[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom=”no” pb_border_bottom=”no” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”] Birdman: Writing A Screenplay Is Like Writing a Poem By Jacob Krueger [/spb_text_block] [divider type=”thin” text=”Go to top” full_width=”no” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”] [blank_spacer height=”30px” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”] [spb_text_block title=” TRANSCRIPT” pb_margin_bottom=”no” pb_border_bottom=”no” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”] There is a saying in poetry that form should equal function. Meaning that the form your poem takes should reflect the effect that that poem is intended to create in the audience. And writing a screenplay is a lot like writing a poem. In writing a screenplay, every line matters in the same way that every line matters when you are writing a poem. Every single word can not only affect the experience of reading or watching a movie, but every single word can also affect your budget when it comes time to shoot your movie. So, as screenwriters we need to be as exacting with our words as a poet. Screenwriting is also like poetry in that we are working within a form – an existing form. And we are finding our creativity inside of a form, or inside of a structure, just like a poet finds the form inside of a sonnet or a villanelle. Screenwriting is like poetry because screenwriting is a field in which form equals function. It’s a field in which the ways that we follow the rules or the ways that we break the rules need to grow organically out of the thing that the screenplay is intending to accomplish, the feeling it is intending to create, the story it is intending to tell. This is the big difference between the approach of Birdman and that of other movies that attempted to break the rules with less success. For example, the last movie that tried to tell a whole story in one continuous shot was a film called Russian Ark. And the result, though technically extraordinary, was about as exciting as watching paint dry. The screenwriter of that script began with a gimmick and then figured out a story that they could tell within that gimmick, just like many aspiring screenwriters begin with a gimmick or a formulaic structure – something that they read in a book or stole from another movie – and then try to force the story that they are telling into that form. And what I’d like to suggest to you is that whether you are following the rules or breaking them (later I’ll discuss how Birdman does a little bit of both), the places that you follow and the places that you break from the rules should, in fact, grow organically out of the function of your storytelling or out of the intention of your storytelling. In other words, instead of allowing the rules to define you or the rules to define your story, you can allow your story to define the rules it needs to tell itself. Just like a poet, you can allow your story to reveal itself to you. And in the process of revealing itself to you, you can allow your story to teach you the rules you’re going to need in order to bring that story to the page and to the screen in the most powerful way possible. Birdman did not begin with some fancy pants director saying, “let’s figure out a cool gimmick that nobody has ever done before.” Birdman began with an observation by writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu. His observation was that life doesn’t happen in cuts. Life doesn’t feel like cuts. Instead, he wanted to make a movie that felt more like life. He wanted to make a movie that felt more like one thing flowing into the next, flowing into the next, flowing into the next…. He wanted to make a movie that felt cyclical,