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TEACHING THE CRAFT OF SCREENWRITING IN INDIA

Conference Paper · September 2006

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This paper was presented at the First All-India Screenwriters’ Conference, Film & TV Institute of India -Pune,
in 2006

TEACHING THE CRAFT OF SCREENWRITING IN INDIA

Indranil Chakravarty
While there is a plethora of guidebooks on screenplay-writing in the tradition of Hollywood
cinema, no such ‘textbook’ exists for the Indian cinema despite the fact that more films are made
in this country than anywhere else in the world. While it is not difficult to surmise the reasons for
such an anomaly, it may raise serious methodological issues related to the teaching of
screenwriting in the Indian tradition. While Hollywood cinema may look highly structured and
codified in the same vein as the western symphony, the Indian screenplay is somewhat akin to the
Indian raga with its basic guiding principles but resolutely denying, or lacking, precise codification
as understood in the western sense. So, how can one set a criteria of assessment of the
effectiveness of a certain narrative structure? Does it imply an impossibility of conceptualising the
Indian cinema? Are we condemned to judge ourselves based on borrowed parameters? Is it,
therefore, a futile effort to develop a methodology for teaching the craft to Indian students of
screenplay?

In other words, do we need to think of a specifically ‘Indian’ way of teaching screenplay-writing?

Yes. We need our own way of teaching simply because our situation in the entire world, in relation
to film culture, is unique. It is needless to elaborate here in how many ways Indian cinema is
unique in the whole world. Unfortunately, however, the only way for us to engage ourselves in a
discussion about ways of teaching screenplay-writing is to bounce off our ideas against the Syd
Field-ian method simply because that is the only available method that has been elaborated and
practiced in America and other parts of the world.

If there are no books on screenwriting ‘Indian style’, neither are there books on how to write it in
the ‘European’ style or ‘Latin American’ style though they all have clearly different cinematic
traditions of their own. Does this imply that the Hollywoodian/ Aristotelian way of telling stories
applies to all of them and is actually the only ‘right’ way of doing it?

Some of the key issues involved in teaching a course are as follows:

Can writing be taught? What can be taught and cannot be taught?

What is the role of intuition in writing and why do we need to learn certain rules? Do great writers
know their rules innately? Will awareness of rules make someone a better writer?
Syd Field himself was a disastrous scriptwriter. What does this mean? Is an awareness of rules
restrictive? What purpose do they fulfill?
Are there guiding rules for writing specifically in the Indian context? Do the rules of the game vary
according to the specific Indian culture one belongs to (commercial/art; Tamil, Bengali,
Malayalam)? Is it possible to talk of common principles across cultures within India?

Certainly, Indian cinema is not a monolith in terms of its structure, content or language. While the
popular Hindi cinema and the different regional variations are characterised by idiosyncratic forms
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that emerge out of our own cultural experience, there are many strands within Indian cinema,
including some of the greatest films made in the country, that are structurally very close to the
Hollywoodian/Aristotelian model. Without getting into essentialist arguements about a
supposedly unique and continuous dramatic tradition, it may be more instructive to see Indian
cinema as a hybrid form born out of several influences and exigencies and examine the genealogy
of specific concepts (such as ‘melodrama’, ‘realism’, ‘mythology’) in the context of Indian cinema
and explore its different manifestations in the works of filmmakers with diverse convictions and
orientations.

Any person teaching screenplay-writing in India is likely to have some problems with the Syd
Fieldian approach. Firstly, he applies Aristotelian principles to Hollywood films in a totalising
way. However, his equating of Aristotle and Hollywood as if they were synonymous raises further
questions. This is what a Syd Field follower has to say to students of screenplay:

<<Aristotle was the first to put the storyteller’s trade tricks down on paper. The beginning–
middle-end concept is in Plato’s Republic but the elaboration of this insight you will find in
Aristotle’s Poetics. For more demystification, buy that slim volume, read it twice, then pick it up
every three or four years and read it during your screenwriting career. Those are the few rules we
have and need.>>

