Michela Scolari (Screenwriting)

Michela Scolari Reflection

It’s been over 3 months since we handed in our final scripts to Michela, concluding our journey through the process of conceiving, writing and pitching our own feature film screenplays. To be honest, it feels like a bit of a fever dream from a long time ago – where we would be sitting in isolation at our desks and on our couches, listening to Michela take us through the development of a screenplay.

I will say that out of many of the processes we have engaged in throughout this course, this is one is the one that was most consistently apparent as a process. Michela took us incrementally step by step, never putting more in our mind than the specific step we were currently on.

This style of teaching, learning, and working creatively is quite satisfying for me – and I’m sure for many others. Breaking it down into bite sized achievable chunks of work does really make the whole process easier. Although sometimes it became tempting to daydream on the concept and really flesh it out in one go, if we did, it would become unwieldy. There’s also a certain sense of discovering what exactly it is, while you’re building it. I say this, because for my own creative work I find myself in the latter realm – one where I want to wallow around in the big concepts, the work as a whole, when it would be much more pleasurable and productive to just focus on small bites at a time. 

This became increasingly important when we entered into the heavy writing phase – I was able to lock myself into a certain number of pages each day, and eventually ended up with a full feature script. Others found it paralysing, as they would keep returning to the big concepts or ideas, or spend their time re-working what they had already written. Although Hollywood and its associated ethics and structures can be seen as quite heavy handed and commercially focussed, there is definitely something to be said about its ability to keep churning out material rather than stagnating.

It’s this concoction of functionality and creativity that was quite satisfying from a process level. At the same time, I do have to acknowledge that I’m not thrilled with the resulting script – however, this is just the first draft, and if I were to continue working on the project, I would be re-drafting countless times. 

There’s an interesting cultural departure between the theatrical and performative worlds, and this more Hollywood-esque world of screenplays – the rules and techniques seem to take a much more central role than they do in (especially contemporary) performance and theatre. This was most evident in Michela’s quite prescriptive feedback on our processes – feedback that she would then counter and contradict later on, to much of our collective confusion. 

In the process of working on the script, I joined a particular Facebook group that was set up to allow screenwriters to share writing tips, ask for help, and compare works online. Since being in this group, I’ve come to find that the vast majority of the posts and questions on the group are all about the ‘rules’ and ‘correct ways’ to write scripts, rather than anything to do with creativity. Considering this is somewhat the world I partially dipped my toes into and was heading for at one point, I can understand why I do have such a desire for structure and sequence over loose expressions and ideas. I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing, but after seeing this in this social group, it’s turned me off such a prescriptive focus. Something to balance.

One task we consistently returned to though, was that of the pitch. Obviously this is a very literal part of the functional process of getting your script made (or even read for that matter), but constantly returning to this pitch to extrapolate and refine also served the more creative purpose of keeping our concepts in check. By making the work articulatable, we were forced to keep our concepts in our minds, and not get carried away into another realm. For me, this actually ties in with some of the work we’re currently undertaking with Giacomo on concept and transversal action – that is to say, they serve a similar purpose. With Giacomo, this conceptual level, which aligns with the transversal action of the whole text, is where you draw everything from creatively. This is on more of a philosophical and intangible level than the pitch, but I find that the pitch is what stops you from developing tangentially. 

This tangential development can be very appealing, but I think it can also lead to work that is very shallow in a wide range of areas, rather than diving deep in a singular focus. It’s this depth that I want to be able to work from in my works from here on out. Maybe it’s possible to combine the two methods for my final project – keep a pitch that updates and is malleable throughout the process, but which aligns alongside the transversal action of the work. A good way to stay focussed, perhaps.

I honestly didn’t think I would have a finished full-length screenplay sitting in front of me by the end of our time with Michela. I think that it’s a testament to the way in which she took us through the process, learning as we went, that leads to a sizeable result without it necessarily feeling like a sizeable leap of work. There’s a lot I want to take away here in terms of process, that I believe can marry with the more performative work we’re doing, and hopefully allow my final project to be a relatively pleasurable and satisfying experience for everyone involved.