Same Script = Different Film?
Q: Why would a filmmaker want to buy a book of screenplays that other filmmakers can use? Isn’t the whole point of making a film to have an original thought?
A: No two films are going to be the same, even if they have the same script. Each director has his or her own unique style and approach to the material. Two artistic experiments which demonstrate this – Hal Hartley’s Flirt (which consists of three wildly different short films made with the same script), and Gus van Sant’s Psycho (which does nothing except illustrate why people should study Alfred Hitchcock).
People also enjoy watching different actors play the same roles in Shakespeare. Compare Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet to Mel Gibson’s Hamlet; no one gets upset because someone has already interpreted a performance of Hamlet. Instead we approach the new interpretation with a curiosity: Let’s see what this person can do with this material.
It is the same with directors and film making.
A director focuses on tone and pacing, not necessarily creating a performance or visual experience, but certainly shaping and guiding it. To do this, a director needs to interact with the material on a fundamental level. Because we are all fundamentally different – our passions, strengths, and weaknesses differ wildly – the art we create will be different, even if we have the same building blocks.
This goes back to my book of short film screenplays. If a class of twenty film students takes a script from the book, and each student makes a film from that script, each resulting film is different from all the others. VERY different.
Film directors also have a bag of commonly understood tricks that serve as shorthand to telling a coherent story. You see this shorthand standing in for exposition, especially in short pieces like web video and short film. I call it cinematic language. You’ll see these shortcuts used within a genre, such as an action-spy-thriller (example of that in a moment). And regardless of genre, other common devices keep cropping up (pun…) that help the plot, characterization, visual design, sound, or other elements of many films hold together. We know the shorthand because we’ve seen enough other movies to spot these references to a shared vocabulary.
It’s necessary for films to reference, comment on, quote, sequel, prequel, adapt, and even copy each other.
My hope is that my short film screenplays, which are Creative Commons licensed, will contribute to the making of short films by providing scripts that use common cinematic tools in fresh ways. In turn, each director who uses these screenplays to create a film (or web video), or who splices my screenplays with other ideas, will contribute their own vision to the medium. Maybe they’ll make some money at it. More likely, most will not.
My point is that this isn’t plagiarism. It’s a conversation between filmmakers, screenwriters, all the films’ other creative participants, and our audiences. Multiple people making different films from the same script is part of that conversation. The book is a set of contributions from me to that conversation.
The following two web videos demonstrate how the language of action-spy-thriller movies can be co-opted for different uses. In the first example, the action film’s cinematic language hooks the viewer into thinking about art and design. In the second example, the same cinematic language raises awareness of a product. Same cinematic language, wildly different interpretations.
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