I couldn’t imagine the daunting task of adapting a work like The Iliad to the movie screen, but at the age of 34, David Benioff has already adapted Homer’s The Iliad and is now working on the screenplay for Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s a good thing all those writers are dead. Otherwise, Benioff might feel some pressure.

Benioff’s work first hit theatres when Spike Lee had him adapt his own novel, The 25th Hour, for him to film. The film received wide critical praise. But already, Benioff was in the weeds with writing his multiple drafts of Troy. It’s unusual for a $200 million production to only use one writer, but Benioff worked closely with director/producer Wolfgang Peterson and even worked with Brad Pitt on making his character of Achilles more human.

Besides The Iliad what sources did you draw on? Of course there are more source texts than just The Iliad. I mean The Iliad was the pivotal one in the telling of the Trojan War, but it starts from the ninth year of the war and ends in the ninth year of the war. We wanted to tell the entire story from before the beginning when Paris seduces Helen and triggers the entire war through to the fall of Troy, and you don’t get all of that in The Iliad, so some of it comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and some of it comes from The Odyssey, actually. There are little bits from Eneid. There are bits of things from Bulfinch’s Mythology, and some of it was just imagined.

Was there a tendency not to write too contemporary? Yeah, that’s one of the big challenges in screenplays. You don’t want the characters to sound contemporary. You don’t want them to sound like California boys in 2004, but at the same time it won’t work effectively if they sound exactly as they do in Homer because Homer is not really dialogue. It’s more of these dueling monologues, which are beautiful, but they are at least ten minutes long.

Agamemnon will launch into this long speech, and Achilles will respond with his very articulate rebuttal, and it just goes on. I don’t really want to sit there watching one character make a speech for 15 minutes and then have the next one do the same. It’s trying to find some kind of happy medium between contemporary lingo and the Homeric, ultra-exalted dialogue.

How many writers had their fingers in the screenplay? I was the only writer the whole time. It started with the pitch that I made, and I was lucky enough to not be replaced, which I’m incredibly happy about; I would’ve been heartbroken, and it happens most of the time. So it’s partly luck and I think partly because [director] Wolfgang [Peterson] and I work well together.

When I started the screenplay, I had no idea it was going to be a $200 million movie. I think that would’ve been incredibly intimidating because this was only the second script I wrote. I was kind of dumb about the whole thing. I mean I didn’t really get nervous until after I had written it. I didn’t really understand how intimidating it was until I actually went on set and saw the size of these sets and saw the thousands of extras running around. It was a massive undertaking.

How do you pitch a faithful retelling? Well, I didn’t pitch a faithful retelling. I pitched kind of a ruthless retelling where I really wanted to concentrate on the human story. For me, what I’ve always loved about The Iliad is the story of Hector, Achilles, Paris and Helen but particularly Hector and Achilles. These are the two great heroes on either side, and inevitably, they are going to fight, but it’s not a good-guys-and-bad-guys story. It’s not the epic battle of good versus evil. It’s not humans versus orcs. It’s humans fighting humans, and that’s why I think it’s the great tragic war story. Every time you see a soldier fall, it’s not some villain falling. It’s a human. It’s some mother’s son, and that’s what’s brilliant about Homer’s telling of the story. Each time, he always gives you one moment with that character, even very minor characters you’ve never met before, at the moment of their death. It’s a very humanistic way of telling a war story.

When you sat down to write this story, did you have the talent in mind? I did not, and actually I’m glad of that because it would be hard for me. It is harder for me to write knowing the face in some ways because then you tend to write for the actor, and I really wanted to just let the characters exist in my imagination or the characters from the original text. I’m not writing lines for Peter O’Toole or for Brad Pitt or Eric Bana but for Priam, Achilles and Hector. Why did you change the way Agamemnon died? The ruthlessness is there. In the myths, Agamemnon can’t get the right winds to get to Troy, so he sacrifices his daughter, and this irritates his wife. So at the end of the war, when he sails home, his wife ends up killing him. We didn’t have time to tell all the different stories. My first draft of the script came in at 180 pages, which is a monster script, and there still wasn’t a way to tell all the different strands. Eventually, it was cut to 140 pages, and there was a certain ruthlessness involved. We had to pick the stories that we could follow all the way through. If we weren’t going to have the whole story of Agamemnon and his daughter and his wife, we had to figure out a way we could allude to his death the way that it’s depicted in the myth. He was knifed by a woman, so that was the way it was handled there, but there were certain changes made, sometimes for efficiency and sometimes because I had to choose what I thought was best for the movie. As for being absolutely faithful to the source material, I’m always going to pick the project.

Were there any other endings? Yeah, from the original pitch, it was meant to be the story of Achilles and Hector, these two great heroes. Hector is killed 25 or 30 minutes before the end, and then Achilles is killed. Once your two main guys are dead, there’s not much more story to tell there. I think we could have an eight-hour miniseries that goes through all the different phases of the characters, but if you’re going to try to do it as a feature, you really have to cut many different things. The ending we have now was pretty much always the ending, and we are lucky in that we have Sean Bean doing that final voiceover with his magnificent voice. This is a tragic story in many ways, and I love the image of the ending with the smoke rising to the skies. I don’t know if that was originally in the script or if it was Wolfgang’s idea.

To read more…

Our good friends at Script Shark, the number one script handling service on the Internet, asked us to post their 2007 contest winners! Please visit them for more info on the 2008 contest which will be upcoming!

