Christopher Riley, Screenwriter, Author, and Instructor: I really value stories told by writers who are able to go out into life and experience it and come back and help make some sense of it.
Film Courage: Can you explain why a writer must understand their own story before they can essentially understand any character stories that they may invent?
Chris: My wife Kathy took this idea of defining moments and pushed it a step further by saying this isn’t just about concocting moments for our characters, it really begins with us understanding our own story. When she teaches young writers, she will say again and again that Before you can understand your character’s story, you have to understand your own story. If we’re going to understand the dynamic of the way moments can reshape us and transform us, the best place for us to look is in our own experience. We have a front row seat to our own invisible inner emotional life and so we’ve got to be willing to draw on that but before I can draw on my own life (my own defining moments) I have to actually locate them. While I might not want to crack open an old DVD, I have to crack open my own history. If I’m going to tap into the emotional riches that lie there for all of us because we all have in the words of author Frederick Buechner Wonderful and terrible things that have happened to us all and so the idea is that we would look at those things. As an example, a kind of moment that might define us, would be the moment a dream was born. Somebody who’s pursuing acting, directing, writing often that’s based around a dream. The question that I would ask is When was that dream born? Can you locate the moment of birth for that dream? Sometimes there is a moment and sometimes things emerge so gradually that we can’t locate a moment. We’ve got glaciers that creep imperceptibly but then we also have…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Christopher Riley is a professional screenwriter who co-wrote with his wife Kathy Riley the award-winning German language courtroom thriller After the Truth. The Rileys have written scripts for Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Mandalay Television Pictures, the late Sean Connery’s Fountainbridge Films and Robert Cort Productions. Christopher produced the independent action-thriller Red Line and executive produced the web series Bump+. He is the author of the classic screenplay format guide The Hollywood Standard, now in its third edition, and teaches screenwriting at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Riley’s latest book is The Defining Moment: How Writers and Actors Build Characters (through Michael Wiese Productions).
BUY THE BOOK – THE DEFINING MOMENT: How Writers and Actors Build Characters (by Christopher and Kathy Riley)
BUY THE BOOK – THE HOLLYWOOD STANDARD: The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style
CONNECT WITH CHRISTOPHER RILEY
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