What Mr Field/Mackee are obscuring here is that there may be several other ways of applying
Aristotle to cinema. Secondly, in many of his books, the index of films that are referred, have no
references at all, to non-American films. Rarely, if ever, are there references to the American
independent cinema. Its claims to universality are therefore, highly suspect. Thirdly, they belong to
a culture where myth is significantly absent in everyday living and when Francis Ford Copolla uses
myth in Apocalypse Now, he has to make a very conscious intellectual effort to reach out to Graeco-
Roman myth, to the extent that he places the volumes of Jesse Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and
Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough on the table of Marlon Brando in the film, an army officer who
has turned to mysticism and has gone ‘mad’. It is needless to mention that India, myth is a living
tradition and it underlies much of our contemporary storytelling, in cinema and elsewhere. Our
education thus has to find ways of incorporating that experience and explore the depths of our
minds where consciousness occasionally reaches down. Perhaps, for us, we have to make no
special effort to reach out to myths – not only terms of content/ story material but also in terms
of narrative structures.

Is there any specifically ‘Indian’ way of telling stories? Does it help an Indian screenwriter to
know of a distinctive aesthetic tradition from Natyashastra, etc and the larger world of folk
narratives and Indian literature. Certainly, a sense of contact with tradition is key to our sense of
identity. It does not mean that the background material (Natyashastra) may have any direct
relationship with current cinematic narratives. If the indigeneous narrative traditions are not part
of the scriptwriter’s lived experience, it would lose emotional value. In that case, hankering after an
elusive Indian-ness just because it is Indian, is one of the great dangers of such an education.

However, it is important for students to know the historical process through which Indian cinema,
particularly the popular cinema, took on its peculiar, idiosyncratic form. This will make us aware
how important it is for us to have an awareness of the role of Hollywoodian principles within the
framework of our ‘hybrid’ language. All artists – writers, filmmakers, dancers – want and need a
tradition that they can belong it even if it means at the end to reject it.
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How important is ‘organicity’ to us as an organising principle? When we look at our most

acclaimed films (as in Ray’s body of work), they are remarkably ‘organic’. Nothing is wasted,
nothing is in excess, even the smallest prop is made dynamically central to the plot. Was Ray closer
to the Hollywoodian style than others? In fact, he was deeply westernised which he himself
acknowledged but his western sensibilities (love for minimalism, organicity and his elaborate
planning before venturing out to shoot) were simultaneously, deeply imbued with an
Indian/Bengali sensibility, not only in terms of subject matter and locations but also
understanding of characters, their motivations, their actions and their transformation within the
framework of the story. In other words, Ray’s cinema problematises our unwillingness to accept the
Hollywoodian screenplay as universal.

Though organicity is favoured in Ghatak’s major works, his films, on the other hand, refuse the
principle of minimalism and aggressively assert the creative power of ‘excess’ as an aesthetic
principle. On this count it is easy to call Ghatak more ‘Indian’ than Ray (in a very narrow sense of
the word) but is our culture necessarily a culture of ‘excess’ so much so that we would want it to
become a rallying point for our cinematic identity? Ekta Kapoor would love to assert that.

The assertion of ‘excess’ becomes relevant when we get into questions about the claim to realism
and the use of melodrama. Allied to it is the important distinction between emotion and
sentiment. Look at a film like Kurosawa’s ‘Dodeskaden’ and one encounters a film where emotion
borders on sentimentalism as it were the other side of the same coin. How exactly does Kurosawa
maintain that balance on the side of emotion without allowing it to slide to sentimentality. These
are conceptual discussions in class that may clear a student’s mind of certain key issues that will
haunt them all their lives, particularly in the Indian scenario.

A course in screenwriting needs to have a basic emphasis on watching some of the well-crafted
films and analysing them strictly from the point of view of screenplay structure. The diversity of
approaches to storytelling will thus become clear through demonstration. That is to say, through
analysis, one will realise the different narrative structures without raising issues to a theoretical
level. Doing film analysis from the point of view of Film Studies and doing it for a film
practitioner are vastly different approaches. Obviously, one has to stick to the latter approach.