Grand Prize Winner
Richard Keehn, Wounded Knee 73

First Prize Winner
Seth Walther, Fate, Schmate

Second Prize Winner
George Gier, Exquisite Corpse

Runner Up
Matthew Flanzer, Back in the Day

Runner Up
George Gier, Maternity Leave

Just a shameless plug and friendly reminder that Tuesday is the deadline for Devin’s class on Horror Writing. As you know, Devin has his first feature completed and about to come out this summer.  This is an excellent opportunity to learn about writing from someone who has actually been produced.  Also, my Advanced Screenwriting class has a deadline of this Tuesday as well. It’s an excellent class for those wanting more from an online screenwriting class.

 - Chris

Ok, not here ranting in order to piss off any screenwriting bloggers, but, I have spent some time reading the tidbits of knowledge some screenwriter “wanna be” bloggers have posted, and, well, I am no longer confused as to why there are so many bad screenwriters out there.

Here are just some of the craziest statements and pieces of advice given from one wanna be to other; truly the blind leading the blind.  (I have paraphrased so you can’t copy and past and find out which blog I am mocking.)

1. “Make your characters stereotypical is required because audiences are too stupid to appreciate any other kind of character.” In a nutshell, this is what’s wrong with screenwriting today, and screenwriters in general. 

2. “Reveal character through dialogue.” Ehhhhh, wrong.  Sure, language is part of it.  But this leads too many new-be screenwriters down the wrong path. Character is most representative by the actions of that character. Remember, the main conflict and how the protagonist resolves it will often reveal the major change thus arc of the character. How the conflict is resolved and why, is important.

3. “Syd Field is every screenwriter’s God.”  This one about had me on the floor.  Sure, I know Syd, have spoken with him several times and have even been on the same screenwriting panel as him.  I like Syd.  He is indeed an important historical figure in the evolution of screenwriting, BUT, that’s where it stops.  As I have been painfully promoting for a few years now, we have to get away from the confinement of the writing by rubric approach. Which is ultimately what Syd promoted for many, many years.  The 3-act structure, my God.  People, don’t think about it. You can’t help but write in 3 acts if your goal is to write a story where something is happening and the story comes to an end.  Don’t get locked up by page counts, plot points, mid-points, end-points, turning- points, ect, ect.  Just write, know what you write, and know where you are going. 

 4. “Talent is only a SMALL part of screenwriting.” Yes, it is true. We are witness to a lot of bad movies and TV shows. It seems obvious that there are many a writer stealing money with the crap that is allowed to be produced. But that’s just it, we don’t always know the true story. A script often goes into the production warehouse pristine and finely tuned, only to come out a piece of shit. Do not fool yourself, dear writer. TALENT is huge. You have to have it. You can’t be an artist without it. I mean a true artist.  Screenwriting is an art, not just a craft.  You have to have that “feel” for what is working and what isn’t. In the end you need that innate ability to write a highly dramatic story that hits on all cylinders and that ain’t easy my friends.

 Here are a couple of good blogs:

http://www.unknownscreenwriter.com/
http://www.goasa.blogspot.com/

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(C) Chris Wehner is a professional writer and author who teaches screenwriting at the 4 Screenwriters Institute. For more information or to take a class click here.

From the archives comes an excellent interview with one of the best storytellers of all time:

David Mamet is one of the greatest writers working today, if not ever, so any chance to sit down with him was an honor. I joined a roundtable interview where several journalists had the chance to ask Mamet questions. Fortunately, just about everything he said was relevant, so here is the interview in its entirety.

Mamet wears huge yellow glasses and sports a full beard, so when he gets into long speeches about the use of exposition, he feels totally professorial. Even when he dishes short quips about dialogue, it’s so pointed it feels like he’s prepared the answer for years. Probably, he has. Having been in the screenwriting/playwriting business for so long, he must have been asked all these questions many times before.

What’s your writing regimen? I think I’m going to just start writing and keep writing until they throw me in jail. Other than that, I set aside all day every day for writing and break it up with going home to see my family or having lunch or getting a haircut. I hate to do that stuff, but…

Is writing a screenplay or stage play easier? It would seem that you could do almost anything on film, but that’s part of the wonderful fascination of filmmaking. You say, well, okay, you can do anything you want. Now, what are you going to do? So that’s the wonderful challenge of film. Theoretically, I can do anything I want, limited only by my ability to express it in terms of the shot list. So that’s a fascinating challenge. So I don’t find it any more freeing or any more constrictive than writing plays. They each have their own strictures. The wisdom of how to understand those strictures fascinates me.

What are the strictures of playwriting? Aristotle said it’s got to be about one thing. It’ll be one character doing one thing in the space of three days in one place, such that every aspect of the play is a journey of the character toward recognition of the situation. And at the end of recognizing the situation, he or she recognizes the situation, undergoes a transformation, the high becomes low, or in comedy, sometimes the low becomes high. That’s the stricture of playwriting.

To read more ….>

When Chris set up this blog and asked me about posting to it, I honestly couldn’t come up with anything for a few days about what to say. A writer, with nothing to say? That’s anathema!

Don’t worry, I got over it. I thought about all of the various topics I’d discuss on here, and I think I’ve got enough material to keep you guys and gals out there in Screenwriterland (a small country bordering Belgium) occupied for awhile. I have quite a few blog posts from my old blog that I’ll put up here first regarding Tenebrous while it was shooting and comment further about those events with hindsight well in play.

So for now, I’ll sign off by saying hello and stay tuned for more. More about Devin…