Jack S
Earlier this week I went to a BAFTA event called A Life In Pictures, with Quentin Tarantino.
It was a Q&A with the man himself, discussing his work to-date, his writing technique (which he talked about far more than his directing) and what’s he going to do next. (One more film and then he’s done with movies.)
He said a lot of interesting stuff very quickly, and swore a lot. It was great. But he told two anecdotes that really struck a chord.
The first was about writing Inglorious Basterds. He was struggling with the ending and, in particular, what to do about Hitler. It was 3am and he was pacing around his bedroom struggling for ideas, when it suddenly struck him:
“Just f*cking kill him. It’s my movie, I can do what I want. So just f*cking kill him.”
He grabbed a piece of paper and a Sharpie and wrote JUST F*CKING KILL HIM in big letters, then put the paper on his bedside table and thought – if that’s still a good idea when I wake up, I’ll do it.
I won’t give away the film’s ending but that is the overnight test in action. Do the work, get it right, then walk away and give yourself time to re-examine it with fresh eyes. It might still be right, or you might be able to make it even better. If you send the work off as soon as you finish, you won’t know until it’s too late.
The overnight test is one of our core rules and one of those basic tips that’s clearly as valuable to a Hollywood Writer/Director as it is to us.
GUESS WHAT? HE ALSO WORKS BLOODY HARD.
The second anecdote was all about effort. Tarantino had completed his first draft of ‘The Hateful Eight’ and was pretty happy with it. But the death of one character was bugging him. He knew this particular person had to die (they were hateful, after all) he just didn’t know how.
So he re-wrote the entire screenplay from that one character’s perspective in order to better understand who they were. Only when he’d done that, did he know how they should die.
Can you imagine finishing a screenplay and then deciding to start over, just to solve one scene?
It’s a fantastic lesson in the importance of properly examining your own work. And a reminder that when it comes to good writing there is no magic sauce, no shortcut or revolutionary hack. Sometimes it’s just about the hard yards and a lot of swearing.
