What's New Podcast Transcript, the Secrets of Hollywood Storytelling
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What’s New Podcast Transcript Rebroadcast: The Secrets of Hollywood Storytelling July 21, 2020 Host: Dan Cohen, Dean of Libraries and Vice Provost for Information Collaboration at Northeastern University. Guest: Bobette Buster, Professor of the Practice of Digital Storytelling, Northeastern University. Hi, this is Dan Cohen. During this coronavirus summer, Americans have turned to an old pastime—the drive-in movie. And the movies that are being played, from Jaws to Star Wars to Jurassic Park, are not only popular favorites, but films that advanced the sound design of the movies through innovative techniques. A couple of years ago, I interviewed a Hollywood screenwriter and producer about a documentary she was making about storytelling and sound in films, and that documentary is now out: Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, available for free on Amazon Prime and streaming through many other services as well. And in this rebroadcast, here’s my conversation with the producer of Making Waves, Bobette Buster. Dan Cohen, Host: For over 100 years, movies have been synonymous with entertainment. But outside of the film industry, few people really understand how they are made, [00:00:30] and especially how the best movies engross us through careful attention to good storytelling, encoded in dialogue and images and, most obviously, sound. Today on What's New, the secrets of Hollywood storytelling. I'm Dan Cohen, and this is What's New. With me today to talk about Hollywood storytelling is Bobette Buster, a screenwriter and film producer who has also [00:01:00] worked as a story consultant with major studios such as Disney, Pixar and Sony. She has just been appointed Professor of the Practice of Digital Storytelling here at Northeastern. So, welcome, Bobette. Bobette Buster: Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Dan Cohen, Host: It's great to have you here. So, Bobette, when people think about film, they of course think about moving pictures, but movies, of course, begin as words on a page and as story ideas at their inception. Can you talk about where these movies come from at that early stage of just a story? [00:01:30] Bobette Buster: Well, they begin sort of preverbal. They're ideas, and they're a vision of how you want to express your ideas in sight and sound. You think of somebody like J. R. R. Tolkien who was just a young soldier in World War I, in the impasse of trench warfare, and what a scandal it really is in history of how many young men lost their lives by the entrenchment of that war. He was so overwhelmed with the [00:02:00] loss of humanity in that era and perspective that he set about writing Lord of the Rings. For him, the ring was the symbol of this gloating sense of power and glory. 1 He ended up dedicating his life's work to this big idea in the same way that George Lucas had this big idea of creating a worldwide non-religion religion, the [00:02:30] force. He embedded that in this wonderful intergalactic story, Star Wars, and it's become the franchise business of our times. It's a metaphor for all that we're going through in our lives. Baby Boomers and all their children and grandchildren now are still mesmerized by this big idea. What is it to have the force in you? But in with these grand stories, as well as Academy Award winning stories or art house films ... everybody has a favorite film. Behind it is another story, the story [00:03:00] of how you orchestrate the emotions. You do that because cinema is sight and sound. We have been trained to think just visually, as moving pictures, but, in fact, there's been a quantum leap in storytelling since the '60s and understanding the power of sound to move us at a very subliminal level. Dan Cohen, Host: I want to come back to sound later in the program. But just sticking with the [00:03:30] words for a second, you mentioned some literature, Tolkien, for instance. George Lucas, of course, drew from mythology. We know that when he was working on Star Wars, he was reading great works of literature to understand how to translate this idea of the force into something that looks like a script. What is that process? For someone who's never written a screenplay before, how does that translation happen from idea to an actual script? Bobette Buster: Well, first of all, cinema is more akin to music than a narrative form like novel [00:04:00] because it's in a time-based medium. So each page of a script is worth one minute of screen time. When you're creating a script, you are taught not just the idea of character development and then plot and then dialogue, you are literally taught how to think in terms of time and pacing. You have to know the format of a script. It's more than just buying a copy of Final Draft. You have to know how to [00:04:30] orchestrate that in time on each page. The very discipline of writing a screenplay is multi leveled, and I often think it's much more akin to learning how to write a symphony, for example. Dan Cohen, Host: For someone new, let's say a student ... I know you've taught many students how to go from story idea to a screenplay. What are the key differences, say, from writing a novel that you tell them about because this is so time-based? How do they start to change their skills into this new format? [00:05:00] Bobette Buster: The important thing is to say what is the big idea of your story. For example, to take Star Wars, George Lucas was talking about what he called the used future. In every scene of Star Wars, you have a sense of a futuristic world, but it feels real to us. The Millennium Falcon is a beaten up hot rod. You see the bumps and [00:05:30] bruises and the crashes. You experience reality in that world in a whole other way, and that's very important to the sound design. When you're making a story that you hope to translate onto the screen, you have to think in terms of what is my key image. What is the metaphor I'm telling with that image? With that, you construct, in a very well-organized way, an entire universe that relates to that [00:06:00] image. You also do that in terms of the sound design and in the style and tone of 2 the world you create and the world you build so that there's an integration, all with this big idea. Dan Cohen, Host: How does dialogue relate to this? I love that notion of the used future. I'm not sure I've heard that before in relation to Star Wars, but as soon as you hear that phrase, it's so true, the Millennium Falcon, the beat up robots, this world that was very different than other science fiction of the age. How then do you add in [00:06:30] dialogue to this imagined world? Bobette Buster: Well, in film school ... I went to USC Graduate School of Cinema, and we take an entire year of courses which is just visual storytelling. You have to be able to tell your story visually without any dialogue. Then, eventually, you add in sound effects and maybe music, and then the last thing you add in is dialogue. It's very important that you learn how to make the story rest on that. Dialogue is like the [00:07:00] jewel in the crown. It's a lot of fun. It can advance a story, absolutely. You think of Quentin Tarantino. He's the master of these long, winding dialogue moments on his screen, but he's unique because he has a unique voice. Most dialogue has to happen in a very clipped way so that you can cut around it and also so that you can put subtitles with it, internationally. Dan Cohen, Host: That's an interesting point. It's not real dialogue, right? Bobette Buster: No. [00:07:30] Dan Cohen, Host: Even Quentin Tarantino is writing a kind of artifice of dialogue that you add into these stories. Bobette Buster: Dialogue is subtext. It's really what we would all like to say or wish we had said. When you're in the moment with someone, most of us, in reality, are just speaking in a very polite framework, or we're frustrated. We can't find the words to say what we want to say. People on the big screen or in television are literally living out the inner life revealed. [00:08:00] Dan Cohen, Host: How does a script get polished up into something that actually is compelling, that doesn't have long, boring stretches? It's interesting to think about the script as actually being a kind of time-based media because we think of writing in the novelistic form, where you're in your chair and you're reading it at whatever pace you want. But since it is a page per minute, how do you tell students this is enough of this scene, or we need to move on, or we need to create a new dynamic for the script to actually make it a good story? [00:08:30] Bobette Buster: Well, it's a time-honored understanding in screenwriting that you have a foundation of eight sequences, which are around 11 minutes.