WRITING  FILM SCRIPTS– THE MOROCCAN EXPERIENCE

The latest edition of CINEMAG, the French-language Cinema and Audiovisual Magazine of Morocco (No. 10. Nov.09 – Feb 10) devotes a Special Section to script writing in Morocco. The views and experiences of 16 personalities of Moroccan cinema are presented through articles and interviews. Writer-directors, screenwriters, cinema critics and professors explain how they approach  writing scripts, what difficulties screenwriters  face and how they see  screen writing as part of the future development of  Moroccan cinema. Joanna Tachmintzis presents below  a summary of some of the points made by  Moroccan Writer- Directors  in CINEMAG.(magazine website: www.cinemag.info)

WHAT MAKES A FILM SCRIPT  SUCCESSFUL? SHOULD WE MASTER  CREATIVE WRITING  OR GOOD  SCR EEN WRITING TECHNIQUES?

For Latif LAHLOU, writer and director of , amongst others, the award-winning “Gardens of Samira”(2007), it is important to make films that describe the life around him, and express feelings and sensations through a story that charms the spectator and creates emotions that make him identify with or share the emotions of the film. He has found that the best way to achieve what he wants is to write scripts  which tell  stories about   different aspects of the life of couples. He  feels that  through  the couple he can suggest , or even perhaps express, the very essence of life, and all his fiction films are on this theme. He believes it is important to master certain screen writing  techniques, but at  the end of the day, it is the content, the charm, the emotion, what you “breathe” into the film  that makes it a good film, and you either have it in you or you don't. You can be technically  brilliant in writing the script, but puerile or banal in the expression of the content.

Saàd CHRAIBI ( “Islamour”,”Femmes et Femmes”, “Soif”,”Jawhara”) gets his inspiration for his scripts  by observing the evolution of Moroccan society around him, and its transformations and mutations both at the human and the societal level. And as for the rules of screen writing, he believes that these vary from one script  to another depending on the subject being treated. You cannot, he says, use the same methods for writing a script for a love story as you would use for an action film or a historical film. And he believes that a good screenwriter can find a way to combine creative writing and screen writing techniques, by putting the second  to the service of the first. But he must have an open mind,  a global vision of what he wants to say as well as a  good  knowledge of the subject matter he is treating.

For Ahmed EL MAANOUNI (“Transes”, “Alyam Alyam”), it is the originality of the script and the personal style of its writer which is important, and which must not be lost in a “method”of writing a screenplay. And how  does the idea for an original script arise for him? “At first there is a desire which takes you by surprise, throws you in the world of the imaginary, imposes on you a theme which swells like a river in spate, bathes you in its own unique  music, floods  you with its richness of emotions and makes you dream of images which will never leave you. The criterion for choosing a future script is the force of this desire”. And after this choice starts the real and complicated work of writing, which requires both the mastery of story telling and of cinematographic creation. For him the rules to follow are the same as for writing drama, but he cautions against applying methods of writing mechanically. Even though the complex rules of drama writing must be followed, he reminds us that writing a script  is above all a huge work of the imagination, and this is what will guarantee the force of its originality. As for the difficulties to be faced, he quotes Jean-Claude Carrière who said that “the imagination is like a lazy muscle” and it is exhausting  to get this muscle working intensely.

Kamal KAMAL (“La Symphonie Marocaine”, “Taief Nizar”) likens  making a film to  making music. “If a Maestro needs a conductor to interpret a symphony, a director needs a script  to make a film. Each musician in a symphony orchestra has his score, but the conductor reads simultaneously all the scores.(...)Yet it is not just for this capacity that he leads the orchestra, otherwise he could be replaced by a metronome(..) He is indispensable because he gives life and sense to a piece of music”. He makes a comparison between the conductor who breathes life into the fingers of his musicians by giving them tone and tempo,  to the film director who breathes life into his characters by giving them a reason to live. For him, the force of the cinema lies in its capacity to gather within it all the previous art forms. And it is precisely all the other art forms that he considers that the script  must manage, and organise simultaneously and harmoniously taking into account our  capacity of perception. He believes that a structural approach to a script  is important, not as an end in itself, but as a tool; and that the interest of  a film results from the way the director  uses all the means available to the 7^th art to transmit an idea, an emotion or a sensation. And that in the end,  it is the choice of stories, colours, sounds, movements and forms, harmonised in an intelligent way, that will make the spectator stay glued onto his chair, with mouth wide open, for as long as the film reels are turning.

Hicham LASRI (“The Iron Bone”) shares his own experience  on how to write a script. For him, the first thing to learn when telling a story is how to position oneself, choose one's camp and determine a point of view. And the story must be sufficiently coherent to create empathy by captivating the spectator. When starting on a new script, his own method is to dissociate ideas and structure, and to work on them separately in order to optimise the impact of each scene, each idea, each character. The first, and longest, stage is gathering ideas, fragments of ideas, images, experiences of his own or of others, which he notes down; then comes the structuring of these in one or more  versions of sequences. He finds creating continuity and  dialogue the least difficult stage, with the writing flowing once the structure is solid. He recommends seeing two films which, in their own way,   can be  very educative on how to write a good script-“The Usual Suspects” by Bryan Singer, and “Memento” by Christopher Nolan.

Rachid ZAKI believes that all failed  films were a failure even before they were filmed, and   underlines the central  and primordial role  of the script  in a film. Will a good script always result in a good film? Not necessarily, because so much depends on other factors, including the director's vision and the funds available. Will a bad script  make a bad film? Yes in 99% of cases. He agrees with Boileau who wrote: “What is well conceived is clearly expressed”. If the writing is confused, so is the thinking. For him, a script must seduce, move, entertain, surprise, and make dream. And when any one of this ingredients is missing, the script  suffers. He also considers  that many screenwriters wrongly believe that there exists a narrative structure specific to screenplays, whereas in fact it resembles that of other literary genres. For him, the  screenplay must be based on the classic scheme of three acts (prologue, main story development and epilogue) inherited from Aristotle and the theatre. And the golden rule for screen  writing is reading= seeing, that is to say, that the writing is the means to transpose the images to be filmed, whereas many Moroccan writers see the script as a literary work. He believes that their evident weakness to write in images may be linked to the fact that  in the Arab-Muslim culture the spoken and written word overrides the image. Images were banned in the past, but are still refused, they create fear.

For Hassan LEGZOULI , (“Tenja”) the idea for a new script can arise from an image, and then there is a snowball effect. And this idea then becomes a script for him once he sees the possibility for characters who can exist outside of him, and who are not there just to convey his ideas as author. He believes that writing a screenplay cannot just be improvised. Just because you may have a story, it doesn't mean that you can write a screenplay. And just because you may be in the writing business (journalist, novelist, poet,..)it doesn't mean you are naturally a screen writer. “Writing a script is long and exacting labour. There are methods, academic teaching, learning. One can learn to write a script. But it is like learning music: studying music at the conservatory is not enough to make you a musician”. He maintains  that you have to know the  rules and methods for screen writing  in order to better forget them afterwards. But being creative and imaginative doesn't mean that you can just do what strikes your fancy- some screen writing rules have to be respected in order to place  the  script within a narrative frame. As for difficulties encountered when writing a script, for him there are two principal ones: firstly, the motivation of characters (why they are they way they are, what makes them react in a certain way, how to avoid clichés, how to make them exist independently), and secondly, how to find the narrative, how  tell the story in order to draw out the maximum emotion from the viewer. Once these difficulties are overcome, the rest follows on. However, in the final analysis, he considers that a good script is a necessary precondition, but not enough in itself, to make a good film or a masterpiece.