Screenwriting 101: Guillermo Arriaga
“I never outline the story, never. I once went to a seminar by one of these gurus of the screen, and this person said, ‘You must know…
“I never outline the story, never. I once went to a seminar by one of these gurus of the screen, and this person said, ‘You must know everything about your characters.’ I thought, ‘Fuck, there’s no way!’ I want to have dark parts of my characters’ history so they can surprise me. Also, I can’t have an ending already, because when I don’t know the characters they can show me the ending as I get to know them. That’s why I don’t like to do research of any kind. I like for the characters to grow up inside me. There are two kinds of writers: there are those who don’t have any kind of internal way to order things inside themselves, so they need structure, page thirty, page sixty, and so on — and I don’t blame or criticize the professors or the students of that discipline. But I think there is another kind of writer who has a different kind of approach to structure. 21 Grams goes back and forth all the time, and I had a perfect understanding of where it was going. I never got lost or thought that I needed a plot point here, or for something to happen in the second act. I never think that way. That’s not to say the other way is bad — it’s just that myself and other writers have a different internal process. It’s intuition.”
— Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams)
From “Screenwriters’ Masterclass” [P. 382]
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