ROMA: Turning Your Life Story Into A Screenplay

ROMA: Turning Your Life Story Into A Screenplay This week, we’re going to be talking about Roma by Alfonso Cuarón. Roma is an extraordinary film that harkens back to a different era of storytelling. It’s shot in black and white, despite having a substantial budget. It’s entirely in Spanish. And, in a way, the whole film is a love poem for Alfonso Cuarón’s real-life nanny from his childhood growing up in the Roma section of México City. The film harkens back to a different kind of filmmaking. An age where storytelling was slower, where the pace was different, where shots were longer without so many quick cuts, and where stories unfolded in a more symbolic kind of way. And that kind of structure is quite appropriate for Roma, because, in a way, it is a nostalgic look back at Alfonso Cuarón’s own life. We’re going to look at Roma to talk about how to write a screenplay from real life. How do you look inside of yourself and find those true stories that matter to you? How do you find the shape you want to put those stories into in order to communicate, not the literal experience, but the emotional experience to an audience?  How do you use your real experiences to open up that little piece of your life in a screenplay? What’s interesting about writing from real life is in many ways these true-life stories are actually the hardest stories to tell. One of the gifts we have as screenwriters is the gift of metaphor. If you're Alfonso Cuarón and you're writing Gravity or Children of Men, you can look at those experiences from your real life through the veil of metaphor. You can convince yourself “Hey, this isn't really me!” By using the technique of metaphor, using a work of fiction in order, to tell the truth, sometimes we allow ourselves to actually see the truth about ourselves and our lives more clearly. And, in doing so, we can also help our audiences see the truth about themselves and their lives more clearly. By abstracting just one degree, or two degrees, or three degrees, or twenty degrees from what actually happened, we allow our subconscious minds to start to give us the clues we haven't yet processed in our conscious minds. We start to actually see the truth of our experiences, in a way that our conscious minds shields us from in our daily life. If you have ever been to therapy, you know what this is like. You come in for your first session, and you think you're in therapy for one reason, and then you start to spend time and you realize you're actually dealing with something completely different. This is exactly what writing a film is like. We start with some story we think we’re telling, or sometimes we think, “Oh, I’ve got a great commercial hook...” But then over the course of a year, or six months, or three months, or however long it takes you to write it, you start to realize, “Oh my God, I’m actually doing something very different. I’m actually telling a story about my mother. I’m actually telling a story about my brother. I’m actually telling a story about this thing that happened to me that I can’t make sense of.” That veil of fiction, the way we convince ourselves we’re using fiction, the way we convince ourselves this character isn't really me, gives us a level of safety within which to play. That way we don’t have to deal with the entirety of our past until we’ve done the work to get ready for it. When you start to tell a true life story like Roma, things start to change. It’s just a fact of life that you are actually the one person you can’t see clearly. This is a physical fact. When you go around in the world, you're looking at other people all the time, but it’s only when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror that you actually see what you look like. In fact, most of us, myself included, have a vision of ourselves that’s from a different era of time. I still think that I’m 33 years old! We actually have a vision of ourselves, but when we see ourselves, it doesn’t always match up with the person who’s in the mirror right now. Physically, we actually just don’t see ourselves well. But also emotionally we don’t see ourselves well. It’s extremely hard to look at ourselves. If we could, we would all be capable of change instantaneously. We’d all be capable of being exactly the people we want to be all the time. But there are layers of ego, and self-protection, and fear, and confusion, and conflicting messages, and concerns, and thought processes and belief systems we have to navigate through to actually look at ourselves clearly. In order to survive the things that happen, we put walls around our real self that get in the way of us actually seeing ourselves clearly. So to adapt a true-life story into a film, we must find a way around these walls. Using fiction as a tool is one of the ways we, as writers, get to look at ourselves and heal our wounds or express the beautiful parts of ourselves. Fiction allows us to bypass those filters. But when we start to tell the story that’s “the true story,” things get a lot harder, because now we no longer have the veil. Now we have to start to look at ourselves clearly, and that’s the hardest thing to do. So, one of the places you want to start, as Alfonso Cuarón starts in Roma, is by abstracting to some degree, even within the real story, by giving that story some level of fiction. One of the techniques Cuarón uses is simply to change the name of Roma’s main character. His real nanny’s name was Liboria (she’s actually still alive). He changes her name to Cleo. And simply by making that tiny little change, he gives himself just a little bit more abstraction, just a little bit, one degree further from the true-life story. A trick you can use if the main character is you — and you can see it in Roma — Alfonso Cuarón is a character in the film, but he’s actually even more tangential than the main character. He’s actually off to the side, barely a featured character in the piece. In fact, you don’t even know which little boy he is, but he is a character hanging out there. In Eugene O'Neill’s great play about his family, Long Day’s Journey into Night, which was also made into a really beautiful film, he is finally deciding to confront his father’s narcissism and his mother’s addiction, and he dramatizes the story of all the people in his family except for himself. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, he decides that Gene was the child who died. He actually writes himself out of his own life story in order to be able to tell the story more truthfully. We’re all our own protagonists; we all see ourselves as the protagonists of our own stories, but Cuarón takes that character and slides him just a little bit to the sidelines. He looks at that character just a little bit from an angle, instead focusing the camera on the person who he both loved and underappreciated during this period of his life. If you're ever writing a movie where you're the main character, another trick you can use is to give that character some element that’s very different from you. Find some difference between that character and the way you perceive yourself, something that gives you that one degree of abstraction. You might think finding that one thing that’s different might actually hide the truth from you, but actually, the opposite is true. By finding that one thing that’s just a little bit different, that is just a little bit more abstract, what happens is it actually allows your subconscious mind to start to play and feed you that truth. So, in this case, Cuarón changes his main character’s name. That’s one little trick. He writes himself off onto the sidelines but also uses another technique of amplification. What Cuarón is doing in Roma, you might have noticed, is hitting his symbology not with a little ball-peen hammer, but with a giant anvil. He is hammering, hammering, hammering on his symbology. We don’t get to see this a lot in movies anymore, but in Roma, it is unbelievably effective. For example, we have the symbology of that car that can’t quite fit into the driveway. And then we have the expansion of that symbol when the mother purposefully drives it between those two trucks and destroys the car. And then, we have the next step of that when she slams it drunk into the driveway. Then the next step of that when she replaces it with a new, smaller car. And we start to realize, as we play with and amplify that symbol, that the car is a symbol for the father—the husband who abandoned her—and her anger towards him. And the replacement of the big car with the smaller car is the beginning of the movement back into herself, into building the life she wants to build, rather than trying to fit into somebody else’s walls. Who knows if that car even existed, or if that driveway even existed? In Roma, the car is a metaphor, it’s a symbol, in the same way when Cleo tells her boyfriend Fermín her little secret in the movie theatre and we watch the plane crashing on the screen. This is a symbol; a symbol for the way it feels inside of that character. And so what Cuarón is doing is using these symbols and he’s allowing himself to play, not in a realistic world, but in a heightened naturalistic world, in order to get closer to the truth of what this feels like. He is taking the experience of his true life story and he is translating it into art. There is another level though to what’s happening here because the intention behind Roma actually grows out of the kind of perspective we can only develop over time. Growing up in this little section of México City, Alfonso Cuarón was sheltered from what was really happening around him. He was sheltered even from the Corpus Christi Massacre, which we end up seeing towards the end of Roma. He wasn’t aware of the political events. He wasn’t aware of the real life of his nanny.