![]() If you could write a screenplay for any film franchise which would you want to write for? And how would you continue the story… It was also in film school that I realised my calling as a writer, rather than a director and that, if I have anything to contribute to the cinema, it would be in the stories I choose to write, rather than how much time I spent on a film set. It wasn’t until I was able to really study the process at film school (I went to the University of Northumbria in Newcastle) that I became more interested in plot and narrative, the rhythms of how you tell a story intended for the screen. If you can’t find something relatable within your work, you should set it to one side and consider why you’re writing it in the first place. It wasn’t until my oldest brother John read one of my early efforts and simply said “Give them something to say” that I realised my approach was simply to magpie from films I’d seen, rather than writing about what I knew, which, as anybody who tells stories will attest to, is the key to everything you write. My early attempts at screenwriting were predominantly dialogue heavy and interested in characters interacting verbally. I think when you’re a kid, you’re looking for mirrors and I saw myself in these types of men, regardless of my own limited talents. I hasten to add, of course, that the ignorance of youth, back then, meant that very few female screenwriters were on my radar, something I rectified as I got older. When I was fifteen, the American Indie film wave hit and we had writer directors like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, who were all known for dialogue driven work, and they, of course, were hugely influential to a young kid who wanted to do what they were doing. Timing plays a part in all this, as well, I think. I would look at the writing of people like Lawrence Kasdan (whose screenplay is still, for my money, one of the finest examples of how to craft a story for the screen) and marvel at the skill. You realise very quickly that there are a whole different set of elements at work, as the writing is intended to convey something visual, above everything else, and that includes dialogue. Sitting down and reading a screenplay is a completely different experience to reading, say, a novel, or poetry. ![]() If you don’t have a script, you don’t have a film, and as I started to look into the process, I started to recognise the names of certain screenwriters, which then led me to sourcing copies of their work. ![]() It wasn’t until I was about fourteen (and it coincided with me discovering reading books for pleasure, not just for study) that I began to think more carefully about the screenwriter side of the process, as that is where the whole endeavour starts. Up until that point I always assumed that if I was going to do anything in the filmmaking arts, it would be to direct, as I grew up in the 80s with Spielberg and Kubrick as my guides as to what it was that a director actually did. The notion of becoming a screenwriter didn’t quite hit me until I was a teenager. And I always wanted to be a part of that roll. ![]() All those names that you would see on the credit roll at the end of a picture, they all had a part to play in the magic that just unfolded in front of me. ![]() I had always loved the movies and I think that, even from a young age (say six or seven) I was drawn into the notion that these were actually made by people. ![]()
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