It's the contradictions and inconsistencies that make characters believable.
I had also barely scratched the surface of many themes I wanted to explore, but either didn't, or only barely did. I really wanted to cover the uncertainty of young adults, the banality of life, conformity, the concept of doing what everyone expects you to do in life. I did that. I still do that. I started going to college because everyone expects you to. I thought that's just what you do. But I don't want that. I want to live an unstructured life devoted to creating art. This is a thought my character had for the first time in the script. In previous drafts, he was just lazy. I know too many people who are in school to kill time, and don't really know what they want to do. I didn't cover that nearly enough. Now the main character isn't the only one--it's almost all of the characters, though some don't know how to put their life or their fears into words. One character quit college and has resorted to selling old homework and pot to high school kids. One is on the verge of graduating without knowing what she want in life. One is doing what's expected without even questioning it, and is content to just live a simple, structured, planned-out life. One just goes with the flow. One quits everything to be an artist and to live the way he wants to live.
Being a slacker is a badge of honor. The word has become a synonym for "lazy" though I don't see it as such. To me, being slacker means doing what you're passionate about in life, and not compromising it for anyone or anything. That's what I feel, and as a result, that's what the lead character feels. In previous drafts, he just simply didn't. He knew what he wanted to do, but didn't know how to do it. He quits his job and drops out of school as a resistence to comformity, but not the high school idea of conformity, which amounts to dressing a certain way and hanging out with a certain crowd. Conformity in the real world is equal to simplicity and comfort. It's easier to just go to college, get a diploma, start a career, get married, buy a house in the suburbs, have kids, and start driving a mini-van; in that order. Being a non-comformist in the real world means to go against that, to live the way you want to live, and devote your life to your passions. That was a theme I hadn't touched on before. At it's core, that is what "Next Exit is truly about.
So here I am, in May of 2007 writing this essay about the process of writing a screenplay. It's been about eight months, and I've written four drafts. Granted, I haven't spent every day over the course of the eight months writing--in fact, each draft itself hasn't taken long to write--but I've spent eight months soul-searching, and trying to tell a brutally honest story about myself, my life, my freinds, my thoughts, my emotions, and I feel I've accomplished at least that. I've spent these eight months thing really hard about what I really wanted to say and how I would say it, about who I am, which in turn tells me who the characters are. I've spent eight months despising the work I've done, and being driven to make it better, to make it honest, to make it real, and true to myself. In a society conditioned to believe Hollywood is some kind or presentation of real life, it's time that filmmakers stop lying and start telling the truth. That, after these eight months, is the most important thing I've learned about story-telling, and perhaps life in general. Writing this film has been a constant struggle, and though it'll be more demanding to actually shoot it, it'll still be a challenge to not let the truth-telling and story-telling get lost in the mix, to convince everyone to be honest too, and to not "act", including myself. A lot of filmmakers get caught up in jargon and technicalities, that they end up "playing" filmmakers, rather than actually being them. It's time to bring back the true meaning of Cinema Verite: Cinema of Truth.
Eight Months
By Matt KIeley
Since mid-September, 2006, after shelving "Seeing Red" the film I was originally going to shoot in the fall, I was floating around trying to figure out what I was going to do instead. I had an idea for a road movie a long time ago. I had a brief paragraph-long note to myself about what the film was. That was the seed of the screenplay that's now known as "Next Exit". I was thinking about that little idea, and I was hit with a brush of inspiration. It was late at night when I started writing a vague outline. I continued to re-write the outline and re-think the idea of the film, until a few hours later, when I started writing the script. The first fifty-something pages poured out of me effortlessly. Eventually I hit a wall creatively and stopped writing that night, and over the course of three more months, I gradually wrote the rest of the script, and re-wrote some of what I had already written. By December, the script came in at 109 pages. Then it was vacation time.
For a couple of months my mother and I had been planning a trip to Utah to visit my grandparents, uncles, and cousins. This trip would mark the first time seeing my cousin Scott in four years, the first two of which he spent doing missionary work in Italy. He used to live in San Diego, where I'd go every Christmas and Summer, and sometimes Thanksgiving, so we were pretty close. His best freind, Kent, had graduated film school sometime earlier, and so my cousin Scott had helped him out a few times with short films. Cousin Scott was into films, so natually, I showed him my script. He wrote some notes inside of it, which didn't really change my opinion of my script. I was already not entirely happy with the work, which is constantly happening to me. I'm not sure if I'll ever be satisfied with my scripts. So that January, it was back to the drawing board, sort of.
I wrote the second draft fairly quickly, which wasn't much of a full-on re-write. I had removed things I didn't like, re-arranged other things, played with different ideas, combined characters, and wrote new dialogue scenes, which brought it to a 104 pages. But there was still something wrong with it. I couldn't put my finger on it exactly, so I got to work immediately on a third draft. In August 2006, I had auditions for "Seeing Red" at the spotlight theatre. The project was cancelled, but I didn't want good auditions to go to waste, so of course I sent my script to all the actors who auditioned that I liked. I was worrying about sending a third draft so soon. I had already sent them two in just a couple of months. I began to fear that I might have created a flaky and indecisive image for myself. But I bit the bullet and re-wrote it again anyway. It was for the good of the film.
