In focus: screenwriting

Is the nature of screenwriting changing in the Netflix era? Taking as a measure the opinions of several leading practitioners of the craft, that would appear to be the case. Long-form TV drama offers the freedom and creative opportunity they simply don’t receive on feature films. 

Beau Willimon

Beau Willimon, showrunner and writer of Netflix-backed House Of Cards, describes film “as kind of like a poem — a compact, finite piece of art with a very clear beginning, middle and end that can be absorbed in one sitting”. By contrast, a TV show gives a writer the opportunity to “dig into characters and storylines in an expansive way over years — it has a much more novelistic feel”. 

On House Of Cards, Willimon has the opportunity “to respond to what the actors are doing in front of the camera, to have that influence on the story in a way you can’t in a movie”. A movie is usually locked once shooting begins, whereas on House Of Cards he can make “changes based on what I’m seeing. There’s a jazz-like quality I really like.”

Willimon dismisses the idea that Netflix’s renowned data analytics approach — the highly sophisticated statistical analysis it deploys to identify viewers’ tastes — had any impact on the way he wrote the show. “I don’t get any data analytics from Netflix,” he insists. “I have no idea how many people watch the show. I don’t know the demographics. 

“It is not as if there was some recipe and Netflix ran it through the algorithm machine and said, ‘This will definitely be a success.’” 

Prior to House Of Cards, Willimon had a positive experience on features when he co-scripted the George Clooney-directed political drama The Ides Of March (2011), adapted from Willimon’s own play Farragut North, but admits his contribution was limited. “I wrote a few drafts, sent it to George and [producer] Grant Heslov and they did their work on it — significant work,” he explains. “The majority of the screenplay was their work but that was fine by me; I knew they wanted to tell the same story I did.”

Once the screenplay was finished, Willimon’s job was more or less complete — a far cry from the 80 to 100-hour working weeks on House Of Cards, where Willimon was an integral part of the creative process from the beginning. While he may be the show’s creator, he remains resistant to auteur theory being applied to TV drama. “I never bought into it for film and I certainly don’t buy into it for television,” he says.

Screenwriters often suffer from status anxiety when working on features, and have dark stories about always having to defer to directors and producers. In an era of Netflix, HBO and boxsets, the wheel has turned full circle. Now, writers and showrunners such as David Simon (The Wire), Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) and Willimon are venerated. The extent of their newfound prestige is reflected in the people who watch their shows.

These include President Obama, who is a fan of House Of Cards. “It is almost too surreal to be intimidated,” Willimon says. “It’s hard to make the synaptic leap in your brain that the president of the United States spends any time watching television, much less something you made.

“The biggest danger in people liking your show is that you could feel seduced into repeating the things people like,” he adds. “It would be a wasted opportunity, given this level of attention and resources, not to push the boundaries at every turn.”

Hossein Amini

On the day Screen speaks to Willimon, another leading screenwriter, Hossein Amini (Drive, The Two Faces Of January, The Wings Of The Dove), is preparing to fly to New York to meet his fellow writers on an adaptation of Caleb Carr’s crime novel The Alienist, which is being turned into a TV series by director Cary Fukunaga (True Detective) for Paramount Television. 

This will be Amini’s first experience in a writers’ room and he admits to being daunted at the prospect of working alongside figures of the stature of John Sayles and Eric Roth. “It’s a book I’ve always loved,” Amini says of The Alienist, a spine-tingler set around the hunt for a serial killer in 1890s New York City, featuring fictional characters alongside prominent historical figures such as Theodore Roosevelt. “I think Paramount had tried to make it as a movie for 20-odd years,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘How can they do it justice in two hours?’”

A 10-part series, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter suggests, offers greater opportunity. “That is what I find exciting. For me, TV is a 10-hour movie.” Having digested dense novels such as Henry James’ The Wings Of The Dove and John Le Carré’s Our Kind Of Traitor into big-screen versions, Amini can now focus on an adaptation in which he doesn’t need to condense source material to fit a two-hour running time. “The characters are often what get sacrificed in a two-hour telling of the story,” he remarks.

