Academy Award and Emmy Award Nominated filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd is interviewed

Today, Norm Goldman, Editor of Bookpleasures.com is honored to have as our guest, Academy Award and Emmy Award Nominated filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd.

Since the 1970s Lionel has been involved in one capacity or another with over sixty films, many of them for television. Among his credits are P.T. Barnum, Color of Justice, The Man Who Captured Eichmann, Kissinger and Nixon, The Heroes of Desert Storm, Two Solitudes, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, for which he received an Academy Award Nomination and the Wrtiers Guild of America Award for Best Feature Comedy, and KISSINGER AND NIXON, for which he received the Best Writing in a Dramatic Program nomination from the Gemini Awards- and the list goes on and on.

Good day Lionel and thank you for agreeing to participate in our interview.

Norm:

How did you come to be a screen writer and do you specialize in a particular screenwriting technique or genre?

Lionel:

I think of myself more as a filmmaker although clearly my base craft is writing and that was a decision of the marketplace. I had a flair for it and, in general good writing is the most difficult of the skills to come by in the modern entertainment business. Once you've established yourself in this field, you will generally have the opportunity to direct and/or produce (which I do on almost all my projects.) Writing also offers the best longevity of the three filmmaking crafts. Survival requires a generalist approach, but my credits tend towards the so-called "serious" subject matter which requires some grasp of history or scholarship. This is a fairly uncluttered corner of the market.

Norm:

How do you create characters in your writing?

Lionel:

There is no prose in screenwriting everything is kinetic and in quotation marks. Consequently the screenwriter must typically create a situation and then allow the character to emerge from that dynamic. In screenplays we know the character by their behavior not their inner monologue, so typically the character reveals him or herself to you as you experiment with the various situations in which you place them. If you find your character behaving inconsistently or in a contradictory fashion, then you know you've either created a false situation or you're contorting the character to fit a plot twist in a way they would not, in general react. So you watch how plot and character develop in tandem, driving one another, creating the character arc (or change) and see how authentic the experience feels. You have limited variables: real people in real situations, unreal people in unreal situations, real in unreal, etc. With time and experience, you develop a sense of where you're floundering and becoming flabby in this regard.

Norm:

Do you believe that Hollywood is too preoccupied with sex and violence?

Lionel:

Personally I think Hollywood is to preoccupied with politics (-). But frankly, sex and violence has been the cornerstone of all drama since the Greeks. What is unpleasant has been the lowering of any boundaries in the ambient culture so that the nature and quality of sex and violence depicted is, as often as not, more for shock value than for clever story telling or character revelation. In this regard my own work has been relatively restrained.

Norm:

Why are TV reality shows so popular today?

Lionel:

Partially, because they're what's there. As production costs were driven up, networks found this form a cheap way to fill the schedule. Partially, it's a consequence of a celebrity obsessed society where you can get people to do almost anything as long as they're seen on TV. And partially it's a response to the times: in the 24 hour news cycle with its sense of frenetic urgency that attends everything we do, the "news-like immediacy" seems to pass as an extension for real life.

Norm:

What is the difference between writing a screenplay and a stage play?

Lionel:

The stage play is dialogue intense whose rhythms and emotional peaks can vary with the audience’s interaction. Films are about seeing it rather than hearing about it, and the pace must be constructed through judicious editing that will stand up to an almost unlimited number of showings. The play is intimate, the film generally less so. There are many other differences but these are the principal structural problems the dramatist faces.

Norm:

What can a great novel do that a movie cannot?

Lionel:

A great novel can permit the laying bare of a character's inner monologue. In film -- and a lesser extent stage -- you're entirely at the mercy of the actor’s skill in communicating the interior life of a character. Occasionally a novel rich in internal character nuance, for example "To Kill a Mockingbird," can be realized on screen in all it's fullness or you can get the remake of "Lost Horizon" (Liv Ullman, etc).

Norm:

Which do you prefer, screenwriting or directing and why?

