This Short Exercise will make you a Better Storyteller
There’s only one thing I wanted to be in my life, other than a film-maker, and it’s kind of embarrassing now.
I wanted to be a poet.
My inability to write good poetry brought that ambition crashing down — it’s been more than ten years since I even finished a poem. But I was treated with kindness by a couple of very accomplished living poets while I was struggling (and failing) to create something meaningful — and one of them introduced me to a mental exercise that I use nearly every day as a film-maker.
The first poet I ever met was Douglas Dunn, one of the greatest living Scottish Poets. I’d only just started writing and by some weird stroke of luck won a prize, so he agreed to meet me. He was very kind, worked up a reading list and encouraged my efforts, and it’s thanks to him I have had a lifelong love affair with the Norton Anthologies series (buy every single one you can, you will never regret it).
The second time I met a well-known poet was less fun, nearly a decade later, and was I think the last time I wrote a poem. It was a workshop run by Paul Muldoon in Oxford, the kind of thing you have to book months in advance and write a poem for. I think there were twelve of us, and as soon as I arrived, I regretted coming along: I brought along some strangled lines about someone I deeply loved and had recently died in a tragic situation, and instantly knew this was going to be embarrassing, if not humiliating.
The first guy who smugly volunteered to read launched into a poem he’d just written about walking to the workshop and not being inspired to write a poem. Everyone laughed and said it was very good. Soon enough eyes turned towards me, and predictably, as soon as I finished my sad, not-very-good little poem, it got torn to pieces by the group — principally by the same smug guy who had started off the session with his ‘this whole thing is a pointless waste of time’ performance.
But before we moved on, Paul tried to do the decent thing and turn it into a learning experience. Someone had said that what I’d written sounded like a poem but wasn’t good enough to be one, and he turned this into something more positive, saying:
‘This is a little inconsistent in its style. Maybe you’re trying to be too many different things. Think about this:
How would John Donne write this poem?
Right — now, how would Samuel Taylor Coleridge write this poem?’
Almost as soon as he said it, this concept blew my mind.
Sometimes we try so hard to be unique, we don’t sound like anything rational or honest by the end of our efforts. This is as true of coherent storytelling, and of directing film, as it is of writing poetry.
By thinking about how someone else would write your poem, or your story, or direct your scene, you begin to solve a problem through differing — equally valid — approaches that aren’t necessarily yours — and by doing this imaginative groundwork, you start to flesh out which parts of these approaches chime with your own instincts, and which are clearly inappropriate for the job at hand.
Bringing this to a film-directing approach — my first instincts, looking at any scene, are egotistical, even if I don’t want them to be. ‘You know what would be amazing… Can you imagine how the audience would react when the shot went like this… No-one will have ever seen something like this…’ A lot of director’s storyboards — and shorts, and features, if they’re lucky enough — are simply stringed together ego-trips — as are so many stories and poems.
So now, I use my own technique, derived from those questions Paul Muldoon asked me. I start out by thinking up a director whose work I’m very familiar with, but who makes very different films from the ones I would like to make — and then I ask myself something like:
‘How would Woody Allen shoot this scene?’
I close my eyes and make myself imagine each of the shots. How would the dialogue change? Would the editing be quick-fire or non-existent? Would the entire scene be shot in a single wide? I imagine him making the scene witty, verbal, open-ended. What do I think of the scene in front of me, shot this way? How could a director like Woody Allen make this scene great? Would I enjoy watching that scene?
Then I open my eyes, read out the scene again, and ask myself:
‘How would a young Stephen Spielberg shoot this scene?’
I close my eyes and I think about the Stephen Spielberg from the first half of his career: Jaws to Jurassic Park. How would his camerawork tell the story? He might play the whole scene in one shot too, but the camera would be roving, pro-active — not a bemused observer, but a driving narrative force. Classic Spielberg scenes have beautifully concise beginnings, middles and ends, with each part being signalled clearly through camerawork and cutting pace. Movement, broad comedy, violence, and dramatic reversals would play a much more prominent part than Woody Allen’s version. Blocking — the way actors move in relation to one another and the camera — would be primarily visual, rather than realistic. And the characters and camera would move together, like a dance that itself played out the story.
Then I open my eyes, read out the scene a final time, and think of a different director.
How would Quentin Tarantino (from the 90’s) shoot this scene?
How would the dialogue differ? How would the performances? Maybe it would be in a one-shot too, but in this one, the actor would be sneering into the camera as they delivered the lines. How would it look? Where would it be set? Would it look hyper-real, or would it be set up just like a shot from another movie?
Maybe it wouldn’t be Quentin Tarantino. Maybe it would be Sophia Coppola. Or Martin Scorsese — or Billy Wilder. Brian De Palma — or Ridley Scott — or Tony Scott, or Spike Lee — or the Coen Brothers. Or Kathryn Bigelow — or James Cameron.
I’m not necessarily trying to think of a favourite director — I’m trying to think of a director whose style I can easily imagine, whose films and tastes are consistent, and then imagine what they would bring to this scene, and whether I think it would work. Every single one of these directors might chose to shoot the scene in one shot — and every one of them would be completely distinctive.
I exclude 4 kinds of directors from this exercise.
- Directors who I consider to be operating on a different level than me (like Kubrick, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky and Wells spring to mind — just as you wouldn’t ask yourself, ‘how would William Shakespeare write this scene?’). Everyone’s list is different — I also include P. T. Anderson and David Fincher in mine, though others might not.
- Directors use such a particular style that I would basically be thinking about nothing but art direction and effects if I were to imagine them directing the scene (like Michel Gondry or Wes Anderson).
- Directors who have such wide contrasts between films that it’s difficult to tell which style they would bring to the job (like Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Jonze, David O. Russel).
- Directors who inspire a lazy response (‘I bet Judd Apatow would set two cameras running and then just let both actors improvise for ages. It would probably be funny…’ ‘Michael Bay would put a steadicam on a segway and blow shit up during a slo-mo ramp as all the characters say, ‘shit just got real’…)
When I’ve thought up three different directors and the three scenes they would create, I look at the scene again. And then I try to imagine it afresh — and ask myself:
If that’s how they would do it, how would I do it?
And then I write my shot list, my blocking, my idea for the scene.
This exercise has helped me immeasurably in working past the ego in my initial thoughts, in evaluating different ideas and where they might lead: and working out which instincts to follow and which to avoid.
If you sketch out a rough shot list, then do this exercise, then write a new shot-list based on everything you’ve considered, I guarantee it will be different, better thought-out, and you will be more confident about the results.
It’s also helped my writing. While the work involved in envisioning an entire story worked up by different writers is much more time-consuming than that of a poem or a film scene, it’s still a great thing to think about in the broad brush-strokes: how would Stephen King structure my idea, as opposed to Philip K. Dick? How would the prose and dialogue read if it were written by Raymond Chandler, as opposed to Sylvia Plath? How would Salman Rushdie break up this story, as opposed to Lee Child?
Suddenly, you have a whole writer’s workshop in your head — with some of the world’s greatest writers, living and dead, extolling the benefits of doing it their way. Similarly with directing… It’s a great tool — have fun with it.
I have a lot to thank from Paul Muldoon. And I’d never have developed this exercise without his inspiration. He turned the day I stopped writing poetry into the day I began to develop into a thoughtful storyteller.
I wonder how he would have written this post?
