Interview: Seth Lochhead (part 1)
My sister attended a semester abroad and met a fellow named Kieran Murphy. He is a mad film genius and aspiring filmmaker who decided it would be a good idea to quiz me for his Uni’s newspaper. Here is Part 1 (!) of his questions and my answers:
Interview: Seth Lochhead (Part 1) for Brig Newspaper (University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland) (source: brignewspaper.com)
Growing up in an isolated forest in Finland, trained in combat and survival by her father Erik (Eric Bana), Hanna (the preternaturally talented Saoirse Ronan) is suddenly propelled out into the modern world with one goal: kill the CIA agent Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett).
Written for his film course while he was in his early twenties, Seth Lochhead’s Hanna was eventually picked up by Focus Features and found its way onto Hollywood’s Black List (despite the ominous sounding name this is actually a list of the year’s ten best unmade scripts). After being considered by Danny Boyle and Alfonso Cuaron, it fell into the hands of Joe Wright. A departure for Wright, who was best known as the director of period dramas such as Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, Hanna brought a pumping, arthouse aesthetic into the mainstream cinema and garnered rave reviews worldwide.
I was privileged enough to interview Seth over email. Instead of pursuing the typical E!/MTV line of questioning (what is Cate Blanchett really like as a person, and just how did Eric Bana get that body?), I decided to quiz Seth on screenwriting. We got carried away and the wordcount ballooned. The interview is therefore broken into three parts: Introduction and Story; Character; and the Writing Process.
Brig: What made you want to write films?
Seth: It was never about writing films for me. I loved them. I loved the way they could make you feel (that inexplicable feeling you get when you want to cry but you’re not sad, that religious feeling, the way Moses must have felt after smoking whatever he was smoking on that mountain top). It was always about the writing. I loved the writing because like the best of movies, it gave me that same inexplicable feeling. When I write, really write, when I become unconscious to all the knowledge I’ve collected, I trance out. It has been said that I rock in my chair and speak in tongues (but this can be linked to the headphones I have plugged into my ears and my poor attempts at singing along).
Screenplays were a practical remedy to a problem I was having. How to write and only write without having to be a barista or a blackjack dealer or, fear of all fears, dig a ditch. Of course I did all those things, but it was hard to go to Starbucks, throw on my apron, when I could be trancing out on my favourite drug. Short stories were not a legitimate revenue stream, novels would take too long, but screenplays, screenplays were very interesting. They were a literary form that few considered literary.
Brig: What was it like when Hanna and your other screenplays got recognised?
Seth: It was exhilarating of course. Your wildest dreams and more. But the emotion was fleeting. It was a brief rush that faded faster then it came. Writing to me is a marathon. There is no breaking in. There’s just brief moments of exhilaration that don’t add up to much. I’m currently in one of those exhilarating moments. At this moment in time, a movie I wrote, that I pulled from thin air, something that so many people – the cast and crew – worked on tirelessly, is about to be released upon the world. But I know this feeling will not last long. And that’s probably a good thing. It’s a drug in its own right – the exhilaration of recognition and acceptance.
Brig: I think, for a lot of us struggling, wannabe filmmakers here in Stirling Uni, your story could be very inspirational.
Seth: I’m going to be a bit of an asshole, cock-sucker here and give it to you straight: do not pursue this work for recognition and acceptance. You will not find it even if it’s dumped on you by the barrelfuls. Pursue this work because you love the work. David Lynch twittered this the other day: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” – Confucius”
STORY
Brig: Ancient Greek dramatists treated drama as a craft. Writing for theatre was often a family trade, and story structures were taught and modified generation to generation. Is screenwriting a craft?
Seth: It can be, but I actually think that’s the problem with modern screenwriting. Writing is a craft. Painting is a craft. Carpentry is a craft. They all have tools and devices. It’s how you use them that makes it art. Screenwriting is no different (except perhaps when the script goes into production and transforms from literary prose into an instruction manual – but that transformation occurs not necessarily by the writer, instead it comes from his symbiotic partner in crime, the reader – in the case of movies, the director, the actors, the crew). Meaning, anything can be deemed the work of ‘craft’ depending on the context. Sure a writer can think of himself as a craftsman, but I think that limits the writer to a set of pre-established tools and only those tools (not that those tools aren’t necessary or helpful).
Unlike the carpenter, the writer is not bound to the laws of physics. He is bound only by the laws of his or her imagination. Yes, I just said that.
Brig: So you don’t agree with William Goldman when he asserts, ‘screenplay is structure’?
Seth: William Goldman is a brilliant guy to read. He’s not a prescriptive guru. His scripts prove he knows what he’s doing, but I would counter his statement and say, “screenplay has structure.” Words have structure. Language has structure. Human beings have this wonderful way of structuring something out of nothing, finding meaning in nothingness, staring into the abyss, and maybe, seeing something staring back (there’s nothing there… right?). The best screenplays probably have some sort of logic in their structure that starts with the writer. Does having a recognizable, pre-established structure help you get work on a practical level? Yes. Of course. Am I so noble that I don’t have these structures in my tool box? No, man. I’m most definitely a compromised whore. What I do is I try not to rely on them and if I have to blow out a wall to get at something a pre-establish structure won’t let me get at, I will blow out that fucking wall and risk having the house tumble down and crush me. Figuratively of course. Because, lest we forget, writing does not exist in the realm of reality.
