and today my guest is robert mckee. the filmmaking professional screenwriting at something say at least. and those writers names may not even appear in the credits their work is essential for each and every film or t.v. show and sometimes way higher than the act so what does it take to become a really good how does this sacred process look from the inside we're asking the man who best the world famous screenwriter and writing lecturer robert mckee. when the american writers guild went on strike in two thousand and seven it was a disaster for the entertainment industry it lost about one point five billion dollars in just a few months proving screenwriters are sometimes even more important than directors and actors this idea is something robert mckee has always tried to promote he's screenwriting consultant to major t.v.

studios like paramount twentieth century fox and disney and he's also one of the most sought after lecturers on writing in the world mr mchugh. include thirty five academy award winners and almost one hundred seventy award winners many hollywood screenwriters regard him as their mentor and inspiration. to make him welcome to the show it's my great pleasure thank you very much for being with us it's a privilege and first of all i decided to talk to you when i when i read in one of your interviews you said i am starving for great movies. let's talk and. i already. know what what makes us angry and the absence of food and we get used to good food and then we do we think we need something more what is it really . you know i think we do. growing up and our generation of mine

we were i was used to i would say every two weeks. twenty five times a year i would go to a film i'd see my name more than that i'd see two or three films week but every two weeks some of them to a casablanca i asked every every time we got to come out of a film but there was hollywood or from europe or asia going wow wow right and i'm lucky i think we're all lucky if that happens once or twice a year now where you just come out playing golf fantastic. and so there's good stories and there's satisfying stories certainly being told but that that sense of something so deep and so beautiful and so brilliant is rare very rare now you know my latest impression of modern cinema i watched woody allen's midnight and i'm going to fad of woody allen and myself never being but this what is it about the

palin daughter. and i had the at the festival so i went to watch it and it's not worth half of the backs of the few ships people because back to the future is better i mean it's for kids but it is better what is it happening what do you know that he is a classic what is the story what do we what does that woody allen was in his day one of the great iron it's. certainly great social and. personal. masters of. the difference between appearance and reality and his films are very complex and fascinating and even if i were in the seventies yeah it was you know those days of past and take you lost it yeah he's lost. but he's woody allen and he makes films are very low money less than ten million dollars and they always make money because of the momentum of his reputation and so he's struggling and has for years that i think the last.

satisfying woody allen i saw was bullets over broadway you know that was thirty years ago maybe twenty twenty years ago yeah and so but you know so it's just business just as it is this is sad is this it wasn't for me for me personally only if it's movies are very personally i think you're great it all started with a movie called the water world by kevin costner i watched it in london and i was i was down on the seaside and somebody called me said i've got tickets let's just put in the premier you must make it the most friday the traffic jams which i was so i made it and i watched it and i was i mean it was a shock no don't no story only go but very beautiful everything very beautiful and and very sexy kevin costner well then it went all the way down this is happening all the way down to avatar to turn town no story at all but technology

business and i would i would agree one hundred percent with that ten ten i understand i have a seat at but i think we're probably agreed we should not see it. but avatar yeah in terms of i think a very well told story the problem with avatar is that it is yet another rendition of the fascist myth yeah good times and bad guys mean yes and that society is weak and it has to be rescued by lone heroes we've been telling that story since forever and so and so it's a recycling of cliches as if the if you were ten years old are going to avatar it would be new and very exciting for you and the story telling would be very memorable but we've seen all this stuff yes yes i saw it maybe this is personal it may be that it may be that they're making films but not for us but for but for a much much younger to two or three generations ago. we're now the generation

that's make only one star of the. someone exactly you know not love and we've seen it all you have seen other so is it true that today people prefer in the city to similate to harm it it is in effect. yes but it's never been different and the idea i think it's an overstatement to think that there was a time when hamlet was actually popular culture maybe it elizabeth in england when she wrote it ok but there's always been a certain cultural elite that has enjoyed works of that kind and then there's always it for example in the nineteenth century was the century of the novel and great russian novels great french novels great english language almost german german certainly. even american and even occasionally american might not be big you know melville and so. there was an outpouring of novels i would think there was one hundred years i would think at least a thousand novels a year that's

a hundred thousand novels in that century you can put the best of them on one shelf . and so it's always been like this there's always this little spectrum of greatness and then the great tsunami of mediocrity you are called the most influential theorist of writing skills since our wrists but i don't know that everyone said in the press has anything changed. in the sense that it's what we need we need new ideas we understand story. greater depth or with a greater precision that aristotle did but he was looking at the very first works and he had homer and he had escalus and sophocles repartees to guide him but we now understand the difference between conscious and unconscious desires we understand the mechanisms of turning points and the rush of insight we understand set ups and

pay offs i mean the world has achieved much more supply. rich technical understanding or story but the essence of it has not deepened sincerest but he understood it in its essence as well as you know as well or better than anyone since and so there's more technical understanding but it doesn't mean that we've actually got a depth of understanding. how you think i suspect that people are discussing movies today he says seriously because movies are really cinema is really replacing literature i mean in the culture is it true or more than that i mean there was a time when new society had for great wisdoms there was a time when we used to read philosophy to answer aristotle's great question how should a human being lead their life but today who's reading philosophy that doesn't have an exam to pass we used to we used to study theology. but today in many