At the moment, writers and showrunners are dominant figures in TV drama. In the long run, Amini believes this may change. As star directors begin to work more and more in television, their influence will continue to rise. “When you get a David Fincher or a Steven Soderbergh, they have such a strong authorial voice as film-makers that I think the clash with the showrunner could be pretty extreme,” he notes. On feature films, it is widely accepted that writers sit low down the totem pole. Amini acknowledges there have been occasions when he has felt “disrespected” and even been fired from projects. “It’s made me careful about who I collaborate with,” he says. 

One plus side with films is that the financial rewards are usually better. “TV is an enormous amount of work,” says Amini, noting that he is working on The Alienist adaptation “out of love for the book rather than any financial incentive”. He adds that if he didn’t “get into the TV game” now, he might be in danger of “getting left behind”.

Jimmy McGovern

For Jimmy McGovern, there are obvious reasons to work on the small screen. He is a campaigning writer whose work, which includes TV drama features Hillsborough and Sunday, deals with social and political injustice. 

“You’re not going to get anybody into a cinema on a Saturday night to watch things like that,” he states. “What I like to think happens is that they [viewers] turn it on, see a thing they think is hopelessly worthy but something hooks them and they start to watch it. At the end of the hour, they’ve been changed by it. I think you can only do that on TV because TV invades the nation’s living rooms. You don’t get that in a picturehouse, where you have to buy a ticket and go in.”

McGovern qualifies his comments, paying tribute to Ken Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty, who bring the same crusading zeal to film that McGovern brings to his TV dramas. “But Ken is unique in making those kinds of politically committed films,” he adds. “Somehow he gets them made. I don’t think other people would.”

McGovern started writing his recent TV drama Banished, about British convicts in Australian penal colonies, before the series had even been commissioned. On a film, he acknowledges such an approach would be impossible. “The way movies are written, you storyline them first,” he says. “Otherwise, you don’t get the money.”

While McGovern admires Polly Hill, controller of BBC drama commissioning, he warns that UK TV drama has become too safe and there are not enough contentious and abrasive voices. “Producers are working with writers with whom they feel comfortable; I think you should work with writers who are pains in the arse!” McGovern argues. “I see too many writers who are good at working a room, whereas the likes of [maverick Scottish playwright] Peter McDougall, or me when I was a young man, we could empty a room.”

Beau Willimon and Jimmy McGovern will join Nick Hornby, Nancy Meyers and Andrew Bovell as speakers at the Bafta and BFI Screenwriters’ Lecture Series, which runs between September 23 and October 3.

Jeremy Brock

Jeremy Brock (The Last King Of Scotland, Charlotte Gray) is another prominent screenwriter increasingly fascinated by TV drama. “Long-form drama allows me to explore character, the development of character, and particularly the development of narrative over a longer period.” He points out the commercial imperatives around mainstream cinema are so fierce that writers are constantly inhibited by issues not always related to storytelling. These range from tweaking screenplays to keep stars happy, to changing storylines to foster more empathy for the hero.

Brock has two TV projects on the boil: The Opium Kiss and Jerusalem, both being developed for Mammoth Screen, the production company behind BBC hit Poldark. Harvey Weinstein is involved in Jerusalem. “Harvey was articulate and clear with me when it came to the differences between TV and film,” says Brock. “He could see that for me as a writer, there was a huge benefit to being allowed a 10-hour stretch to tell a story. 

“As a writer in television, your voice matters in a way it can’t matter in film,” Brock declares. “The fundamental rule of film is that the director is the first among equals. It’s a director’s medium, unquestionably.” In TV, he says, when the writer walks in the room with an executive producer, “they want to know what you’ve got to say”.

TV drama still doesn’t pay as well as Hollywood features, but if you’re working on an independent film with multi-party financing or one made by a mini-major, the differences, according to Brock, are “pretty minor”.