[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Jill Chamberlain, Script Consultant/Author/Writer: Characters are what they do, not who they were.
Film Courage: Should screenwriters write character profiles or biographies?
Jill: In my opinion writers can do whatever they like if that’s helpful for them, go for it. I don’t do them. I don’t like them. I don’t have any of my writers do them. Of all my professional screenwriters who are clients, I’m not aware of one of them that does that.
I have a client who has movies everyone here has heard of and he does biopics. His philosophy is he writes the story first and then he does the research. He doesn’t even want to be distracted by extraneous details about someone’s life. He basically goes with a Nutshell idea of what this person’s life represented to him. When he heard about this person’s life what got him excited? What sounds like the story of their life? A life is not inherently a story, so what was the story in there that got him excited, basically a Wikipedia level of understanding.
Then get away from the facts, write the story, write the emotional part of what fascinated him about this character and then he just researched to fill in the details. He doesn’t even want to be distracted. I absolutely know writers who have done too much research that it gets in the way of you being able to tell a story if you know too much…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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About:
Jill Chamberlain is the founder of a screenwriting school, a script consultant, a screenwriter, and the author of The Nutshell Technique: Crack the Secret to Successful Screenwriting.
The Nutshell Technique is considered the go-to manual many professionals swear by. It’s on the syllabus at film schools all over the world and has been published in Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Italian, and in audiobook format.
As a script consultant, Jill has fixed and fine tuned scripts for Oscar-nominated screenwriters, top television showrunners, screenwriters whose movies have made over a billion dollars at the box office, award-winning independent filmmakers, and for many, many spec script writers.
In 2006, Jill founded The Screenplay Workshop with Jill Chamberlain (Screenplayworkshop.org) where she has personally taught thousands of screenwriters feature film and episodic television writing. Complete beginners to Emmy-winning screenwriters and award-winning producers enroll in her classes.
Find out more about her and her script consultancy at jillchamberlain.com.
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