[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: When does the rule ‘don’t be boring’ come into play?
Richard Walter, Author/Screenwriter/Former Screenwriting Chair at UCLA: From beginning to end. The least we want is not to be bored. I mean I go to the movies and see screeners scandalously. I’m going less and less to the theaters and looking for more and more screeners. I used to feel guilty about not going to the theaters. Now I feel guilty about not screening the screeners and the reason is usually I am bored. I think most art is pretty bad, most paintings, most sculpture, most literature, most music is lousy. Now that also may seem like a cynical and a dark thing to say but it’s the opposite of that. The truth is that the stuff that is contemporary, much of it is going to be pretty bad. Some of it will be brilliant. What happens is that the bad stuff falls away. I was in New York not too terribly long ago and I was in the Museum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (one of my favorite museums) and I didn’t see a single painting there that wasn’t timeless and eternal, that didn’t deserve to be there and you could get the impression from that that paintings are somehow worthy all the time. Well you don’t realize (a lot of people don’t realize) that for every painting that hangs at the Met, there are 10,000 stupid, worthless, jerky, amateur paintings. Now there’s nothing wrong…I think it’s wonderful that people try to paint and try to be creative and took a shot at it but it’s unusual that it’s worth bothering somebody else about, that is to say there’s something in the work that merits the attention and the consideration of the time of an audience, an observer.
In film, because it is contemporary, even more so television because it’s in our face now, there hasn’t been the chance for the bad stuff to drop away. So we think that it’s uniquely bad when it isn’t, it’s just as bad as other art. Fortunately, the little bit of really, really good stuff is enough to change your life and make it worth engaging all of it with all of the stuff so that you do see the good stuff. People say Why don’t they make good movies now like they used to in the 30s and the 40s? Did they make good movies in the 30s and 40s? They did, there were a lot of really good ones but there were also a lot of lousy ones, we just don’t remember them. I think 50–60 years from now they’ll be saying Why don’t they make good movies like they did back in the early new millennium? because the people will have forgotten the Hunger Games. I’m not a big fan of the Hunger Games because I think people are going to forget about it but they’re going to remember the Imitation Game, they were in two games today. I guess it isn’t that the movie is about touring and so the least we want when I say “don’t be boring,” I’m saying that’s the very least that I want from a work of art. We’re talking now about dramatic narratives. I was at the Louvre in Paris and I saw the Mona Lisa among others. How much time did I spend with it? A minute. If I’d spent 3 minutes with it that would have been a long time. If I sat quietly now for just a few seconds you’d feel how heavily time weighs. Do you know? I’m just waiting to see if I get quiet even for two seconds, you get nervous and you jump in and I don’t blame you, that’s my point.
Film Courage: Sorry.
Richard Walter: No, not at all, you are helping me. I have a deal with my wife which is if I start to nod out during a movie she’s supposed to let me do that unless I’m snoring and wheezing and spraying everybody around us and then bringing disgrace and discredit and humiliation upon us. It’s up to the movie to keep me awake and the fact of the matter is that I used to like to fight it. If I started to drift during the movie, I would fight it. Now if I start to drift, that’s it, I’m going to nod out in this one. It’s just not worth seeing. I’ve walked into movies where I was really weary and hadn’t slept very well but it was a good movie and it woke me up, so that’s the least we want, don’t be boring and if that’s what you do, that’s an incredible achievement but again that’s the bottom.
What’s the top? The top is I want my life changed completely the way great art does. I want it turned upside down and transmogrified, I want to be transported and that’s what Breaking Bad did to me, that’s what The Sopranos did to me. My life is different and constantly because of my exposure to great art and that’s what great art should do at the top end, it should just change your life forever…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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About:
Richard Walter is an author of best-selling fiction and nonfiction, celebrated storytelling educator, screenwriter, script consultant, lecturer and retired professor who led the screenwriting program in the film school at UCLA for several decades. He has written scripts for the major studios and television networks; lectured on screenwriting and storytelling and conducted master classes throughout North America as well as London, Paris, Jerusalem, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney and Hong Kong.
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