Robert McKee, the guru of screenwriting

By PETER CALDER

Before the world was full of screenwriting teachers there was Robert McKee. For 21 years this high priest of the craft has been strutting his stuff through three-day writing classes which now boast 40,000 graduates in a dozen cities.

Among them are William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man), Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), a variety of luminaries from David Bowie to Brooke Shields, and a handful of New Zealanders that include Peter Jackson and Jane Campion.

His 1997 book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting has been translated into 13 languages and has become a writer's bible which, despite its title, sells more copies to would-be novelists than screenwriters.

McKee's legendary status made him a character in Charlie Kaufman's tortured-screenwriter drama Adaptation who screams at Nic Cage: "If you can't find [material] in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life." (McKee worked a lot on that script and cast Brian Cox to play him from a list that included Michael Caine and Terence Stamp.)

McKee is bringing his masterclass Downunder, running his punishing full-length seminars in Sydney and Melbourne and giving shorter seminars in Auckland and Wellington.

Q. Why is there such a boom in screenwriting tuition?

A. When I was young everyone wanted to write the Great American Novel. When I was in university, everyone wanted to write the Great American Play. Now everyone wants to write the Great American (or New Zealand) Screenplay. And, in fact, in the US, the most ambitious writers are leaving film and writing television series. The hunger to write has always been there - it is just the medium that changes. But what I teach is story. At least a third of the people who take my class are novelists and there are producers, actors, editors.

Q. So with all this teaching - you've had 40,000 students - why are so many films so badly written?

A. God just didn't give out that much talent. Making matters worse is that there are hundreds of television channels now, an enormous flood of material. Who's going to write it? Hollywood is making 500 to 600 films a year. No matter how hard I work, if the world is going to produce all that film and TV there is going to be a huge percentage of it that is perfect dreck.

Q. So talent can't be taught?

A. Of course not. You need to bring to the work talent and hard work and perseverance and insight. What I can do is hone the craft and the knowledge of the underlying principles of the form.

Q. Is that to say you teach form rather than a formula in which the hero has to face his nemesis somewhere between pages 63 and 74?

A. Yes, absolutely. The problem is that the students are often desperate for a formula. They want me to say, "Follow this recipe and your cake will rise." But it's not a hobby. It's an art form. The students' problem is to master a difficult and complex craft in relation to life and they must create a metaphor for life. They must express through these characters an insight about life and if they have no insight into life, no matter what I teach them ... will be useless.

Q. You said screenwriting is an art form but it's interesting that the progression through novel, play, screenplay and television script that you mentioned at the outset is a continuous progression from less to more lucrative forms. In the eternal conflict between art and commerce, do students still need to understand that it ain't just a job?

A. Of course. There is no fundamental difference between novel-writing, screenwriting and playwriting. They are three different media through which artists express a vision of life in a story. That's why my book and my course are called Story.

Q. Your course is reportedly a fairly extravagant performance.

A. It has to be. I've got to hold their attention for a total of 31 hours. If I couldn't perform the lecture well, they would go to sleep. It's gruelling. I pace about 10 miles a day.

Q. You don't tolerate questions from the floor or interruptions, I'm told. And you have a bit of a reputation of being a curmudgeon.

A. That reputation is well-earned. Serious people appreciate my seriousness and intensity. You always get people in the room who want to impress the other people in the room. They want to interrupt and throw in their comments as an act of vanity. But people aren't paying money to hear them. I will take questions during the question time - but they have to be germane. I will not take questions about people's work in progress, questions of taste ("What did you think of this or that movie?"). And I particularly won't take questions in which people try to demonstrate their cleverness. If I'm a curmudgeon, it's in the service of the serious students who only want to hear what I've got to say.

Q. Do you generally feel optimistic about the direction screenwriting is going? Who is winning - the people who call movies "franchises" and think they are a platform for a McDonald's tie-in? Or the people who want to tell compelling human stories?

A. Generally, I am pessimistic about the future of film and optimistic about the future of television. The cinema is in decline in Europe and Hollywood whereas television is attracting better and better writers. Right now in the United States we are in a golden age of television writing - the great HBO series like The Sopranos, Sex in the City, Six Feet Under but also the network series like The Practice, West Wing and Law and Order.

Q. So why is this not happening in the cinema?

A. The only original artist in film and television is the writer. After that, everything is interpretive - everybody else is conductor not composer. But Hollywood and European film is in a decline because the producers are more concerned with spectacle than substance. We are having a great crisis of content because everyone is concerned with style. The only place in the world where people take screenwriting very seriously and consistently make films that are beautiful to look at and really rich in content is Asia - Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan. For two decades now that has been the best film culture on Earth because they are not caught up in the commercial imperatives of Hollywood or the intellectual pretensions of Europe.

* Robert McKee is running two one-day seminars in Auckland (The Art of Horror, Saturday, July 31 and The Art Film, Sunday, August 1) and a two-hour Evening with Robert McKee in Wellington, Thursday, July 29.

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