Kevin Willmott grew up in the small town of Junction City, Kansas, and came of age in the movie theater during the golden age of 1970s films. In his own film career as a writer and director (greatly influenced by fellow Kansan, Gordon Parks), he’s made many independent films including the slavery satire C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America and The Only Good Indian, and he’s collaborated with Spike Lee on adapting Chi-Raq and BlacKkKlansman (for which they both won an Oscar). His latest project was Da 5 Bloods, also directed by Spike Lee, starring Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther), and due for release this year.
Last weekend, Willmott was in town to celebrate Black History Month at CSU Monterey Bay, and his visit concluded with a masterclass in screenwriting on Monday, Feb. 17, at the university’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. (Willmott is also a professor of film at the University of Kansas.) It was attended by many students from CSUMB’s Cinematic Arts and Technology Department, as well as community members who might be pursuing cinematic aspirations. Below are some of Willmott’s advice on successful screenwriting.
“It all starts with the screenplay. It’s hard to make a good film without it. [The screenplay] is the blueprint.”
“How do you become a director or a screenwriter? You gotta do it. You gotta write all the time.”
“You’ve got to know that what you’re doing is worthy. You’ve got to be willing to listen to others, to take criticism.”
“If you don’t have a good script, no one’s going to want to work with you. If you have a great script, people will work for you for free. Take as much time as you can to get the script ready to go. It’s hard to know if it’s ready. That comes with skill, from doing it. Have a community of writers around you to take a look at [your] script.”
“William Goldman said ‘No one in Hollywood knows anything.’ I showed my film to an agent. He said, ‘Kevin, what do you want me to do with this?’ The next day it got accepted to Sundance. ‘Kevin, you’re a genius.’”
“Let’s get into the nuts and bolts.”
“A screenplay has a three-act structure. The first act is set up, the first 30 pages or so, everything we need to know. Page 10 is the inciting incident. A page of screenplay is a minute of movie. Buy Final Draft [scriptwriting software], it’s industry standard. $100. The inciting incident is the hook. It holds you. James Bond movies start with a big fight, a car chase. What are you going to learn about James Bond in the first 10 minutes? He’s a handsome guy, a slick dude, women love him. He’s a badass. He’s got resources, gadgets. In the first 10 minutes you‘ll know James Bond through the action of the movie.”
“What’s the best way to get character across? Through action and conflict.”
“You have to play fair with the audience. Or they’ll walk out.”
“The first act is setting up the rules of the world. You’ve got to know your world. Movies are about taking us someplace we haven’t seen. Or what new thing can you bring? What’s the genre or subgenre? You need to know as much about it as you can. You need to be expert. Movie history is really important, the kind of movies [yours is] like, what’s worked, what’s failed.”
“Page 25, 27, 30, is the first plot point. A big reversal. Like in a Dirty Harry movie. Clint Eastwood lives around here, doesn’t he? Dirty Harry lives right down the street. We’re investigating a crime, we think we know who the criminal is, then a big reversal—the opposite of what’s going on. The partner gets killed or something dramatic happens. We go from this direction to a new direction. Plot points are tricky because they had to come organically. Not out of the blue.”
“The second act is the confrontation. It’s the hard part of screenwriting. You have to have a really good plot point, invest in the situation with inciting incidents, then a catapult to the plot point. Characters run out of stuff to do. Amistad is a great example, a movie where Morgan Freeman’s standing around like ‘Somebody call my name?’ He doesn’t have a lot to do. That’s a problem.”
“Who’s going to be the hero? Is your movie going to be a single hero? Or two people that goes back and forth? Or a Robert Altman film, 6 or 7 people exploring a common idea? You need to figure that out now. The point is to keep you from doing a lot of work that goes nowhere.”
“A single hero film is a good way to start screenwriting because it’s a clearer form. A movie like Memento…that’s not where you want to start, [with] really complicated structure. You don’t have to have a complicated structure, but you need to know your story.”
“The second act is about 60 pages. There’s a mid-point at page 60. I look at them as energy drinks, as an oasis. When you first start writing, you just have to get to page 25. That oasis will give you a lot to do, then you just have to get to 30 more pages to the midpoint. It’s hard to figure out. It links the first half to the second half.”
“A good midpoint is ET: The Extra-terrestrial. ‘ET go home.’ Declare what the character wants.”
“Another plot point is at page 75, which drives you to the third act, which is resolution. I don’t worry about how it’s going to end. That’s one of the easier things to figure out, typically. If you figure out all of this, you’ll know. It’s like a ball rolling downhill.”
