Arrival: The Writer’s Journey

[spb_text_block title="PODCAST - ARRIVAL: The Writer's Journey" pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] Arrival: The Writer's Journey By Jacob Krueger [/spb_text_block] [divider type="standard" text="Go to top" full_width="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [spb_text_block title="Arrival" pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] This week we’re going to be talking about Eric Heisserer’s script Arrival. It's really a beautiful thing when you see a friend create something that is such a pure expression of who they are. I’m lucky to count Eric among my friends, and I'm really proud of him for this movie. Beyond just the superb quality of the film, one of the reasons that I'm proud of Eric, and one of the reasons that I think that Arrival is so valuable for emerging screenwriters to look at, is the process by which Eric wrote it. Now, Eric is a pretty big time writer. He writes a lot of horror movies, he’s written for the Nightmare on Elm Street & Final Destination franchises, and he just had a big hit with Lights Out earlier this year.  Eric is not a guy who needs to write scripts on spec; he is not a writer who needs to go out and write a movie that he's not getting paid for. But Eric made a really bold choice. Instead of taking one more well-paid ‘work for hire’ project, he instead dedicated years of his life to making a little movie that mattered to him. A movie that, quite frankly, is a pretty hard sell. Imagine walking into a producer and trying to explain this film. “Look, I want to make an expensive sci-fi movie, the main character is a linguist, it's mostly about language and the nature of time. It’s going to get really deep into very complex ideas that normal people don't understand. And most of the action is just the main character standing in a spaceship, trying to learn a language that neither she nor the audience can possibly understand. It’s going to cost a lot of money to make because we’re going to need some big special-effects. And, oh, did I mention it's also really sad and profound?”   This is not an easy pitch.  If it had been, Eric, at this phase of his career, probably would not have had to write the script for free.  But that’s what he did.  He did it because it moved something in him. He read this short story-- written in 1998, so it’s not like this was the hot new thing out on the market-- he read this “unadaptable” short story and he was moved by it. And he decided that he wanted to turn it into a screenplay, whether it was “adaptable” or not.   Before this movie was completed he had written over 100 drafts of this script. And, I think the thing that stands out here, that you should think about if you are an emerging screenwriter, is the humbleness. The desire not to get it done, but to get it right. Not to get it finished or get it sold, but to get it to a place where it was a pure expression of what he wanted to say.  So often, when I work with young screenwriters, they are rushing through the process of screenwriting. They're either going out looking for the hot idea that they “know” they can sell,  which as we all know rarely turns out to be the one that actually does. Or, they are rushing to complete the idea, just to get the script on the page, following some commercial formula, trying to sell out, or blow things up, or “save the cat,” or do whatever they've been taught by a screenwriting book in order to conform to the formula. They’re rushing through the process, looking for that quick payoff. If you are one of those writers, if you have made that mistake, I want to suggest to you that you take a page from Eric Heisserer. Rather than looking for the script that you think you can sell for a lot of money, look for the script that you would be willing to write for free.   Instead of looking for the formula that you've seen before in other movies,