The Academy has been releasing a series of Academy Originals for quite some time now and they are varying degrees of interesting, and this latest installment, sitting down with screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) I found particularly interesting, perhaps if only because he tells us he uses a piece of screenwriting software that still requires DOS and there’s only enough memory for 40 pages. He likes the limits of the program, however, saying, “I like it because it makes you make acts. If I haven’t said it in 40 pages, I’m starting to get into trouble, you know?”
Once he’s done, he sends the studio a hard copy of the screenplay, which they have to scan into their computers.
I also liked his approach to writer’s block, which he says he combats by simply doing something as easy as changing the weather in a scene, which suddenly changes the scene and creates new obstacles and tasks for the characters to deal with.
Give the video a watch and get into the mind of the screenwriter behind not only Gump and Benjamin Button, but Michael Mann‘s The Insider, The Horse Whisperer, Ali, Munich and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
