2.Main Content
Training
The Script Factory Masterclass with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner
Billy Elliot, one of many Working Title successes
The Script Factory Masterclass with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner
As part of SCENE at the Regus London Film Festival
Saturday 16 November 2002, Soho Theatre, London
Chaired by Miranda Sawyer, journalist, presenter
Miranda Sawyer
You’ve obviously got a structure that works (at Working Title) but is it like a kind of factory, is every process the same or does it vary for each work?
Eric Fellner
I think that the application is the same and the personnel are the same but each project needs different things depending on whether you’ve got a major director who is very established and who doesn’t need the same support of a first time director. Same with writers - a first time writer or an established writer need different resources. We try and cover as much ground as possible on every project no matter the size or experience of the writer and director to ensure that it will be as good as possible. You can never be sure that something is going to work: you can do all the work, have the best people, the best directors, the best actors, the best writers…everyone can still have failures.
Tim Bevan
Also, because of the consistency of the personnel and the consistency of the company, which isn’t only unheard of in the whole of England but also in the whole of the movie business (in actual fact the same group of people working together is actually very, very rare) there is actually quite a depth of development. On the main slate we’ve probably got fifty projects and of those fifty there are probably fifteen that it’s conceivable we could make in the next eighteen months and that varies each week, month to month as to which ones bubble up to the top but that’s an amazing thing to have because we are actually putting stuff into development now, in 2002 that we are not even thinking about producing until 2004/2005.
EF
The development we are most focused on now is what we are going to be doing in 2004 so that’s an indication of how far ahead we are.
TB
I think one of the problems with a lot of British films is that the day they get green lit is the day when the development stops, and it tends to be at Working Title that if we have managed to get a film green lit, that that is the day that the development process starts. We realise that we’ve got this film green lit, and that in ten weeks or twenty weeks or whatever we are actually going to go and shoot it and there is never a perfect script at that point. One of the things that Michael Coon certainly taught me, I don’t know if he taught Eric as well, was something called quality control, that we attach to our development executives as well as ourselves; the scriptwriting process and the development process doesn’t actually end until the last day of the dub. We are in post-production on Johnny English and Ned Kelly across the road here at the moment, and there are still writers at work on both pictures, basically because that’s the process.
MS
I know that there are quite a number of people here who are scriptwriters themselves, but you don’t tend to accept unsolicited scripts do you?
EF
Tim does? (LAUGHTER)
TB
I’m going to get him back afterwards, and give out his email address… (LAUGHTER)
EF
No, seriously. We can’t because it would open the flood door and because we are part of a major organisation that is constantly looking at things like copyright infringements. We can only take screenplays through agencies, in other words…
MS
Do you ever approach a writer and ask them to have a go at writing something?
TB
There are three basic kinds of ways that projects come to Working Title: there are the long term relationships which we will talk about later; there is reacting to books or screenplays in the market place; or there is ‘pro-acting’, i.e. coming up with ideas that we want to turn into films ourselves. The way that material comes in is pretty well equally balanced across those three arenas. Eric and I are also thinking of our entire slate in any given year because we will make probably five movies every year - a couple of low budget ones, and a couple of high budget ones. There is no point in having a bunch of art movies going at the same time, because you want to balance that slate. Once the development process starts, it’s always pretty much the same, which is that one of our senior executives is on it, and either Eric or I are on it. If there is a writer attached to it, then the writer will come in and we will start to have meetings about what the projects going to be about. If there is not a writer attached, we will suggest different writers. We run quite a disciplined process, and if it is something that we are starting from scratch - be it an adaptation of a book or an original idea - we would work for many weeks on cracking the structure of what the script is going to be and setting out a map so that we all know vaguely what to expect. But that is the process, then the writer goes and does a first draft and we then go through the process again, and again.