Brig: In writing Hanna were you informed by the hero’s journey and what are your thoughts on the continuing significance of this myth?
Seth: Sure. The hero’s journey to me is the story of a single human life that transcends context. It’s a great structure because we all experience our own hero’s journey. We are the hero’s of our own stories after all. We’re all trained at birth, given a certain set of tools to function in the world, we meet new people along the way, some are good, some are bad, and some are undecided. We collect more tools and grow and learn. We have conflicts, we win and lose battles, and at the end of the day, if we’re lucky, we find a comfy place to return to and rest. Or we don’t.
You don’t need to study this type of structure. You’re born with it and you live it.
Brig: Did you draw on any films or novels or stories for inspiration?
Seth: Not directly. Obviously, I structured it based on my travels from Turkey (that became Morocco in the film) to Denmark (that became Sweden in the script, then Finland in the film). Those experiences were a huge influence. But those influences were secondary, they came in later. It started with an image of child running through trees. Disappearing in and out of trees. I wanted to figure out how she got there. I wanted to know what she was like. Did any films or novels or stories inspire me? Yes. Everyone I had consumed up until the time I put pen to paper. Some, like Grimm’s Fairytales and Luc Besson and Matt Damon and B.F Skinner and even a whole lot of Frankenstein, had more influence than others.
Brig: The Russian formalists distinguish story from plot (story being everything that we know happens; plot being everything we see happening); is that tension something you factor into your work? In other words, how do you decide what is a scene and what can be consigned to exposition?
Seth: Russian formalists! Man, you’re pulling out all the stops. I love it. With HANNA, since it was my first script, and I sold the first draft, it really was not a matter of consciously consigning one to the other. Looking back, I would say I was obviously not interested in exposition (I’m still not really). I find it more satisfying as a consumer of art to infer meaning and backstory as opposed to having it explained to me. There’s a balance, of course. But when I was writing HANNA my goal was to make the reader fill in the gaps with his or her own experience, their own emotion. A Father may read it as symbol for having your kids grow up and leave you. A kid might read it and fully empathize with Hanna and see the horrors of the real world and the possibilities that everything you know, the safety and comfort of your home and your parents, might one day be gone forever. Not having kids I fully identify with Hanna’s journey. By leaving gaps I opened the story up to multiple interpretations as opposed to just serving my own needs as a writer and subsequently as a reader.
Brig: Do you find the idea of “genre” enabling or limiting and were you thinking about it when you wrote Hanna, a film that combines many genres (off the top of my head: action; espionage; coming of age; and fairytale)?
Seth: Genres are tools like structure. Actually, without getting too philosophical (it’s too late isn’t it?), genre and structure are much more important to certain audience members (critics for example) then they are to the writer. They are elements that can be construed after the fact. Did I set out to write an action-espionage-coming-of-age fairytale? No. I had no preconceived notions for what HANNA would become (it’s an unawareness I desire to re-obtain). As Hanna developed as a character, as I began to examine the foundations of her personality and how the uniqueness of her upbringing would affect how she would interpret the world, I realized Hanna, like all human beings, would make the unfamiliar familiar by using her experiences and influences to fill in the gaps. The world to Hanna is a giant fairy tale with witches and ghoulish tricksters and innocents in need of protection. The balance was to show how Hanna saw the world without rendering it in caricature. Erik, to me (originally), was a Nordic woodsman, a mythic Viking, but he was also very much a real human being. He is probably the most real human being Hanna will ever know (within her POV). So when I’m rendering them, I’m kind of walking this line of caricature, of heightened reality, with real, recognizably human emotion. Sometimes I win. Sometimes I lose. Points for effort?
Brig: And finally what do you think about story in general? Do you agree that there are a limited number of story forms that we keep retelling (8 or 12 or whatever the count is now), or do you think we can construct more? And what exactly is a story? Like many things, the more I consider it the stranger it becomes.
Seth: I agree with you. Story is strange. I sometimes joke about how much I hate categories – don’t label me! – and you probably can sense a theme running through my answers, perhaps you might call it contrarian or I might call it pretentious. My problem, I think, lies in the limits set out by these “rules” (genre, structures, what have you). How they can constrict your imagination as opposed to freeing it. That said, I’m not sure any of us, including me, has the time or energy to truly bust down the walls and really see where the limits of storytelling lie. The writer has to remember that he is nothing without his reader. So if his reader isn’t open to exploring a new experience, a new type of story, the 13th floor, well, that writer is screwed. That’s not to say he or she shouldn’t try. Are we limited to those 8 to 12 stories? No, but we are limited by our shared experiences. New story forms will emerge as our shared experiences change.
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