Lionel:

They’re completely different experiences so to some extent it depends what you’re up for at the given moment. Writing is solitary and personal, and it’s an opportunity to be a tourist in your own imagination, finding bits and pieces that apply, daydreaming, fantasizing – not always about the subject at hand – and, above all, it affords the opportunity to be master of your own timetable (within the stricture of the deadline). Directing is less purely creative. It involves getting up very early in the morning because the monster must be fed on time every day, coordinating and supervising the efforts of hundreds of people, keeping track of all the politics and relationships on the set beginning with the actors in the make-up trailer typically at an ungodly hour, and so on. Its great saving virtue, however, is that if you take on that responsibility – in film in any event – you have enormous control over outcomes. In television that authority usually falls to the executive producer who can often sleep late.

Norm:

Do you ever read newspaper or other media critics and how do you react to a bad review of one of your productions?

Lionel:

Like everyone I know I will deny reading the critic or paying them attention while in truth often staying up at night waiting for them to hit the internet. But as your career lengthens you begin to understand that most of them know very little, would rather be doing what you do, and will be gone from the scene shortly. Your film, however, is forever.

Norm:

How much research do you do before writing a film?

Lionel:

A great deal. I take it very seriously. Since your film will live for a very long time truthfulness is the only way to protect its legacy.

Norm:

What is the role of a producer and how does he or she go about raising money for a film? As a follow up, is it true that when producers read a script with an eye to buying it the first thing they think of is its casting? If so, why?

Lionel:

The role of the producer varies from arena to arena. The vast majority of films produced in the United States are institutionally financed (studios, specialty banks, dedicated investment combines, etc), so the producer's job is to take his vision for the story he wishes to tell and find that writer one of the institutions will pay to write the script. If it is a script already written, his job is to press the institution to the next step which may or may not be hiring a director. The critical moment is finding the actor, since that’s who sells the product at the point of sale – the box office. Of course, there are countless modalities within this broad description of film financing, and in regimes such as Canada, with heavy public funding, the producer’s path is far different. In either case, nowadays virtually all "green lights" are contingent upon casting..

Norm:

What was your most satisfying screenplay and why?

Lionel:

Every screenplay becomes like a child one labors so hard over them it would seem indecent to select one over the other. I do, however, have particular affection for Goldenrod, Varian’s War, Ike: Countdown to D-Day … if I keep this up I’ll name them all. In general, my favorite, the perfect one that meets every goal I have set, is always the next one.

Norm:

How do you feel when your screenplays are not filmed the way you wrote it and do you have much input as to the way they are filmed?

Lionel:

Filmmaking is a collaborative process, painfully so, and if you don’t face that going in you’ll surely bleed to death. In general I was well served by my collaborators in the early period of my career, and in recent years have enjoyed a remarkable degree of control – particularly for a writer -- of the way the films with which I am involved are realized. So I accept the confinement of the marketplace and, as is the unspoken rule in Hollywood, always stand by the final product -- at least for a while...

Norm:

Is there anything you have not done in the world of film that you would like to try?

Lionel:

There are at least two scripts in my trunk, one over 15 years old, that I still fantasize about making. It’s out to some actors now and if one of them will come on board this particular fantasy will be realized with a bright green light. I think that filmmaking, like all commercial "artistry" (quotation marks for mild derision at calling this that) is an incremental life. Except in very rare cases, each project is filled with mostly new faces and presents with new challenges. So, in a way, most of us are happy just to have another kick at the can in the hope that this time, we'll nail it perfectly...(a bad mix of metaphors -- explanation enough for why one would wish a career of second chances.)

Norm:

What is next for Lionel Chetwynd and is there anything else you wish to add that we have not covered?

Lionel:

I’m currently finishing the final draft of a theatrical motion picture for Sony with a biblical theme which is one of the more interesting undertakings of my career. I expect there will be much spoken of this before long. Being garrulous potentially to the point of boredom, I could go on for hours about other things I’d like to say but I think your questions have been precisely to the point and have covered all that I might usefully address. Thanks for the opportunity. I enjoy your websites and am delighted for the opportunity to be a part of them. Good luck, Norm.

Norm:

Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future projects.