Taking It Apart To Build It Again

Writing a big budget Hollywood movie can safely be compared to NASCAR racing.

You are building an extremely complicated machine to exacting tolerances, hoping that it has enough speed to win the race. And when the results fail to yield the desired velocity, you take the car apart, make small and subtle alterations, and put the car back together again. You shave weight, you reduce drag. You do this until you know every piece of the machine by heart, until you can map the gears of every system in your mind. And even then, the car may not be fast enough. So then you get really creative. You drill holes in wheel wells to improve air flow, you install extra fuel piping to increase capacity, you raise the spoiler to increase downforce. In short, you cheat.

Last week Huili and I actually submitted the final Pillow Crisis revision. I write "final" with some degree of hope, because our last two revisions were also the final revisions. But in this case, having utterly exhausted our capacity and desire to work on the story any longer, I'm inclined to believe that this is the ultimate revision.

One of the important things we've learned in this process is the value of rapid prototyping. Instead of pouring a lot of resources into a single perfect draft, never knowing if the final product would pass muster with the studios, we instead focused our efforts on outlines.

We began with a fifty point outline, encompassing every moment of the movie, and proceeded to justify the inclusion of each individual point. Did this moment belong in the movie? Did it need changes? Did it need to be placed at a different point in the outline?

On average, we spent about a day on each point, working our way through the outline like a Catholic praying the rosary. The most frustrating moments came during moments when we decided that we needed to throw out large sections of the chronology, which often meant going back to where we were three weeks ago. The movie mutated several times along the way, growing new appendages and shedding old ones. We spent days, weeks cultivating - and then destroying - alternate universe iterations of our movie. Imagine the cloning laboratory from the fourth Alien movie.

But that is the beauty of rapid prototyping - evolutionary errors were discovered early enough in the process so that we did not have to undertake an arduous page one rewrite of the screenplay; we merely needed to reconfigure some bullet points on our outline. We were essentially writing a new version of the movie every couple of weeks, as opposed to months.

The downside of this process is the loss of discovery - the sense of a story growing organically from the hidden recesses of your heart and subconscious. But big-budget Hollywood movies are not organic - they are machines which create the most exquisite illusion of soul. Back to the Future is ultimately a cold, mechanical movie which fools you into thinking it has a heart. See also: the entire oeuvre of Pixar. The illusion is so well-crafted that even awareness of the illusion is not enough to break it.

That is the magic of the machine you're building.