Roland Fishman talks to Robert McKee about Story Structure

To Robert McKee stories and their heroes are the most important thing in the world. Telling people how to create them is what he has dedicated his life to, and it is that, rather than his own writing, that has made him a name in Hollywood.

Stories, he says, shape our lives, and films are the most influential stories in our world today. Which explains why Tom Cruise is probably the most important person in Australia when we're lucky enough to have him here, and why that is not as silly as it sounds.

"Of course film stars are more important than anyone else. They represent the heroes of the stories that teach us how to live, that shape our lives. Life does not equip us to live, stories do. They answer the fundamental question first asked by Aristotle - how does a man lead his life."

McKee, who suffers no shred of self doubt, shyness or false modesty, is trying to explain why stories are important and why his story writing workshops to be held in Melbourne and Sydney in late June and early July are probably the two most significant cultural events happening in Australia this year, and why his book on story structure, which he believes is the best ever written on the subject and will live on after him, should be required reading for everyone on the planet.

He quotes Aristotle again. "When storytelling goes bad, the result is decadence."

 ***

The essence of McKee's workshops are that character and plot are the same. Story events put pressure on a character and force them to change. Where character meets plot is a spiritual experience.

Through the course of the story a character goes on a journey where they overcome various challenges, obstacles and opponents and are transformed as a result.

For example, in Casablanca, which McKee shows and analyses over five hours in his workshop, Rick, the Humphrey Bogart character, goes through a classic transformation. At the start of the film his character is a burnt out, laconic saloon keeper who wants to win back his lost love Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, even though she is now married to the resistance hero Victor Laszlo, played by someone you wouldn't have heard of.

Over the course of the film, Rick has changed. He has regained his sense of honour and purpose, has decided to join the resistance and found a higher form of love. When Rick acts nobly we see not only the most noble side of him, but also of ourselves and all human beings. And this is what makes for a satisfying story and what makes a story a timeless classic.

Which is what every writer aspires to do.

 ***

At the moment there is a world-wide epidemic of script writers turning out one cliche after another. Urban legend says that you can approach many a stranger in Los Angeles and ask "How's your script going?" before anyone replies: "What script?"

It's not quite so bad in Australia, but we're getting there. Anna

Macarthur, a former actor and actor's agent, who through her Sydney based company Epiphany Films brought McKee to Australia, so she could earn enough money to fund her own documentary films, hopes that 400 people will pay $495 to do McKee's two Australian seminars. This is standard for the 20 seminars Mckee expects to do this year. He says the demand is such that his seminar has taken over his life.

The question is why is there such a world wide obsession with breaking into the film industry?

McKee has an answer. "Film is the dominant art form of our time. It is the way people can have a huge international success."

According to McKee, film makers are the elite in our society. Those who make it in the industry, appear to live on another plane to the vast majority. They make more money and experience more fame than most of us would know what to do with. Everyone wants to be a member of that exclusive club, and writing a film script seems to be the easiest pathway into that world.

What happens is this. People go to the movies, see films that cost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, make the stars and directors millions of dollars, and everyone can see these movies and go: "What a load of crap. I did well at English at school. Surely I could do better."

The hardest part of the process it seems to the outsider is getting their film script in the hands of some important person - like a movie star, or even a director or producer - who'll read their script and see the talent oozing out of the page and they'll desperately want to get it made. The money and fame will surely follow for the writer and their life will change.

Sounds easy enough.

 ***

There's a story of a writer going to a party where she meets a brain surgeon who tells her he is thinking of taking six months of to write a film script. The writer smiles. "That's funny I was thinking of taking a bit of time off to do some brain surgery."

McKee would say writing is much tougher than brain surgery.

"Writing a screenplay one of the hardest things you can do. There's so much involved. Much harder than writing a novel."

McKee is very critical of other well known script writing teachers. "They try," he says, "and make it sound like writing a successful script is easy. They say if you do these simple things you will have success, you will be successful. It's a lie."

I tell him that there are three rules you have to follow to write a good novel, the trouble is no one knows what they are.

"Exactly," says McKee, "if you try and follow the so called rules you have a cliche. And audiences are smarter than that. They can spot a cliche in the trailer. It's not about learning rules or formulas, it's about understanding principals. Mastering the art form."

Ernest Hemingway, who only wrote novels, said all writers were apprentices of a craft in which there were no masters.

"It will take you five screenplays to figure a beginning from an end," McKee says in the press kit. "Ten screenplays to get rid of cliches. And a life time of living to have something to say."

McKee figures that between four and five hundred thousand scripts are started each year. Of those 400 are financed and made by Hollywood. The odds are in the vicinity of 1,000 to one. The odds blow out even further if we're talking about a successful film that makes money.

"I'm very realistic in the seminar," McKee says. "I tell it like it is. I put the fear of God into them. I hope I can put them off. Save some of them, those dilettantes who think they'll try film, five years of their lives."

Bryce Courtney quotes Stephen King as saying the most important ingredient for any writer is bum glue. The most common defect that stops most writers from being successful is not writing. Writers are people who write. Put pen to paper, finger to keyboard. Talking or thinking about writing is not writing.

This brings me to my curly question. "Robert...If it wasn't for your story seminar, I never would have heard of you as a writer." He is the most famous unknown screenwriter in Hollywood

McKee doesn't miss a beat. "You're absolutely right. You wouldn't have heard of me if it wasn't for my seminars. But I've got to say; everything I write gets sold."

Still, over the last 20 years, he estimates he's told over 30,000 people how to write a screenplay and yet he's never yet managed to have one made. According to his publicity blurb, a feature written by him is expected to go into production in Ireland later this year. The blurb also lists a string of television credits, says he's sold 12 scripts, some more than once.

Why don't his films get made?

"I tend to write kind of dark films that have female main characters and have down endings. Hollywood doesn't go for that sort of film."

He'd know.

"I'd love to be able to be able to write a romantic comedy, but I just can't do it."

I smile. I'm writing a novel that is a romantic comedy.

Curly question number two. Do you never worry that you mightn't have any talent?

"No. I know I have talent. I can see it when I see my stuff on the screen. I have my limitations. I'm not Chekhov."

"So you believe there is such a thing as talent?"

"Absolutely."

"And you've either got it or you haven't. You're either born with it or you're not."

"That's right."

For the first time in our conversation there is a silence. You see for the first I disagree with McKee on this. I am convinced that everyone who wants to write has talent. No one is born with any more or any less creative power than anyone else. It is not just in some of us, it is in all of us. When it comes to creativity, our imagination or unconscious has far more power than our rational mind can ever posses. It's just a matter of learning how to tap into that power.

I quote Henry Miller to McKee: "We lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there."

McKee's response. "I think Henry's got it wrong."

We leave it at that.

Author's note. Robert McKee hasn't done Unlocking Creativity.

Close Window