Screenwriters Talk About Writing at the Film Festival

By Mahil Senathirajah

Writing about writers talking about writing turns out to be surprisingly easy. The Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) Screenwriters Panel took place at the Arlington Theatre Saturday morning. It may be the best panel of any film festival.

The gathered literati were: Zach Baylin (King Richard), Adam McKay (Don’t Look Up), Sian Heder (CODA), Kenneth Branagh (Belfast), Eskil Vogt (Worst Person in the World), Denis Villeneuve (Dune), and Maggie Gyllenhaall (The Lost Daughter). Jane Campion, reporting she had COVID, provided a pre-recorded but engaging recounting of her process to adapt “Power of the Dog” from the perhaps, partly true sourcebook by Thomas Savage.

All panelists were uniformly intelligent, articulate, self-effacing, quick witted, self-aware and glad to be there. And, as the photos attest, they attentively listened to each other even if their colleague had the misfortune of being at the end of a big line. Having all of them on stage and able to interact elevates the event beyond rote repetition of pre-packaged awards season stories.

Once again, the panel was expertly moderated by Ann Thompson of Indiewire. Her winning formula is to ask the following: 1) resume/how did you become a screenwriter 2) specific, thoughtful questions about each film, with follow ups 3) writing process and 4) next project.

Here’s a writing cheat that screenwriters can’t use, bullet points! A highlight reel of the most entertaining bits biased by the films I saw and limited by my inability to jot down all of the too-fast, too-furious quotes.

McKay likened living in the mad, mad world right now to “being in a bouncy castle with a bunch of hyenas holding wine glasses”. Having him on a panel is like inviting a precocious, profane adolescent to a garden party who then proceeds to blow up any sense of social decorum.
Heder recounted her love of profanity telling us her favorite word is “f***”. “There are others but that’s the best one”. Gyllenhaal then asked how you sign that in American Sign Language which quickly evolved into focusing on how the on stage interpreter was signing it. And then serving up various permutations of the word. The interpreter maintained her looking-straight-ahead professionalism and dutifully signed the variants. It was a crack up.
Gyllenhaal, whose film’s subtext is about mothers who are ambivalent about being mothers, recounted writing the scene in which the protagonist admits she doesn’t really like talking to her children on the phone. She looked furtively around the plane to see if writing about such a taboo feeling was drawing any flight companion judgment. Heder, who has young kids, admitted that she had a few “Lost Daughter moments” while writing her film.
Vogt said his writing process was to think about the story and characters without figuring out how the plot structure should come together, freeing himself from the limiting “chain of consequence”. “Plot is like the coat hanger, not the clothes” and, really, no one says they loved the plot of a film.
Villeneuve, whose first language is French, awkwardly said he was “writing right now” (the second half of Dune). It was a little confusing. He came back to his statement a few minutes later to offer some clarifying elaboration. In response, McKay said, to paraphrase, “good because for a while it seemed like you were saying you weren’t really listening to anyone on the panel”. Villeneuve tongue-in-cheeked that maybe there was some truth to that.
Branagh set up his own internal ticking-clock thriller scenario by self-imposing a 9 am every morning deadline to start writing. The consequence for the failure to meet the deadline was that his autobiography that is Belfast was, in fact, dead. He eventually freed himself from that stressful chain of consequence by allowing himself to just write something.

Anyway, there was more and it was good. There are tickets available for the remaining tributes and panels at sbiff.org. And, there is a streaming option for those who prefer that.