Screenwriter's summit

Julian Fellowes, Guillermo Del Toro and the like appear at the first International Screenwriters' Festival.

Jul 12 2006

Who'd be a screenwriter in the UK? You certainly wouldn't do it for the fame. Nor for the financial rewards, which, compared to Hollywood’s megabucks, would be lunch money for the rich and famous. 'The status of screenwriters is low because a lot of people don't know what screenwriters do,' says Bill Nicholson, whose credits include 'Shadowlands' and 'Gladiator'.

'Stupid people think actors do it all, clever people think directors do it all; but in fact, most directors take over an existing script in which the creation has already happened. A script is not the dialogue, it's the story – that's what we screenwriters create. We've got to start educating people about this.'

Attempting not only to shed light on but also improve the plight of the humble British screenwriter was the aim of the inaugural International Screenwriters' Festival, held recently in the glorious confines of Cheltenham Studios. Five years in the planning, the event, according to organiser David Pearson, a film and television producer, was designed to raise the profile and awareness of screenwriters both inside and outside the industry and also to provide a platform for creativity and debate.

'This festival is about the art, craft and business of screenwriting,' he explains. 'Because the screenplay is the blueprint that leads to attracting talent, which leads to attracting finance.’'

Drawing its speakers from both television and film, the well-oiled four-day event attracted around 500 attendees from the UK, Europe and Australia, ranging from aspirant writers to those with soap credits eager to break into movies to documentary makers hoping to switch to fiction. The event featured keynote speeches and masterclasses from Nicholson, Julian Fellowes, Jimmy McGovern, Tony Marchant, David Thompson (head of BBC Films), producer Kevin Loader (who, if the clips he showed of 'History Boys' and Roger Michell's 'Venus' are anything to go by, looks to have two solid hits on his hands), 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' screenwriter Olivia Hetreed, FilmFour executives Peter Carlton and Katherine Butler, as well as Nicolas Roeg and Allan Scott who decided to speak about their less-than-successful collaboration on 'Cold Heaven' rather than the better-known 'Don't Look Now'.

For many of the attendees, the event was an opportunity to connect with development executives, independent producers, and the big cheeses from BBC Films and FilmFour whom they might otherwise have difficulty meeting, as well as to exchange ideas and stories with their peers. 'We writers tend not to meet,' says Nicholson. 'We need to share stories, experiences, and it would be very helpful if we shared names because there are lots of people you don't want to work with in this business.'

Mexican writer-director Guillermo Del Toro was a very popular guest, having flown in from LA for the day for a hugely entertaining talk encompassing everything from his first experimentation with magic mushrooms on a trip to London to the childhood terrors that inspired his latest work, 'Pan's Labyrinth', to how a writer should 'get a boner' from his or her own scripts. Later, Del Toro offered his take on those 'How to Write a Screenplay' books that so many new writers devour expecting to learn the secret to success.

'You have to liberate people from that stuff, not give them a corset in which they have to fit their story, their life, their emotions, the way they feel about the world. Our curse is that the film industry is 80 per cent run by the half-informed. You have people who have read Joseph Campbell, Robert McKee, and now they're talking to you about the hero's journey, and you want to fucking cut off their dick and stuff it in their mouth.'

For Tony Grisoni – who's worked with Michael Winterbottom on 'In This World' and Terry Gilliam on several projects and spoke, alongside FilmFour's Peter Carlton, about his most recent film, the mock rockumentary 'Brothers in the Head' – one major lesson he was keen to impart was that a script is not something to be handed to someone else after you've written it.

'The passage from typed paper to film stock has somehow got to be a more continuous line. It's really important that screenwriters are involved in the shooting of a film and want to be involved. I do everything in my power to be part of the continuing development of the screenplay. The fact that all the jokes in Hollywood are about the writer seems disingenuous and daft and not the best way to exploit people’s talents. It's not the way I want to work.'

Ah yes, Hollywood. Is LA really the holy grail for all screenwriters? Not, it seems, for Hetreed, who after adapting 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' was offered lucrative work rewriting scripts for Hollywood but passed up the gig. 'I thought it would better to be poor and honest,' she laughs. 'Sometimes I have really regretted that decision, but on the other hand I haven't had to do things I've felt ashamed of.'

Nicholson, however, works almost exclusively for Hollywood and is paid handsomely for it. 'I'm a millionaire,' he says. 'Now that is very seductive and you have to ask yourself: Is this really the right way to go? What I do is write films for Hollywood, but I do fewer and fewer now, and I write books. That way I use the Hollywood income to finance a life I couldn't otherwise afford.'

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