Recently I had begun writing reviews for a film publication called The Sound View. The latest review I finished was one I was proud of, despite the fact that I was worried due to the film being political. Politics is not one of my topics of interest, in film or otherwise.
After writing my review I questioned my rating, but only for a brief second. This was not because I didn't like the film – story wise it was strong – but I thought the cinematography and the set-up of some shots could have been more creative. Personally, I know how hard it is to make your first feature film on a budget, so I try to be fair. Unless a film is off-putting visually, I won't comment on the visual aesthetic.
I hit 'send' on my email, letting my review go out to Dan, the CEO, so he could forward it to the editors.
A few hours later a reply came back from Dan. The review was excellently written, but he wondered why I rated the film 'recommended' instead of 'highly recommended’ since my review was so positive. Honestly, I thought some of the shots were a bit boring, the sets bland – I wrote this in my reply email. In my opinion, the filmmakers could have experimented with more interesting shots, and dressed the white walls and improved the lighting. But in the review I wrote nothing about the filmmaking technicalities, I focused only on the story.
Our email thread grew. In the end, I saw things from his point of view. We came to an agreement – the story is much more important than the visual elements. If you have a badly written character or a story that is not engaging, it's more inexcusable than having a badly dressed set or a boring shot.
The issue of great writing versus pretty visual scenes surprisingly came up again a couple of days after I submitted the review. Ivan and I were in our writing class with Lindsey, a mutual friend and our writing buddy across the screen the last few months. For this session, Ivan had previously submitted a detailed breakdown of an improvised feature film we had planned to shoot in Malta called Imbedo this past Summer. The production never happened, but we had cast the main lead and she had no objections to anything in the breakdown.
Lindsey tore the story apart.
Her writing expertise and personal opinion about how the story was written made us think about focusing on character motivations; characters which she felt were underdeveloped, the lead even unlikable and unsympathetic. She also felt we needed more interaction with local Maltese characters, and as it was a travel story about discovering a new culture, this made sense. We also needed more scenes of the main character's self-reflection and anguish to bring out her past trauma.
After Lindsey gave her overall opinion on the lead role, I explained to her the character's lengthy background. This was a page long description I had agonised over, adding trauma, passions, regrets, personal layers, and a need for personal growth through travel. Yet on that Zoom call, I quickly realised that I had not brought enough of this complicated lead character forward to the viewer. She was hidden by pretty sunsets and Mediterranean vistas and her actions in the film, as it stands now, would come across as hollow in comparison.
We were planning to shoot this in the middle of Maltese summer in the most magical parts of the island where the water glistened and the energy of the Mediterranean summer would have been pulsating. Had we done so perhaps it was more than likely that we would have ended up with a beautiful looking film, but with characters the audience would not understand or care about from the first scene to the last.
This brings me back to original thought – is story more important than the shots and visual aesthetic? In a nutshell, yes. The story is undoubtedly more important than visuals. Sorry, Wes Anderson.
It is actually a common issue with Hollywood films and the never ending sequels and multi-million dollar franchises. They always look spectacular but how often are you left feeling cold and empty after watching the latest blockbuster? How often do you just not care about the characters? How often is the best emotion you can manage in response a shrug of the shoulders and a sigh of ‘meh’. And how often do you think with all that money and all those writers and rewrites and layers of decision-making how can so many plot holes still leak through to the final film?
But I am not going to rant about Hollywood. No filmmaker should be immune from getting called out for bad writing and that includes myself and Ivan. We make improvised films, and we don't write scripts (often) so we only write the outline of what happens in every scene – a filmmaking beat sheet. This helps us as directors work closely with actors to flesh out the character and get their emotions out when the cameras roll. That is not to say that it's an excuse to write a lame and undeveloped film outline; we need to work just as hard on refining and redrafting our outlines as any other filmmaker.
From the recent experience I just had, I recommend workshopping ideas with your peers, welcoming opinions, put questions to other writers, be it online through a small group of people you know or even strangers. You don't have to share your whole film outline, especially with strangers. Even if you share one scene or ask a hypothetical question, starting a discussion around your character or the situation you have written will help you to write a better scene around your characters' desires and motivations. New ideas will also flow.
The great thing about being a filmmaker is the opportunity to write outstanding stories and then have so many different tools — from cinematography to colour, to performance, to set dressing, to sound and music and more — to bringing our stories to life. But no film will be great unless the story, the flowerbed from which all the colourful flowers blossom, is rich and fertile. So get that story right. Don’t be afraid to rewrite. Question, refine and seek feedback. Revision is the true art of writing. American children’s author, Kelly Barnhill, put it in a way I love:
“That's the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.”
Written by Sarah Jayne