Walking The Set

Invent it, see it,
adapt to it…We begin shooting this coming week with two shoot days in L.A, so I flew back home this evening. The filmmaking community is usually responsibile for every first class seat on the Vancouver-LA runs, so it’s always interesting to see who I’ll wind up sitting next to.

This evening, it happened to be an extremely successful writer-producer-director. We started talking about screenwriting, directing and our work methods, and he mentioned something that dovetailed beautifully with an experience I had just two days before.

On that two days before, I walked the set we’ll be using for our second week of shooting. Walking the set is a wonderful thing. As screenwriters, we invent a reality, but our reality is made hyperreality by the convenience of our own minds. Just as in dreams, people move fluidly through our imaginations, spaces conform and rearrange in edits and glimmers, and dimensions change according to our creative whim.

Sooner or later, though, someone is going to have to draw up blueprints that very much constrain the spaces we’ve imagined. For those of you brave enough to have read my little essay on Nietzsche, you’ll recognize this blueprinting as part of the Apollonian requirement of art.

In other words, Dionysius gets you the green light but Apollo hammers some wood together so you have a place to shoot.

When a screenwriter has a chance to walk the set, all sorts of wonderful things start to click into place. Finally, you’re in the real world and out of your head. You invented the reality, now you’re seeing the reality…and what follows is the need to adapt to the reality. Walking around in the space gives you all sorts of ideas, and also sends you scurrying back to the laptop to trim unnecessary dialogue or imagine extra stage direction. You are forced to work to camera angles. You are required to eliminate pointless motion through space. You are asked to connect two people who may or may not be near each other or in view.

It’s fantastic. Once you walk the set, you can finally begin to tell the story best.

So…back to my flight buddy.

He’s a writer and a director, and as a director, he goes on location scouts. Once he finds a location that he really likes, he asks to just sit there at the location while he writes.

Pretty smart. His suggestion to me (and one I now rapidly hand off to you) is to try, whenever possible, to write in places. If you’re doing a scene in a mall, take your laptop to the mall and use your actual presence in the space to direct your storytelling. If you’re doing a scene in a bedroom, trudge into the bedroom. If you’re doing a scene between two people on a date, plotz down on a bench on the 3rd Street Promenade and write as you take in the social buzz.

We can’t get sounds, smells and sights on to a piece of paper, but it’s our job to get as close as possible. If you don’t have a set to walk…go find one.