(In response to a question about how the screenplay structure works for a movie based on a true story): “There’s documentaries and there’s feature films. In documentaries you have witnesses, historians, you’ll have photos and footage if you can. A feature film that’s about a true story is not always so true. It’s a different criteria and audience, and their expectations are different. I think you have a responsibility to the truth to some level. You don’t want to make up stuff unless you’re Quentin Tarantino. If the true story involves plot points, drama, embrace it. If it doesn’t, you have to make some. The first two acts in the real story of Ron Stallworth [which BlacKkKlansman is based on] is good stuff. It portrays the klan, David Duke. But [Ron] was too good of a policeman, so there was no danger, no climax. What big thing is going to happen? It’s your job to deliver that climax. I had to make some stuff up. It’s in the spirit of what a actually did happen. In the real story, the klan was going to blow up a gay nightclub. We made up Ron’s girlfriend, who’s in the black student union, and the klan guys are going to blow up the bsu. If you don’t make it up, the audience will not be satisfied. Your job is to entertain these folks.”
“The engine of your movie are plot points. Your movie has to keep moving forward.”
(In response to a comment about keeping audiences engaged and surprised.): “I think Parasite did that a little bit. Most movies, the hero is going to live. When you kill a hero, you go ‘What? What? What?’ In the ‘70s that happened a lot. In the ‘70s they didn’t care too much about money.”
“The controlling idea is another important element to movies. It’s a fancy word for theme, the comment you’re making on the movie. In BlacKkKlansman we’re making a comment on ‘two-ness,’ an idea that W.E.B. Dubois had: being black and being American. The two Ron Stallworths is a black Ron and a Jewish Ron. The black Ron is dealing with his girlfriend because he’s not just black, but he’s blue—a policeman. The white Ron is going away from his Jewish self, and being around these anti-semetic clansmen makes him deal with his Jewish self. The comment hovers over your film. You sprinkle it over your film.”
“The better the controlling idea—the subtext—the better we love the films. All those movies we study have subtext. The movies we celebrate work on several levels.”
“In the logline, you get to sum your whole movie up into one sentence.”
“Any time you can put a clock ticking, that’s great. That’s pressure.”
“Be as hard as you can on your characters. The worse thing that can happen to her is the best thing…Make your characters earn everything. Don’t give them anything. Heroes earn everything. That makes them a hero.”
“The best thing about Rocky the movie is that Rocky loses. He went the distance. That’s playing fair with the audience.”
“You bring your ideas to this [structure]. Screenwriting is a tactical thing, a blueprint. What is your story? You have to put it through this filter of the 3-act structure. Your job is to make the right choices to hold onto those things important to you. You don’t want things to change arbitrarily. You want your choices to be guided.”
“When someone hires you to adapt something, the first thing you do is you read the book. I highlight things that would be great in the movie. A lot of times you can’t connect those things and put it in this [structure]. You gotta reduce it. Your choices are governed by the controlling idea. What do you use, what do you give up? The controlling idea tells you. It’s not arbitrary.”
“People say ‘the book is better than the movie.’ You know why? They’re two different things.”
“They give you a big book to adapt, and you take a little bitty slice. Especially with biographies. They don’t want the whole life anymore. Steve Jobs. It’s set around the invention of three of his products. It’s not cradle to grave. The conflict with his wife and daughter is set in this structure of these three products.”
“The beat sheet is a sheet of all the basic beats that’s going to happen in the film. Bob robs a bank, pages 1-3. You’re estimating it’s going to take 3 pages. Bob is chased by police, 4-6 pages. Bob hides in Mary’s house, 7-9. Bob kisses Mary, gets slapped, page 10. The key words are robs, chases, hides, kisses. Mapping out your movie before you write. That’s what I like to do. It gives me a more hands on knowing what’s in my structure.”
“Character development and dialogue. There’s one point to every scene. Not two. Not three. It makes screenwriting hard. The beat sheet tells you the point. As things develop, things change. It evolves and you have to evolve with it. Don’t get behind. The tricky thing about it is it has to revolve around your hero.”
“The action line and relationship line are the spine of your movie. The action develops the relationships. The action affects the relationship, and relationship affects the action. One should affect the other. These exercises help you to figure out if you movie’s functioning the way you want it to.”
“If you’ve got a movie that’s a great vehicle for an actor, put their picture above your computer. ‘Yeah, Brad, it’s just me and you, brother.’”
“Show people your work. Develop a community of folks or other writers who will read your stuff. Join a writer’s group. You trust their judgement and will read their stuff. You want people who know what they’re talking about.”
“It’s not just what [characters] do, it’s how they do it. Anything you can do to infuse interesting traits, characteristics, that’s a great thing.”