The methodology behind starting a Social Realism screenplay

Where do I start?

 By Lukas Agelastos

Before I start writing a screenplay, I need to come up with an idea first. Inspiration, research, and coming up with a premise are part of that. Collaborative writing with a screenwriter can also help in instances when I want to come up with new angles for a project, a completely fresh idea, or when I simply need the feelings of team play and accountability to bring a project forward. This post is from the perspective of writing a screenplay in the genre of Social Realism. While I mention Mike Leigh in this article, he isn't a great example of a screenwriter since most of his films are developed through months of improvisations with his actors rather than based on a script. But that's the topic of another article on this blog.

Not a great example of a film written through a traditional screenwriting process: 
Mike Leigh's Another Year (2010)

Inspiration

Feelings are at the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious worlds, and while playing with your creative ideas, the positive and negative intuitive feelings you are experiencing are important messages from your inner creative self (Bonnet 2017).

Mike Leigh insists: “It may change, expand, contract, evolve, but there does have to be a film in your head. You may never make a film that turns out anything like the film in your head; the concept may just be something that drives you” (Leigh & Raphael 2008a). Raphael (2008b) reports that between films, Leigh watches movies, reads, goes to galleries, and watches people obsessively: on stage, on screen, on the street.

Inspiration, that “magical moment when an idea springs seemingly fully-formed from nowhere into conscious awareness” can be helped by taking a moment to reflect: “What’s the subject of the piece? Who’s the audience? What main idea do you want to convey?” (Carson 2010).

Nickerson (1999) mentions that there are many reports of creative people being inspired at unpredictable times, while not actively thinking about the essence of the inspiration. Creative work typically necessitates a period of “incubation”, during which one does not think about the task at hand but the mind continues working on a subconscious level. While not all psychologists agree with the above, it seems that ceasing the fixation on ideas that are not getting one closer to a solution provides greater accessibility to the knowledge that will possibly lead to a solution. Nickerson (1999) concludes that there is no easy, rulebook method to enhance creativity and that it cannot be produced at will. Still, “virtually everyone has more creativity than he makes of, [and] different conditions flush it forth in different individuals” (Rubin 1968 in Nickerson 1999).

For me personally, inspiration usually comes from newspaper articles or stories I have witnessed or heard about people. I have even picked up ideas from "Dear Abby"-type columns in newspapers. Where better to read about the human condition than from people's own experiences?
A typical pitfall is writing about my own life events. The danger is that my judgement about what constitutes a good storytelling technique is clouded by my emotions.
Protagonists in Social Realism films are typically depicted through the lens of an observer. This means that the screenwriter also needs to look at the events as an observer, letting the character's emotions that are on display move the story forward.

Sorry We Missed You (2019)

Ken Loach and his screenwriter Paul Laverty use a more traditional approach to screenwriting.

Research is an indispensable part of the process.

Research

Research is an indispensable part of screenwriting (Joalland 2014). Laverty researches before writing, meaning he talks to people, “sometimes in an organized manner [...], other times [...] just wandering and bumping into people at random” (Laverty 1998). For instance, before writing “Sweet Sixteen” (2002), he visited dozens of schools, children’s homes and secure units for teenagers, and spent time with young teenagers at clubs and street corners in the West of Scotland, where the story is set (Laverty 2002).

Paul Laverty and Ken Loach come up with notions about a character. They then talk about how this character can get into the guts of what they want to talk about, and then Laverty will write a first draft.
For instance, to find a story to touch upon the war they believe you have to make it personal. The more Laverty spoke to ex-soldiers, the more the issue of contractors and the privatisation of violence came up. So things start to grow in his mind and he shares them back and forth with Loach.
One of the most interesting things he heard was how soldiers want "their old self back", the one that was there before they caused death and destruction.
“So for each story you have to find the equivalent of that. The human spark” (Laverty in KenLoachFilms 2010). Of course, “when you are imagining a story, there are often dozens of characters screaming for attention”, but it’s one who “will not give up or shut up” because s/he demands our attention (Laverty 2002).
In the case for our film The Astronaut's Room, and its proof-of-concept short The Line, which are based in a call centre, we talked to a number of call centre agents and conducted academic research on the subject of call center employees to obtain more ideas about our story, and to make it more realistic.

