2.Main Content
Sir David Hare talks structure
David Hare, one of the UK's greatest writers, speaks at SCENE
Tue, 2 Dec 2003
As part of The Script Factory's SCENE Festival, David Hare (The Hours, Plenty) had an audience of writers riveted as he gave a lecture analysing good screenplay structures and the art of breaking the rules.
Extracted from
BEGINNINGS, REELS SEVENS AND ENDS:
DAVID HARE GIVES A MASTERCLASS IN STRUCTURE
THURSDAY 30th OCTOBER 2003
Chaired by NICK JAMES, Editor of SIGHT AND SOUND
ON BREAKING THE RULES
DAVID HARE
Well, we’re seeing three films, two of them are great world classics and one of them is a film I wrote! I’ve included a film I wrote because I wanted to talk about structure this evening. I wanted to talk about how I’ve attacked problems that great writers have attacked before me. Basically, I don’t want to identify them in advance, but the point of the class is to talk about beginnings, reel sevens, and ends. And reel seven, for anybody who doesn’t know this, is that moment about an hour into a film where you begin to get bored. That’s really what I want to talk about, why there is a certain hiatus or a lack of interest as most films proceed. But first I want to talk about three beginnings. I think each bunch of three clips tends to be about fifteen minutes long.
[1st Screening – the opening sequences from The Third Man, Amores Perros, The Hours]
NJ
So, I thought I’d kick you off with the most blindingly obvious question: why have you chosen these three films?
DH
Well, because they teach different things, I suppose. Two of them are connected: Amores Perros, which I suppose everyone has identified, although I left the title off just to titillate, and The Hours. Both have triangular structures, which are rare in the cinema, mysteriously rare. I don’t know why they’re so rare because they’re such wonderful structures. But with The Third Man I wanted to show the opening because it breaks every rule that every screenwriter is taught, so it seems a wonderful way of saying that the rules don’t exist.
NJ
Shall we go through ‘The Rules’ slightly?
DH
Yeah, the one thing you must never do is start a film with voiceover and boring exposition about where you are. And you must identify who the voice belongs to. All instructional dialogue is bad, that’s a rule, whenever there’s a blackboard and a block points at it and says “You must understand that the troops have been sent to ground at Ho Chi Minh City and that they’re moving North”. The audience is bored. That’s the theory.
There are brilliant ways of getting round that. And what happened with The Third Man is that they sat in the cutting room and couldn’t get into the film, so they had the idea that they’d put this prologue on the front in which they’d explain everything to the audience, i.e. breaking all the rules. In other words, it must be a badly written film because it doesn’t make sense when it’s edited, and it’s the philosophy of despair to stick an explication on the beginning which tells you everything that’s going on that you wouldn’t understand if you didn’t have some bloke at the beginning telling you. But it isn’t. And actually people maybe do know who the man is who’s speaking, but the man who is speaking, who speaks that prologue, is not in the film. Who is that man? The answer is he’s Carol Reed. He’s the director of the movie and he simply went into a sound booth and did that voiceover. You never know who that man is, he’s never referred to again and he’s not integral to the plot. And yet the genius of it is this club-land tone that the man has, as if he’s sitting in a chair next to you. So although you don’t know who he is, you - sort of from his tone - pick up that he’s some bloke you’re sitting with, next to the fire, and he is the storyteller. But at no point is it explained that he’s the storyteller and it’s the most extraordinary set-up for a film.
The odd thing is that sitting here I have a sensual memory of the first time that I saw the film, which was in an open-air cinema in Athens, when I was eighteen, with an enormous screen. And I saw it all at the wrong angle. I thought that the shots were regular shots but I had simply, because I’d been sitting in the corner looking up at the screen like that, seen all the camera angles at a tilt. But it’s a brilliantly shot film as it evolves. It’s basically what we call a ‘Here he comes…’ movie, meaning that for an hour they talk about him and then he arrives. A recent example of, and I think a successful example of a ‘here he comes’ movie, is Still Crazy which I think is a very good British film. They talk about him for an hour and then he arrives, and when he arrives he’s Bruce Robinson, which is a brilliant piece of casting. Casting a screenwriter as the person the whole audience has been waiting for is an internal joke anyway, but also in this one a bloke who’s rather distinguished in the cinema turns up as the person you’ve been waiting for an hour. I once wrote a play and Helen Mirren played the lead and she said to me, when I offered it to her, “Oh yes, this is the kind of play I like, for thirty minutes they talk about me and then I come on.” And this, The Third Man, is a classic piece of that. For an hour they talk about Harry Lime and then he comes on. And the only expectation on you all if you choose this particular approach to screenwriting is it’s a very high-wire act. In other words when he or she arrives, it’s gotta be good. And it’s a very risky approach. It’s not that there aren’t any rules, but there isn’t a rule that can’t be broken. It just has to be broken brilliantly, as the rules are broken brilliantly in The Third Man.