This time around the script had mutated substantially. Here we are at February 2007. It was now tonally very different. It became much more of a comedy, whith lots of witty, snappy, Kevin Smith esuqe dialogue. I liked it and was ready to film it. But this is when a question of who I am creeped in. I looked at the script and gave it some serious thought. The more I read the dialogue, the more it sounded like sit-com dialogue. I hate sit-coms. It had also begun to sound like the illegitimate love-child of Noah Baumbach and Kevin Smith, who was pretending to be Woody Allen. I love their films, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn't me. I had become interested in doing comedy. I fell in love with clever dialogue, and comedic scenes. It had become very contrived and less real, less human. It was a movie. I didn't want to write a movie script. I wanted to write something that sounded like real life, something that IS real life.
I was kidding myself, in more ways than one, about my life, about my friendships, my relationships. The script ended with the lead character going to tell the girl of his dreams how he felt about her, but would end up finding out she was already with someone. She let him down gently, he took it, and left. All this after a script full of clever dialogue and comedy. It was dishonest. It wasn't my life. It was as if I was saying my life is all laughter and jokes, and occasinally disappointing, which is too general, too cliche, too simple. The only real complication was that the girl the main character was infatuated with was with someone else and lived hundreds of miles away. That's it. Life, especially my own, is much more complicated than that. The third draft was a representation of my image. I try to act like everything is funny. Acting funny is my way of hiding my true self. The character had to be that, not the actual script. As a result of writing this comedy script, the characters had become mere caricatures. They weren't real enough, there wasn't enough of me or my friends or lost loves inside the characters. They were just moutpieces to this obviously written, contrived comedic dialogue.
Some might say it's self-indulgent and narcissisitic to write about yourself, but what writer doesn't do that? Every writer puts a little bit of themselves in their work, otherwise it's impersonal, it means nothing to them, thus, there's no point in doing it, unless you're financially motivated. I make my films for myself first, then if anyone likes it, fine. It's also my personal belief that if you're honest about yourself, it can't possibly be self-indulgent or narcissistic. It was in the previous drafts, because I had made the character to be this funny guy without flaws. He was Ferris Bueller: a slacker, who's a liar, and kind of an asshole, but gets away with it because he's so charming and funny. I didn't want that. The character now is funny and likeable, but also a needy, sometimes desperate, sometimes self-centered jerk. Everyone manages to contradict themselves. It's the contradictions and inconsistencies that make characters believable.
I had also barely scratched the surface of many themes I wanted to explore, but either didn't, or only barely did. I really wanted to cover the uncertainty of young adults, the banality of life, conformity, the concept of doing what everyone expects you to do in life. I did that. I still do that. I started going to college because everyone expects you to. I thought that's just what you do. But I don't want that. I want to live an unstructured life devoted to creating art. This is a thought my character had for the first time in the script. In previous drafts, he was just lazy. I know too many people who are in school to kill time, and don't really know what they want to do. I didn't cover that nearly enough. Now the main character isn't the only one--it's almost all of the characters, though some don't know how to put their life or their fears into words. One character quit college and has resorted to selling old homework and pot to high school kids. One is on the verge of graduating without knowing what she want in life. One is doing what's expected without even questioning it, and is content to just live a simple, structured, planned-out life. One just goes with the flow. One quits everything to be an artist and to live the way he wants to live.
Being a slacker is a badge of honor. The word has become a synonym for "lazy" though I don't see it as such. To me, being slacker means doing what you're passionate about in life, and not compromising it for anyone or anything. That's what I feel, and as a result, that's what the lead character feels. In previous drafts, he just simply didn't. He knew what he wanted to do, but didn't know how to do it. He quits his job and drops out of school as a resistence to comformity, but not the high school idea of conformity, which amounts to dressing a certain way and hanging out with a certain crowd. Conformity in the real world is equal to simplicity and comfort. It's easier to just go to college, get a diploma, start a career, get married, buy a house in the suburbs, have kids, and start driving a mini-van; in that order. Being a non-comformist in the real world means to go against that, to live the way you want to live, and devote your life to your passions. That was a theme I hadn't touched on before. At it's core, that is what "Next Exit is truly about.
So here I am, in May of 2007 writing this essay about the process of writing a screenplay. It's been about eight months, and I've written four drafts. Granted, I haven't spent every day over the course of the eight months writing--in fact, each draft itself hasn't taken long to write--but I've spent eight months soul-searching, and trying to tell a brutally honest story about myself, my life, my freinds, my thoughts, my emotions, and I feel I've accomplished at least that. I've spent these eight months thing really hard about what I really wanted to say and how I would say it, about who I am, which in turn tells me who the characters are. I've spent eight months despising the work I've done, and being driven to make it better, to make it honest, to make it real, and true to myself. In a society conditioned to believe Hollywood is some kind or presentation of real life, it's time that filmmakers stop lying and start telling the truth. That, after these eight months, is the most important thing I've learned about story-telling, and perhaps life in general. Writing this film has been a constant struggle, and though it'll be more demanding to actually shoot it, it'll still be a challenge to not let the truth-telling and story-telling get lost in the mix, to convince everyone to be honest too, and to not "act", including myself. A lot of filmmakers get caught up in jargon and technicalities, that they end up "playing" filmmakers, rather than actually being them. It's time to bring back the true meaning of Cinema Verite: Cinema of Truth.