Issue 130 – Draft and Polish
Christopher Hampton
Christopher Hampton, Academy Award®-winning screenwriter, playwright and director gave a screenwriting masterclass at the Galway Film Fleadh this year. At the event, which was sponsored by Northern Irish Screen, Martin Daniel, Professor of Screenwriting at the University of Southern California and international script expert, talked to Hampton about his approach to writing screenplays.
MARTIN DANIEL: Has there been a progression in the way you approach a plot, how you outline your stories – has that changed over the years?
CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON: There is a great difference between one script and another, in how long a script will take you to write. But in general, I do try to prepare a script very carefully so that by the time I come to start writing it I may have spent three, six or nine months just figuring out the best way to do it. Now that doesn’t mean planning little details because that tends to kill the spontaneity. But planning the bones of it, what happens, what will happen next, what is going to happen at the end and how are you going to prepare for the end – somewhere in the middle or at the beginning?
Getting all that scaffolding up is really important to me. And then when I come to write, I write as fast as I possibly can. And I know everybody has their own methods but my superstition or theory is that the amount of energy you pour into a script is somehow visible out the other end. And that if you write a script in a white-hot intensity this will have a beneficial effect on the energy in the finished product.
This may be nonsense, but up until recently (I have got a bit more sedate now), I used to get about half way through a script and feel that I knew where I was going and where it was going and how long it was going to take to finish it. Then I would go abroad and sit in a hotel room until I finished it, which was usually a week or ten days. I would just do nothing but write all day and as much of the night I could bear, writing the thing until I got to the end of the first draft. And then there is all the time in the world to mess about with it. And somehow that method of writing a script became a ritual really, I suppose. And that’s the way I have always tried to do it.
So the preparation, the outlining stage – what form does that take?
I have a big notebook and I list all the events, a précis of the plot on one page and on the other page I put striking images and moments or incidents or themes or things that catch my attention as I go along. So that you have the plot of the narrative. And you have the fireworks that you’ve discerned within the source material. So that’s the first stage and at the end of that you have twenty or thirty pages of text. Then I do a very rough outline of what scenes will follow in what order.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 130.
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[...] Draft and Polish Christopher Hampton, Academy Award®-winning screenwriter, playwright and director gave a screenwriting masterclass at the Galway Film Fleadh this year. At the event, which was sponsored by Northern Irish Screen, Martin Daniel, Professor of Screenwriting at the University of Southern California and international script expert, talked to Hampton about his approach to writing screenplays. Read more here [...]