Story ideas filmmakers

Two questions often prove major stumbling blocks for film and video students, as well as for filmmakers who have never written a narrative script. What, specifically, do I write about How, specifically, do I write about it In screenwriting, general ideas are of little or no use when you sit down at a desk to write, and it is often difficult for those who are not "natural" writers (in the way one may be a "natural" cinematographer or director) to come up with fruitful story ideas. Yet, as anyone experienced in the arts knows, learning a skill is a process, and that process has to start somewhere. 

Ever since This Is Spinal Tap, student films about performance, filmmaking, writing, and music have relied on the hybrid form loosely called the mockumentary. This is a form that both evokes realism and pokes fun at it. Not quite as intense as the satire, the mockumentary criticizes gently the subject of the film, which is often the media as it interacts with, and often creates, a star. In this sense, the mockumentary is a self-reflexive and self-critical form, as the "mock" in the word suggests. If your idea centers on the relationship between the public and a character, and if the media can play a role in the story, the mockumentary is an amusing and often insightful form. 

We re surrounded by subjects that offer potential for documentary storytelling. Current events may trigger ideas, or an afternoon spent browsing the shelves at a local library or bookstore. Some filmmakers find stories within their own families. Alan Berliner made Nobody s Business about his father, Oscar Deborah Hoffinan made Confessions of a Dutiful Daughter about her mother s battle with Alzheimer s. Even when you re very close to a subject, however, you ll need to take an impartial view as you determine whether or not it would make a film that audiences will want to see. This is also tme when you adapt documentaries from printed sources a story may read well on paper, but not play as well on screen. In making the series Cadillac Desert, drawn from Marc Reisner s book of the same name, producer Jon Else chose three of the roughly 40 stories in Reisner s book Else and his team then conducted their own research and determined the best way to tell those stories on film. 

The idea that you can respect the privacy of your subjects and still present an honest story might surprise some filmmakers. Do your students ever ask about that ... 

And so that became a very long, intense, and often quite antagonistic collaboration, which ended up with a piece of work that I think reflected both the story and all the ideas that the story threw up, but it wasn t an easy process. Philippe, like many people, had seen lots and lots of films—he loves films—and there s a sense that if you ve seen a lot that somehow you can make them. And that s quite difficult, when you re dealing with someone who s very beholden to their own opinions and ideas. When we didn t agree, I had—as the filmmaker—a greater responsibility to the film to do things the way I thought were best. 

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