Where is your script’s engine? The force to drive your story forward without losing sight of your core idea. Our recent conversation with screenwriter Tristram Baumber explores the importance of knowing your engine, your idea’s nucleus, to successfully structure your script for the screen.
Tristram is an AACTA nominated writer for the political satire PM’s Daughter. His extensive TV credits include many award-winning shows like Mother and Son, and his horror feature Site Unseen is hitting cinemas later this year. With experience as a screenwriter, producer and director, Tristram has shared his knowledge in workshops and courses across Australia. He is bringing his experience to Writers Victoria with a three-part course to shape your screen ideas into an industry pitch.
Thanks! The pre-production process on Site Unseen was quite compressed and there was a lot of work to spread between a very small team – but that’s the nature of micro-budget filmmaking. We spent a lot of time going through the script and breaking it down. Pre-production is the last chance you get to work on the script and make sure it’s all doing what it’s supposed to do. My co-director Brady and I analysed the script from every angle. We talked about things we wanted to improve, and I went away to make those changes. We looked at the visuals and colour themes we wanted for each scene. We looked at the character motivations across every moment of the script. And we had meetings with the actors to talk about the script and their characters to answer any questions they had and to help us understand how they were approaching the roles. Right before we shot, we had two or three days of invaluable rehearsals. That’s when you get to know the script. If we didn’t have a good script by then, we would have been in trouble.
It can be difficult to trust yourself and your ideas in the developing stages. What does trust and discipline look like in your process to turn ideas into a script?
The biggest thing for me is having the determination to get to the end of writing the script. Often everything in your body is telling you to go and do something else instead of writing. Go and do the gardening, or the vacuuming, or go work on a new, exciting idea that doesn’t have all the real-life difficulties and complications of the script you’re writing. The single biggest skill I’ve developed is to push past all those feelings and keep writing. If you get to the end of a script, then you have something to work with. If you never finish it, you’ve got nothing to go on. Part of it is about turning off that internal editor as much as you can. Forget about whether it’s good, just get it written. What helps me get started is thinking about it in terms of the number of words or pages I have towrite that day. I’ll say “I have to write a thousand words today. If I write fast and bad, I’ll get there sooner and then I can stop.” And it turns out that when you read it back later, it’s not actually bad at all. It feels weird you have to kind of trick yourself into writing, but that’s the reality of it. And it feels very satisfying when you’re done!
It feels weird you have to kind of trick yourself into writing, but that’s the reality of it.
You co-run the production company Bad Rev Films. What advice would you give to those pitching ideas to you?
The number one thing would be to know your premise. Know that thing sitting at the core of your idea that will act as an engine to drive it all the way to its destination. Who’s your main character? What do they want? What are the stakes if they don’t get that thing? And what stands in their way? If you’re pitching us something and we can hear that all those elements are present, and they feel like they’ve been put together in a way that’s fresh and exciting, then we know you’ve got something. Beyond that, there are those annoying but practical commercial concerns, like knowing the current market and designing your idea so it’s appealing. But, if you don’t have that powerful engine at the centre of your idea, it’s going to be almost impossible to get excited about it.
In the shows you have written, like The PM’s Daughter and Mother and Son, what worked in the drafts that helped carry them to the screen?
There are a lot of elements in play when a show makes it past all the gatekeepers and gets made. I wasn’t directly involved in the initial pitch for Mother and Son, but I know that having the brand of that classic show, coupled with Denise Scott and Matt Okine in the titular roles, would have made it almost a no-brainer for the ABC. From there it was knowing what the team wanted the show to be, what we wanted to say about the world as it is now and how adults relate to their parents in the 2020s. When it comes to The PM’s Daughter, my co-creator, Matt Allred, and I happened to hit on a very rich premise. And the key thing was that it wasn’t something the ABC had done before. Going into the political system through the eyes of the Prime Minister’s daughter was a good way to do a show that had educational value, while also being slightly glamorous. The truth is if I knew the formula for getting a show made, I’d be doing it every day of the week. There’s a certain amount of luck in going to the right network with the right idea at the right time. The main thing is to make sure you have that strong premise, with that powerful engine – and then you cross your fingers and hope!
Without spoiling your course, give us one word of advice for writers seeking to develop an award-winning screenplay?
Structure. There you go, that’s one word. If you twisted my arm and I had to expand it to a few more words, I’d say: Structure your characters’ journeys so you know what they want at every moment, how that want drives them, and why. If you understand structure, so many other problems you may have in scriptwriting will fall away.
Register for Tristram’s upcoming online course:
The Story Lab: Developing and Selling Your Screen Idea