Cinema: Filmed Screenplay or Film?

Is there a difference?

From “In the Mood for Love” (2000) | Writer-Director-Producer Wong Kar-wai. Cinematography Christopher Doyle, Ping Bin Lee.

Awhile back, I attended a memorial for a dear colleague, a writer and educator with a decades long record of achievement in film and TV. No one could have been more generous or encouraging to their students or collaborative with other teachers than this exemplary educator.

One of this sadly lost man’s friends, apparently among his closest, in giving his eulogy, came out with something to the effect that when the writer has written the screenplay and the director goes on to f… it up…

If the roar of applause from the assembled scribes immediately drowned out any possibility for reflection on what had just been said, the import was clear enough without it — film is all about screenplay. The job of the director is to ensure that the screenplay plays out on the screen. Faithfully. Obediently. Rigidly…

In this blunt view, the director is little more than a copyist. Dutiful, loyal, unquestioning as they point the camera at whatever the writer describes. They’re not even some kind of translator, taking language on the page and translating it into the language of the screen, since in the assumed process of the eulogist that evening, the language of the screen, were it ever so much as acknowledged, can play no part.

The screen, we were to believe, is merely a subservient vehicle for the story’s telling, which to all intents and purposes has already been done on the page.

The art of cinema for the director, if we are to believe this, is thus comprised of two elements: casting and the directing of the actors. Otherwise, there are only the processes of production, logistical, professional, while production design, cinematography, costume design, editing, sound design, and score/source music serve only as slaves to the screenplay.

Extremist stuff from just one person of course, although judging from the reaction that evening, it appears not only widely accepted among many screenwriters but passionately endorsed.

Before going further, I want to make it clear that I see screenwriting as an intensely challenging form of writing—maybe the most difficult of any since it involves writing in one medium for another. Screenwriters, meanwhile, are casually and habitually disrespected. And some directors, it has to be said, do indeed damage the writer’s work…

Perhaps they fail to grasp the complex connective tissue the writer has built into their script, proclaiming they are “making the film their own.” (A film surely should be made the film’s own, not the director’s, nor the writer’s.)

They might be utilizing shots and angles striking in themselves but unrelated to the narrative — a purely pictorial approach lacking dramaturgical authenticity. A director might employ a tone contrary to the writer’s intended attitude to their material, leading to confusing results. A director might, to the detriment of the movie, ignore the sense of rhythm and energy the best screenwriters can convey on the page. A director might not have even read a screenplay with sufficient diligence and so fall short in their efforts.

Yes, there is plenty that can go wrong on the director’s side.

Next consideration though — say two directors could each direct the same screenplay and with the same cast, team, sets and locations, would this result in two identical movies? Of course not. Performance, shot selection, angle, framing, sound, editing, rhythm and its manifestation, tonal modulation, articulation of narrative POV — there’s a wealth of factors that depend on a director’s creative decisions. Screenplay alone cannot determine all of these aspects.

There again, could a director ever make a good movie from a mediocre screenplay? Perhaps not, but could they make a good movie with noscreenplay? Yes, they could and they have.

Wang Kar Wei did this with In the Mood for Love, a classic of the new millennium. Mike Leigh’s movies used to involve weeks of improvisation that resulted in his story and characters coming to fruition. Co-Writer-Director of the animated Flow Gints Zilbalodis has commented on social media that once it had been completed, he never again looked at the film’s screenplay when he went on to make his movie.

Surely, a screenplay is a blueprint rather than a hard and fast template? Even Writer-Directors consistently discover this as the concept and articulation of the film they have set down in screenplay form evolves through the practical and developmental aspects of its making, through the collaboration of the creative team, and as the film itself speaks to its filmmaker with increasing clarity of what it needs and what it is.

We might say that the director should be faithful not to the script on a surface level but to its depth and spirit, those products of the writer’s creative subconscious, not to mention the interweaving of its narrative and thematic threads.

The director’s voice is then not a betrayal of the writer’s screenplay but the vehicle for the realization that transforms it into cinematic life.

The seed is not the bloom. The bloom is the bloom.

Peter Markham

February 2025