places religion has become an even jellicoe joke. we thought that science would solve all of our problems but now as we realize science creates more talk sidi them . and and we had art. but since these other ways of understanding life our interest in disrepute where do people go to get an answer to that great question do they go to the movies god help them so there's nothing bad about it well in the case that the movies are good that they really have to say they are saying something not only showing pictures telling stories that this is what you teach is that what i teach is to write the truth to tell a story and then step back from what you've written presuming that it moves you as a writer and ask yourself is this an honest expression of what it is to be a human being and if the answer is yes then passionately do everything you can to

get this story into the world but if the answer is no if you don't actually believe in the meaning of what you've written than this is why god gave us the delete key. you know it but you know. i mean i can simply say what i like but in a in a world of lies and liars. writers unfortunately keep adding to the to the to the lives and so i've always been on a campaign to above all master the craft so you could express yourself beautifully but believe in the truth of what you do but i get an impression that today in times of big business when produces run run the show when so much technology so millions are pumped into cinema screen writers authors have to fight their way into it into the movies because nobody invades the real you know they they they often use the expression have to break into hollywood as if you were committing

a burglary. but that's nonsense because. in fact if you write with a real superior quality if you write of a work of surpassing quality it will be recognized in hollywood or anywhere they make films in the world and it's not as if people are just reading that say well it's brilliant and then throwing it aside and i just isn't true says robert mckee the well famous screenwriting teacher's spotlighted will be back shortly after we take a break so we'll continue this into the don't go stay way you. white

stream cascading from on the slopes the view is midsomer much. of this beauty brings deaths at a speed of more than two hundred kilometers from. the step to the launch. welcome back to spotlight i'm algor not even just a reminder that my guest on the show today is robert mckee the world famous

screenwriter and screenwriting teacher professor who is lecturing now in moscow and we have an opportunity to interview him. this studio well robert your book your screenwriters bible as they call it is called story substance structure style and the principles of screenwriting in russian and it was published and translated as a story worth a million doing this translation is it really what you teach just didn't seem to make big bucks oh well i was little bit of million was a measure of quality of money money but you know in the poem something i can't promise that nobody can promise a thing like that. do you think that somebody may become well it's not great but a decent screenwriter after. reading and really learning is a book well presuming they have talent ok and there are geniuses and then there are people with great talent and they're people with modest and only manual somebody

presuming they have some talent all right. i certainly think that understanding and mastering the craft maximizes whatever talent you were born with and so you can't you can't. succeed without talent but but talent without a mastery of the craft is paralyzed if you have great talent great imagination but you don't really understand story then what will you do you copy unconsciously you imitate other writers that you know because you're not free to to take the elements of story and play with them and improvise and experiment and do brilliant things with them and so what i try to teach people is that how to understand these elements their relationships and then give you the freedom to do with them as you will because if you don't have that understanding and you haven't mastered these pieces then then you will be

a slave to to every cliche that comes along but the movies like movies like are the times of one extreme when when when sixty really. it's we mainly expensive and really really great show something to see the other extreme is what they sometimes called the the art house movies like the low budget movies where the self-expression of the director is really what matters nothing else matters photography the story what's your attitude to these and there are degrees of but we just said take for example the film that starred george clooney called up in the air. you know there are no it's a very beautiful film and it's a it's very beautifully written and it's not about a director trying to express their vision but instead it's about the writing of a story about a man who comes to realize that his life is meaningless and over the course of the story tries to find meaning and ultimately fails but at least he now understands

that what he thought was a wonderful life is meaningless and so there are there are all kinds of very beautiful films. that are not art movie difference for the sake of difference nor are they slavish really following commercial imperative but there's a great middle ground where people come together to collaborate the writer the director the actors the designers the camera they all come together to produce a work and the work becomes the important thing not their egos not their. vanity but the work and they devote themselves to achieving accidents in the film itself a couple of words about russia well they call you the guru but when talking about gurus you let you like speak about checkoff. did russian literature checa for example he who you say was a genius did they really somehow influence you as though he was mislead really

enormous what why the russians well because. first came stanislaw ski. but he wasn't a writer he was directing so lots of acting he taught acting and he went when you understand what what what what stanislaw ski was teaching primarily was that there's a whole inner life that exists inside of a character underneath what they're saying and doing this up to these subjects so once you understand that you can do shakespeare better than you would ever do it it isn't just reading the law it's beautifully but bringing a character to life from underneath it once you understand the concept and you that the end can execute subtext everything gets much better and check off of course absolutely demands subtext so you think he was an impressionist like an electrician yes yeah he was a minimalist and an impressionist and the stories are very powerful and very

