“I’ve made a living doing rewrites for other people and writing scripts for other people, but I’ve only made three films for myself, and I made them under the conditions that I would have as complete creative control as was possible,” Kenneth Lonergan told a group of budding writers at Dublin’s screenwriting festival Storyhouse.
The Manchester by the Sea and You Can Count on Me filmmaker imparted his advice about how to carve a screenwriting career in the film business during a lengthy keynote conversation with Room and Frank director Lenny Abrahamson.
“In my case, I had to have protectors who were more powerful than I was. But I found them and got them and secured them and made sure that they could protect me. And one out of three times they were unable to protect me – I went through a lot of trouble in my second film, trying to keep the film where I wanted it. But they will change the script and fire you and cast people you don’t like if you don’t have some contractual say over these processes.”
When probed about the current state of the film industry, Lonergan said he pined for the type of bold filmmaking that existed in the 1970s. “I was brought up on very good movies, which I’m sorry to say, is not the case with the average movie going person since then.
“The general quality was through the roof compared to any time since then. It just wasn’t the fashion to underline all the themes and have everything mean something and to tell the moral of the story in the first ten minutes and make sure the audience knew whose side of the spectrum you fell on, politically and socially.”
He continued: “I don’t think people are any less talented, but the zeitgeist, the way Hollywood thinks it’s going to make money, has changed profoundly and hasn’t really changed back. Everything that’s come since then has been against the tide rather than with the tide of the product that’s being turned out. So, it’s not even that people are making sentimental, pseudo, profound messaging movies now because they’re being told to – they’re sort of doing it. They’re getting ahead of the game before they even need to.”
Lonergan stressed that originality is key, and a writer’s individual voice is “the most interesting thing you have to offer.”
“Your job is to protect and preserve that and to have respect for your autonomy and your own individuality and not be subverted by borrowing tropes.”
The writer-director spoke at length about his different processes in filmmaking across his three films You Can Count on Me, Margaret and Manchester by the Sea and when probed by Abrahamson about the opening of the latter film, where Casey Affleck’s character is on a boat with his nephew (whom he eventually becomes the legal guardian of later in the movie), Lonergan admitted that sequence was not in the script and when they shot it, instinctively he felt it would make for a good opening sequence.
“That scene was a function of the credits and the credit sequence and dialogue at the very beginning of the film was improvised by Casey Affleck. He’s a very good improviser and I just asked him to start making stuff up.”
He continued: “If you have a good instinct, it’s good to trust it and to recognize that you’re having one and it’s probably valuable. The only technique that I can identify on my own is to notice that when the breezes start to blow in my favor and I get a favorable wind, I tend not to ask about it but to just go with it until it dies out and the wind starts blowing in my face again.”
Lonergan, who is also a prolific playwright, told the audience that he is currently “working on several things at once.”
“They’re shouldering each other out of the way and it’s the most productive form of procrastination that I’ve ever, ever developed,” he quipped. “I don’t like to talk about it too much but I’m working on two screenplays and a television project, and I don’t know which is going to be first.”
“If I can keep the balance that I’m at now, none of them will ever appear.”