ON STRUCTURE
David Hare
Most films are structured so boringly really. I’m trying to talk about a way of structuring a movie so that the audience doesn’t get ahead of you. We haven’t got time to go into the pernicious influence of Star Warsbut it’s a huge subject. Obviously an awful lot of screenwriting classes are now based on Joseph Campbell and George Lucas; ‘the Star Warsapproach to story telling.’ And that, unfortunately, is as they say, a ‘template’ now so well known that the audience is sickeningly familiar with it. In other words, they know the structure: the hero leaves home, the hero goes on adventures, the hero must return home. During reel ten he will meet insuperable problems that will seem to defeat him but in reel eleven he will triumph over them. Thousands of films a year are still being churned out to a template with which the audience is sickeningly familiar. And thousands of students are being produced from UCLA and USC and the film schools in America, taught that this is how to write film.
ON RESEARCH
Nick James
What of the constraints of it being a real person (Virginia Woolf) in one of the strains, does it really affect anything?
David Hare
Not really. I can’t say that it bothered me very much.
Nick James
You didn’t find yourself listening to recordings of Virginia Woolf?
David Hare
No. This is another thing I feel about research - I’m not desperate to research. I think one of the wonderful things about film, if it’s working properly, is that there are departments to do all that. If you don’t have an idea of what it is you want to write and express, the art director and production designer go down to where Virginia Woolf lived, and they will come back to you and say “Do you know that in fact it was like this and like that?” And you say “that’s very interesting” and that kicks me off and I’ll rewrite this and change that. But that’s not the impetus to write. I mean research isn’t what going to make your film good, is it? Research isn’t going to validate your film, it isn’t a validation of a film to say “this is how it was. Oh, they’ve got it exactly how it was, how wonderful.” I might as well go to Madame Tussauds for my entertainment if I want it exactly how it was, that’s not a vindication, “Oh it’s completely lifelike, oh my goodness he really did look like Jack Kennedy.” That is not a good film. A good film is something that has something to tell you about Jack Kennedy.
ON ENDINGS
Audience
If you take the Joseph Campbell approach and the George Lucas approach, then there are certain criteria for what makes a good script and how you can get a good ending. What criteria do you have when you mess around with a structure. What makes a good ending?
David Hare
That’s such a difficult question and I don’t really know the answer…so by way of answer, I’m going to show three clips. Do you remember how all films, for about five years, began with shots of Manhattan skylines? There was always a helicopter going over Manhattan and there were always soft fades - every single film began like that. I felt if I saw one more credit sequence of a setting sun over the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Central Park… It was like a mass-infection in American film, somebody can write a thesis about it.
I think that’s because the most powerful film idea there’s ever been is The Naked City, “There are seven million people living in the city and every one has a story.” You’re too young to remember. But there was a series on television which began “This is the naked city. There are seven million people living in the city and every one of them has a story.” So there is something intensely filmic about the idea that you’re wide, you go closer, you go closer, you go closer, you go closer. We stay close, obviously there’s a whole thesis written about cinema and voyeurism, and then the easiest way out of a film is you go wide, you go wide, you go wide, you go wide, you go wide. Amores Perrosgoes wide and that is always deeply satisfying. If the film itself has been satisfying then it’s always a deeply satisfying route out. And The Third Manis the most brilliant takes on that, in that it’s a film that appears to do that but actually leaves you deeply uneasy. Everything is resolved but nothing is resolved. And now, brilliant endings tend to be the ones audiences can’t see coming from an hour earlier.
NJ
Just to help our questioner out, are there any things that are definite don’ts for you, anything that you just will never do?
DH
No. I’m trying to say that’s the whole point of my speaking tonight is to say that although there are rules, there are also no rules that can’t be broken if they’re broken brilliantly enough.