Ever heard of William Nicholson? Apparently he’s a screenwriter. A pretty successful screenwriter. The screen writer of Gladiator and Les Miserables in fact. So, why isn’t his name plastered over all the posters? Didn’t he write the damned things?
Screen writers, Nicholson said in an OUFF talk this week, have a hard time. Want to be a screenwriter? Think about it carefully. We highly intelligent, emotionally sensitive types probably haven’t got a chance. Screenwriters need to be able to take a lot of rejection. “Be prepared to have your work ripped to
shreds, criticised, ignored.” Heartening stuff.
Nicholson left Cambridge with a degree in English Literature, having invested his time in “learning to not be clever”. He subsequently spent 15 years trying to be a latter-day Proust, with a day job at the BBC, before finally giving up on his high-brow dream and turning to TV. Writing for TV, he muses, has an interesting future. “TV serials can work like novels; they have the time to really develop character in a way that a two-hour film simply can’t.”
Once you’ve been in the industry you develop a sort of zen. Every director has made an awful film (even Stanley Kubrick – did you see Eyes Wide Shut?); every director is hoping to make a great one.
Nicholson was the third screenwriter brought onto the Gladiator set. A remarkable number of films, he tells us, start filming without a decent script. The producer picks a screenwriter, and later a director, and then the actors appear, and the crew, and everyone assumes that at some point in that process the script will become ready. Sometimes it just isn’t.
On Gladiator, working alongside filming, Nicholson got to see which parts were working and which weren’t. They soon realised Joaquin Phoenix was great, he says, and expanded his part.
“Writing a screen play is not about dialogue; it’s about the story. It’s creating pictures on paper. Some write screen plays like nineteenth century novels, others just write noises.” “Write quickly”, he advises. It doesn’t take weeks to perfect a sentence. And you’ll be drafting and redrafting quite a bit.
“What I do,” he says, “is listen to the criticism my scripts are given, and realise
that yes, maybe those bits aren’t working.” But what he does not do is listen to anyone else’s advice about how to fix those bits; that’s his problem to solve.
“Screenwriters, at least for Hollywood, are underrated. In TV they get a bit more credit. The director swings onboard and takes it as his, or her, movie. But the direction doesn’t really matter,” Nicholson quips. “What you need is a good script, and good actors. And with that, the director doesn’t need to do much.”
Of course, there are truly great directors – he doesn’t deny that – but let’s all spare a thought for the screenwriter.
