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Screenwriting

Terry Davis, photo courtesy of Mankato Free Press.

An Interview with Terry Davis...

After selling his first novel, VISION QUEST to Hollywood, Terry Davis's screenwriting education took a giant step forward. He learned to love the tight, beauty of concise storytelling...the breathtaking grace of leaping from scene to eloquent scene. A decade later, he shares his experience with students at the Minnesota State University at Mankato. This Q&A offers a few insights into his personal style and vision.

What led to your teaching screenwriting at Mankato? And how long have you been doing it?

Terry Davis: I sold a couple screenplays in the mid-Eighties, so I had a tiny bit of credibility. There was interest in screenwriting among out students, so we began offering a graduate course. Now we offer an undergraduate course, too. I teach Screenwriting each semester, and I've been doing it now about ten years. We have three former students working in the business, and one was accepted to the American Film Institute.

What do you like about the art form, as opposed to other written mediums?

Terry Davis: I like it that screenwriting makes traditional narrative transitions needless. You write a new slug line, and you're off. I really like that. I'm using a simplified screen-play form for most of the narrative I write now. I think there's a sample of this on the website somewhere. Screenwriting allows you to make nearly every line a beat, an instance of some kind of forward movement. In traditional narrative form this isn't the case. When I read all but the very best traditional narrative, I find myself with the desire to demand of the writer to get on with the story. And getting on with the story is the only thing that screenwriting does when it's done right.

Are there any basic "musts" in the creation of a balanced screenplay? Accepted guidelines (i.e. X number of scenes, X number of characters, X number of pages)?

Terry Davis: I guess people are saying now that 110 pages is about as far as you want to go unless you've been hired to write an epic. As far as all other musts, there's probably only one -- and it is really only relevant as a matter of personal ethic, I guess -- and that is to learn to write well. Lots of people are writing screenplays now, and few of them can write -- I mean just write a decent prose. If we want to give ourselves the best chance for success in screenwriting -- or any kind of writing -- first we need to write a flawless prose. We need to know standard English. If we want to break those gules -- great. But we can't break them with any grace if we don't know what we're breaking. We also need to know exactly what a good story is and does by traditional standards and also by our own standards.

What is a beginning screenwriter's most frequent mistake?

Terry Davis: Not knowing standard English, not being able to write a seamless, natural sounding prose when such a prose is called for. This is any apprentice writer's most profound mistake. We should all read and re-read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, and we should read line by line aloud and with enormous care Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. And it we place a particular value on work by women, we need to read with that same deep, deep care the first edition of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine.

What is the best way to correct the most common error?

Terry Davis: We need to read the kind of work we want to write with this enormous care, I talk about above. We must learn every secret of how the writing we want to do creates its effects. If it's screenwriting we want to master -- and a mid-level, popular movie is what we want to write -- we need to consider with this enormous care a movie like The Program, written by -- God, it was David Ward, wasn't it? That story is the model for the popular film in terms of main character, number of characters, number of conflicts, three-act structure, everything.

I should say before we go on here, that they don't let you enter the city limits of Los Angeles unless you can prove you possess knowledge of dramatic structure. Most of those people don't give a shit if you can write. In fact, their definition of a good writer is someone who really knows dramatic structure -- a good storyteller, as opposed to a good prose craftsman.

What one piece of advice would you offer writers hoping to learn this "language?"

Terry Davis: Find a decent book, like Robert McKee's Story, and devour it for a knowledge of how a story works. Then maybe Linda Seger's Making a Good Script Great for the screenwriting form of the storytelling. We need to study hard. We need to work for a mastery of prose and of the screenplay form. We need to show ourselves that we can write, so we have a basis for self-belief and a good foundation for hope.

Who is your favorite screenwriter? What film best represents his or her work?

Terry Davis: I like and admire a lot of screenwriters and movies. I think John Irving's screenplay for The Ciderhouse Rules is perfect, and I believe that Irving has a great mind and a gread good heart. I think John Patrick Shanley's Moonstruck is perfect. I like Near Dark, The Hidden, and Tremors as genre stories. I thought parts of American Beauty were wonderful. I love Dave, The American President, Breaking Away. There are a lot of fine movies and a lot of fine writers. Tender Mercies is among the movies I most admire. The death-penalty movie with Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon -- God, I think that is a fine thing. The Shawshank Redemption, The Shawshank Redemption, The Shawshank Redemption.

What contemporary or current movie do you think has the most shining screenplay? And why?

Terry Davis: As I said, I think Irving's screenplay for The Ciderhouse Rules is perfect at that highest level of "art". But I get a huge kick out of The Replacements, too, and I like Little Nicky. There are lots of different kinds of good movies. What we need to do is know the kind we want to write -- we want to understand the kind of movie we love --and that's the movie we must teach ourselves to write.

What classic film best illustrates a mastery of the written screenplay? And why?

Terry Davis: I'm afraid I don't know enough classic film to say. Casablanca, probably. But watching Sleepless in Seatle, Moonstruck, Breaking Away are movies that seem to me to have a classic quality among fairly recent films. They are just so good. And so is Pulp Fiction among the more recent films that don't use traditional chronology. The Usual Suspects, Sixth Sense.

Can a novelist also be a screenwriter? What makes a novelist a good candidate for screenplay adaptation? What makes a novelist the wrong choice for that conversion?

Terry Davis: A novelist who believes he must pay homage to the book he's adapting for the screen is someone a producer wants to stay away from. The job of a writer adapting a novel to the screen is to make the best movie he can.

Whether or not a novelist can do screenwriting depends on the novelist. I would imagine that any good writer can write a good screenplay once he determines for himself -- along with the people who commission him -- exactly the kind of story he (they) want to tell and the form they want that first draft in. As for the shooting script, someone can simply give him a sample of that form, and he can copy it.

Something I should say: we need to concentrate on telling our story in the screenplay that we try to sell. Don't mention the words "shot" "angle" or "camera". Our job is to tell -- and sell! -- a story. The director will determine how he's going to film the thing. And if we have to use the words "we see", we haven't learned to write well enough to do this.

A good writer can write in any form. Even poetry -- not great poetry, mind you, but good poetry. A good writer is a person who chooses the words one by one. Such a person, once his skill has developed to the point where all of those choices are effective ones, can write anything.

End