Interview (Video): Alvin Sargent

Conversation with veteran screenwriter whose movie credits run the gamut from Paper Moon and Ordinary People to Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3.

From the Writers Guild Foundation series ‘The Writer Speaks’, an hour-long interview with one of the most notable screenwriters in Hollywood: Alvin Sargent. He began his writing career in television in 1956 and has over a dozen film credits including Paper Moon, Julia, Ordinary People, Nuts, Spider-Man 2, and Spider-Man 3. Sargent won two Academy Award for Julia and Ordinary People.

When I first broke into screenwriting as a profession in 1987, I read everything I could on every screenwriter — and to this day, some of the best advice I found during that time was from Alvin Sargent. Beyond everything else, Sargent challenges writers to leap before they look, take risks, get messy. That, he insists, is how we find the magic in our characters and stories. Here is a quote from one of the interviews I read with Sargent back in the 80s:

“You must write everyday. Free yourself. Free association. An hour alone a day. Blind writing. Write in the dark. Don’t think about what it is you’re writing. Just put a piece of paper in the typewriter, take your clothes off and go! No destination… pay it no attention… it’s pure unconscious exercise. Pages of it. Keep it up until embarrassment disappears. Eliminate resistance. Look at it in the morning. Amazing sometimes. Most of it won’t make any sense. But there’ll always be a small kernel of truth that relates to what you’re working on at the time. You won’t even know you created it. It will appear, and it is yours. Pure gold, a product of that pure part of you that does not know how to resist.”

For more Writers Guild Foundation video interviews, go here.

For hundreds more interviews with writers and filmmakers hosted here at Go Into The Story, go here.