Coming up with a premise 

Jeff Lyons asserts that “a story premise is a container that holds your story’s right, true and natural structure” (Lyons 2015). He suggests that if a story idea will fail, it will first do so at the premise level and that it is vital to come up and test a story’s premise before writing a screenplay.

He argues that every premise line has the same construction, which consists of four essential clauses, which must always be present:

• Clause #1 [Protagonist clause]: An event sparks a character into action, that...
• Clause #2 [Team Goal clause]: joins that character with one or more other characters acting with deliberate purpose toward some end…
• Clause #3 [Opposition clause]: when that purpose is opposed by a force of resistance bent on stopping/ opposing/ frustrating them....
• Clause #4 [Denouement clause]: leading to some resolution/ conclusion.

Lyons's framework is a test that I always apply to assess if there is an actual story there to be unearthed or if it is just an idea.

Collaborative writing

Some behaviourists argue that creative teamwork can be greater than the sum of the members’ individual efforts. For instance, Pirola-Merlo & Mann (2004) assert that creativity can develop as single members work separately on sections of the larger project, and can also occur as individuals interact with each other, as they build upon ideas together. They suggest that “individual creativity can provide the raw material of novel and useful ideas, but that team member interactions and team processes play an important role in determining how this raw material is developed into group-level creativity” (Pirola-Merlo & Mann 2004).

Baker (2013), in a nursing publication, cites that writing with another person requires each contributor to be open and tackle diverse opinions as they arise. Communication is a key component of team collaboration, especially “approachability, interpersonal skills, listening, and verbal message skills” (O’Brien et al in Baker 2013).
Inspiration, research, and coming up with a premise for me are prerequisites to start writing a screenplay, whether I am on my own or with a screenwriting partner.

For The Astronaut's Room, the feature Social Realism project screenwriter Doris Avgerinopoulos and I are working on at present, Doris came up with the initial idea, and he also served as the main writer. We kept meeting on a nearly daily basis to discuss ideas and progress.

Lazaros Vartanis and Alexandra Aidini in The Line (2019), the proof-of-concept short which I directed and which Doris Avgerinopoulos and I wrote for the feature The Astronaut's Room (in development)

References

• Joy Don Baker. 2013. Collaborative writing. Association of Operating Room Nurses. AORN Journal, 97(1), 4-6.
• James Bonnet. 2017. Unlocking The Power of Story Within You. [ONLINE]. Available at: https://www.writersstore.com/unlocking-the-power-of-story-within-you/ . Retrieved 23 August 2017
• Shelley Carson. 2010. Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
• Stéphanie Joalland. 2014. 6 Rules of Screenplay Research. [ONLINE]. Available at: https://www.raindance.org/6-rules-of-screenplay-research/. Retrieved 26 August 2017.
• KenLoachFilms. 2010. 'Michael Moore talks to Ken Loach and Paul Laverty', retrieved 15-9-2016, https://youtu.be/zlu_HxPTP_Q
• Paul Laverty. 1998. My Name Is Joe. Suffolk: ScreenPress Books
• Paul Laverty. 2002. Sweet Sixteen, Suffolk: Screenpress Publishing
• Jeff Lyons. 2015. Anatomy of a Premise Line: How to Master Premise and Story Development for Writing Success. Pap/Psc Edition. Waltham, MA: Focal Press.
• Raymond S. Nickerson. 1999. Enhancing creativity. In: Robert J. Sternberg (ed.). 1999. Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Andrew Pirola-Merlo & Leon Mann (2004). The relationship between individual creativity and team creativity: aggregating across people and time. Journal of Organizational Behavior No. 25, pp. 235–257: Wiley InterScience
• Amy Raphael. 2008a. Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh. London: Faber and Faber
• Amy Raphael. 2008b. Amy Raphael interviews Mike Leigh. The Guardian. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/feb/17/mikeleigh.berlinfilmfestival. [Accessed 27 May 2017]