The screen writer (June 1947-Mar 1948)

Screenwriter and Director in a British Studio T. E. B. CLARKE T. E. B. CLARKE is a contract writer at Ealing Studios, England. He has collaborated on six recent screenplays, including Dead of Night. He is the author of the original screenplays, Johnny Frenchman and Hue and Cry. ' I 'HE exacting requirements of the partnership be■*■ tween the writer of a film and its director are clearly indicated, I think, by the number of British screen writers who, in recent years, have taken to directing their own pictures. Writers seldom turn themselves into directors for the sake of increased prestige or a larger income. If they are good enough, they can acquire both these rewards just as soon by means of their writing, which, as a form of work, is undoubtedly more agreeable and less wearisome. Almost every writer who becomes a director of his own films does so because he has found that in no other way can his work be brought to the screen in precise accordance with his conceptions of its future form. In other words, he has failed to find a director with whom he can form a partnership that calls for the maximum degree of harmony, openmindedness and close understanding — and he has learned that a collaboration falling short of these requirements stands little chance of producing an artistically successful result. This fact was not realised nearly enough in the past. All too often the director was allowed to ride roughshod over the writer; and it is significant that recognition of the need for a truer balance of collaboration between the two coincides approximately with the time when British films really began to advance in quality. A director cannot be expected to make a good film out of a script that fails to stir any enthusiasm in him. Independent judges may consider it the best script the writer has ever turned out; that is immaterial. No matter what other people go into eulogies about his work, this will reach the screen without the essential qualities of warmth and sincerity if it does not make the same appeal to its director. It is thus very much in the writer's interest to work as closely as he can with the director from an early stage in the development of his story. For what is the alternative? A conscientious director, not liking the script as it stands, will hand it over to another writer for readjustment according to his own wishes, or else will tackle this job himself. How much more satisfactory for the original writer if he can be the one to effect the necessary compromise ! I am not suggesting that he should bow to the director's demands. In certain instances their discussions may result in the director coming over to his own point of view — and here again I do not mean that any act of submission is involved. It is sometimes extremely difficult, even impossible, for a writer to show in his script the precise mood or flavour that he intends the finished picture to have; and the director may have read the script without being able fully to appreciate his aims. Similarly, the director may have certain ideas about the picture he wishes to make which are different from — and possibly an improvement on — the writer's conception. By working together from the start, the two have a real opportunity to smooth out such conflicting views, and to infect each other with new enthusiasms. (Perhaps I should make it plain here that I am speaking of original stories written specifically for the screen, and not adaptations of plays or novels.) Though I am not trying to claim for one moment that a harmonious partnership between writer and director is a recipe for assured success, but merely that absence of it must almost certainly bring failure, I think the way in which I have worked with the same director, Charles Crichton, on my last three film stories may be of some interest, if only as a testament of one screenwriter who has found a method of working which affords him personal satisfaction. Many future misconceptions and disappointments may be avoided, I have found, by a very full discussion of the subject with the director before a line is set down on paper. The discussion having concluded with a rough agreement between us on the form the story is to take, I produce an outline, fifteen to twenty pages in length, as a basis for a fresh conference. Knowing now the sort of courses that the lives of our characters are to follow, we devote this second discussion mainly to the characters themselves. i 14