Anyone who likes movies knows that, in a sense, the screenwriter is the soul of a movie, and the director is just a person who puts this soul on a body and then puts it in front of the audience.
The director is the way of realization, and the screenwriter is the center of the theory.
However, in the modern film system, the role of screenwriters has been greatly reduced.
The director has the power of secondary creation, and in many cases, the screenwriter has become a story machine.
But the screenwriter is not a machine after all, but a human being.
A person will experience emotions, anger, sorrow, and fear, and as a creator, there will also be inspirational breakdowns.
What is left after the screenwriter loses his inspiration?
Perhaps the movie recommended for everyone today can give us some kind of answer.
“Adaptation” is about the story between two creators. Susan, a female reporter, and Charlie(Nicolas Cage), a male screenwriter, became acquainted with a novel.
The reason is that after Charlie’s boss bought the novel written by Susan, he wanted to adapt it into a movie, and the burden of writing the script naturally fell on Charlie.
But what is helpless is that Charlie at this moment has already exhausted his inspiration.
How to turn the essence of this novel into film language is the source of Charlie’s dilemma.
So he made a bold plan to meet Susan in life.
At this point, Charlie brought in his twin brother Donald, and the two planned to have close contact with Susan to get inspiration for creation.
Charlie couldn’t think about it, Donald also executed it perfectly, but unfortunately, the two people’s plan fell into a kind of emptiness at a critical time.
Charlie finally had to face Susan’s censure.
At this time, for the screenwriter, for the creator of the novel, what kind of sparks the dialogue between them will produce, you may be surprised after reading it.
The focus of the film “Adaptation” is indeed to bring us to understand the daily life of a group that may not be exposed to in daily life.
Although there is an exaggeration in it, for a professional screenwriter, Charlie’s sadness may just hit their pain point.
Compared with writers, screenwriters output not only stories, but also scenes.
In such a scene, what the screenwriter has in his hands, or needs to be considered, is not just the unrealistic atmosphere, but the real space and objects.
Under these conditions, screenwriters need to consider more.
As a result, the dilemma Charlie is facing hits the arms of many professional screenwriters. When they are not inspired, they are indeed very painful.
And creating a story yourself is different from writing a story yourself.
For Charlie, it is not easy to adapt other people’s stories and to appreciate the essence of other people’s stories.
Charlie is not Susan, and Charlie naturally can’t realize what Susan feels when facing the prototype of the characters in his novel.
Thus, Charlie started his ridiculous plan.
Contacting Susan in life means that it is possible to face the prototype of this novel directly, which is a shortcut for the creator.
However, this creative shortcut has its own limitations. Charlie can contact Susan in life to get inspiration for secondary creation.
However, he couldn’t say that his path of adaptation was fixed on Susan alone.
After all, Charlie has many other types of scripts.
Susan’s novel experience comes from her own life, Charlie can get through contact and observation, but what about other types?
If it is a mystery novel, if it is a science fiction movie, Charlie still has to fall into a bottleneck.
Because of this, what Charlie couldn’t do, after being replaced by his brother Donald, ended up unexpectedly so unexpected.
The story adapted by Donald has a refreshing feeling in front of Charlie’s boss.
However, what this feeling ultimately brings to Charlie’s boss is that the story has an end, and both the development and ending of the story feel new.
However, for Charlie, he must know that although his younger brother upholds the interest in the screenwriting industry to write scripts, this is only the result of interest.
After truly making Donald a person like him, will this kind of creative inspiration continue to flow?
Thus was born the third topic, Charlie’s present is Donald’s future.
Of course, the premise is that Donald also entered the screenwriting industry because of his interest.
Once the interest is obliterated, there are only technical things left. At this time, there is a screenwriting training class.
Screenwriting training courses for a professional screenwriter can continuously enrich their creative skills and get some enlightenment from it.
Communication is always the source of one’s creation, and this communication often means collision with different ideas or life.
What the screenwriter training class taught Charlie was a kind of collision technique or technique.
After Charlie borrows this technique or technique, he will have a new perspective on the existing story. This is the meaning of the screenwriting training class.
Throughout the story, when we watch “Adaptation”, we will focus more on Charlie’s experience, which is a story level.
For a screenwriter, Charlie’s experience is bitter, and to a certain extent it also confirms that the line of screenwriting is not a once-and-for-all job.
As an industry that relies on inspiration to create, once the inspiration is lost, the ending is very sad.
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