A practitioner learns things only by doing it. Thus the approach has to be: write, rewrite and edit.
Work on more and more drafts. If Hollywood is to be emulated, it should be on this count. An
average film there goes for 12 drafts. There is no doubt that a screenplay always gets better with
each draft. ‘The imagination is a muscle just like any other; to perform better, you have flex it
more often’, says the writer Garcia Marquez.

Watching more and more films critically and closely, is certainly one of the important components
of a screenwriting programme. ‘Classical’ Hollywoodian cinema needs to be contrasted with other
models of storytelling. A film structured on episodic lines (such a La Dolce Vita) actually subvert
traditional cinema because organicity is not the highest virtue at all. In Apocalypse Now, another film
having an episodic structure, the episodes can be moved around or even deleted without
hampering the storyline. In La Dolce Vita, however, it is not possible to reshuffle the episodes
without making the story unintelligible. There is no better occasion to reflect on one’s own
cinematic Self than through a dialogue with the cinematic-Other.
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The aspiring writer also needs to have a certain understanding of the creative process itself. There
are rules in our personal lives to which experience largely conforms. One needs a lot of solitude
around oneself to figure out those rules within oneself.

In scriptwriting, one of the key skills is to discern the actual potential of an idea, not only in terms
of its dramatic possibilities but also in terms of its market-friendliness. In that sense, it’s a bit like
an oil-exploration exercise. And the teacher’s job is to provide stimuli to encourage students to
read. But, as Albert Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’.

A screenplay has no independent existence unless it is made. In that sense, an awareness of the
market is particularly important in film institutes where students are actually insulated from such
forces during their student years. In practice, we find that it actually takes a lot to instill the skill of
writing an effective logline, a captivating synopsis and developing the art of pitching a story and
developing a certain rigorous discipline in writing, moving from a step outline to the final draft. In
fact, there is hardly anything called a final draft. (A screenplay is never complete; there is a point
where the writer just gives up.) A screenplay class has to simulate certain market situations. As
Vishal Bharadwaj movingly said to a group of film students recently, ‘Learn the film trade, not the
tricks of the trade.’

In other words, if the American method of training in screenplaywriting is applied with a certain
critical distance, a certain awareness of Indian cinema’s uniqueness, the tools of Syd Field and
Robert Mckee and others can be hugely beneficial. Among the obvious things, the classical Three
Art structure will have to be deployed with the awareness that we have an interval in the middle
and we need to leave enough hook for audiences to come back after their samosas or popcorns.
One of our unique issues is how to get to an item number or cut to Switzerland logically. Or
rather, organically.

There is a strong feeling among cineastes that the language of cinema has been changing
significantly over the past few years. However, there is a mismatch/disconnect between how
students are being trained and the reality of the current professional scenario. This is not a
problem specific to India but all around the world.

Our film institutions have played a key role in creating auteurist notions of cinema as
hierarchically superior to other kinds of cinema. The net effect of this approach has been decidedly
negative because it has created a caste system not only within the filmmaking community / film
industry but also in the society at large. It implied that one form of cinema was more valid than
others. Issues of assessment were confused with questions of cultural validity. An important part
of our popular culture was thus sidelined or erased from our critical discourse about cinema. In
other words, when students started watching European art cinema, they started looking at popular
cinema with contempt and thus stayed away from it. They could neither be integrated within the
industry nor could they carve out a space for the alternative cinema. A contemporary film
programme has to rectify that error by being more inclusive, by giving as much importance to
popular, industrial cinema as to a more sensitive, personal cinema. In this regard, our central
reference point should be Shakespeare who incorporated every commercial element possible
(ghosts, royalty, murder, revenge, intrigue, blood on the stage, duels, etc) within his personal
vision. A tall task, certainly.

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