Joe Fisher - Advice On Screenwriting

What advice would you give to new screenwriters looking for that elusive original idea?
I don't think there's any particular system. There are ideas lying about all over the place: in real events, in newspapers, in historical footnotes.

One project I'm working on at the moment came from looking at a picture of some huts; another was inspired largely by a piece of music. William Rose dreamed almost the entire story of The Ladykillers. The point is to be permanently open to possibilities. Some people seem to start with an instinctive sense of a good story, then have to learn how to write it effectively; others find technique comes easily and need to develop an instinct for a story.

Partly it depends on your background, and what kind of film you want to make. And really there aren't that many truly original ideas about, unless you're looking for gimmicks; mostly you'll find someone's done something similar before.

The star quality usually lies in the execution, and the writer's angle of approach. My best advice is really trial and error: be profligate, make mistakes, try out a lot of ideas, follow your hunches, and don't be afraid of taking risks or breaking rules or starting things you don't know how to finish yet. And be very wary of anyone who offers to teach you how to write a marketable screenplay.

How do you build on the idea and what are the stages you go through to transform it into a fully written script?
It's never been quite the same twice for me. Each idea tends to dictate its own route. Roughly speaking, there tend to be three stages. A two or three page outline of the heart of an idea. A ten to twenty page treatment (a rough scenario without dialogue, suggesting principal characters, their development, the main dramatic turns and some but not all scenes), usually redrafted three or four times.

Then a full script, typically between 80 and 140 pages, redrafted as many times as it takes it to get it right. This probably represents about nine months' work, spread over something like two years, and the periods when a script seems to be lying fallow are often as productive as the time I spend physically writing it. At all but the first of these stages I'd expect to be collaborating with a producer or director.