beautifully told but it's all in the subtext and at the actors don't bring the subtext to life then check off seems bay now when they bring it to life it's it's overpowering and the differences and subtext is so stanislaus through checkoff because stanislaw ski learned this because he was directing checkable and he was trying to find a way to make check off work well we'll check up didn't only do the short stories but he also did he plays for him do you think he would make make a good writer fulfill for modern movies even live today oh yes baby yeah absolutely but he would write a film like on the air like company he'd write a film like up in the air where a character is going through their day. and dealing with the sort of problems on the surface and we see through that surface to realise my god this man is leading a meaningless life. why don't contend for the russian movies. some of which i do

like why don't they get the international screen well they do i mean i think. i saw. i saw house of pools three times i saw it in los angeles i saw it elsewhere in the world and so there are many russian films that do reach the world. but the when you say the world i just had this discussion just the moment that it was sort of what you mean is north america europe no we don't mean that because. if if russian filmmakers were really concerned about getting their films to italy to spain to germany's current president to telly and you know they'd and and they would be played in these and these cinemas all over europe or asia or australia but when people talk about getting films into the world they don't mean that they mean having critical success in their own country and they get into north america where the money is and so the question is that he would get films to north

america because i don't think europeans care that much about watching other european films well it's not like with ice hockey everybody everywhere you go there you better than the n.h.l. they didn't care because even sally an r.v. i mean they want to be they want to what i want to be the atlanta braves i learned that's unfortunate they haven't done me believe and i lecture all over the world i've been lecturing a great deal in south america these people love films they go to films constantly why aren't russians trying to get their films into the south america is the interesting thing when the russians including me sometimes what's contemporary movies they say the soviet movies would bet give us back the old soviet and some people like my dad they think there was censorship in communist times they would do wouldn't let the directive do whatever you want and they they watched what he did and the movies are better do you think this without you think peter long distances should sometimes do better things than when they're absolutely free to start fresh

and you hear exactly the same thing about how they would the films of the thirty's and forty's and fifty's were. better because there was censorship it was called the hays office and there was censorship and so writers had to figure out ingenious ways to imply subtext subtext and they had to use allegory. and so under the pressure of censorship they had to be more creative now i don't think tyranny and censorship are good things that all. what should happen is that the artists should impose creative limitations on themselves they should not allow themselves to do it the easy way they should say i'm going to do this story in a way that really forces me to be creative and to solve creative problems ingeniously and there's for example there was never any censorship on ingmar

bergman. and yet he is the greatest screenwriter who ever lived and created almost forty films that are the worst of them the least of them are better than most what we watch today but there was no censorship except by baird he forced himself to demand the highest standards of himself and so if artists become indulgent when there's no censorship whatever that they produce pablum but when something when they set standards when someone sets standards then they have to be creative you talking about stories about the necessity of stories only in life but. sometimes i see that interpretation for cinema off classical literature doesn't always become a success no stories may be great what is that well be for for a lot of reasons not the least of which that the power and the beauty of a novel is the drama does ation of inner conflict. but you cannot photograph

thought. so it's not a mad every novel can become a great movie no. because. crime and punishment is all taking place and work around where it's going to head there has never been. a crime and punishment how could there be because the whole story takes place in his mind and and so it's perfect that way. and to try to adapt at discrete i people have done film adaptations of james joyce's ulysses some people in france are you know right so. great literature cannot be adapted it has to be reinvented and when when somebody like james ibori or with his great writer route. when they take classics they don't adapt they reinvent to keep the spirit of the work and if they can manage to do that if they if it feels like e.m.

forster and yet is a reinvention nobody complains well i'll try to guess i think your favorite movie of all time says alice in wonderland. michael had done that fact it's a great story and they made a great movie a great mom my favorite one my favorite than the. star it's the one difference that i mean i don't know wonderful film makes every kid who writes terrifying and thank you very much thank you so much for being with us and just to remind that my guest today was robert mckee the world famous screenwriting teacher professor and screenwriter and sound and that's it for now from all of us. will be back until then take care thank you you thank

. russia would be so much brighter if you knew about some move from funds to pressure . for instance on t.v. dot com.

you. are the top stories in aussie provoking tension and defense of them says u.s. warships will continue to sail in the arabian gulf despite your brain warning to stay away made while tehran successfully test. firing naval naval exercises claiming it's prepared to head back if the toxic. first talks between israel and palestine in fifteen months end without breakthrough settlement building on occupied lands continue to build restart of substantive peace negotiations palestinians say construction must stop but is there a balance no preconditions. on the winds of change the russian army marches onward to modernization with a credit and keen to return to soviet era by its ambitions plans and visit spending over six hundred billion dollars on upgrading the country's military industry which

has fallen behind the motorcade. and those are the headlines up next elsie's debate cross talk with people about. play. live. live. oh and the stewards. listen to. the plane. hello and welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle the coup that failed but changed everything twenty years ago communist party hardliners attempted to derail me helped out of a child's efforts to reform the soviet union in the coos aftermath the communist party was banned to be followed by the end of the u.s.s.r. could history of played out differently.