You can visit Joe Gilford's website, and order Joe's book, Why Does the Screenwriter Cross the Road, here.
Dave Watson: How did you get started?
Joe Gifford: Every time I do something new I’m getting started. I’m still waiting to get started. It’s like climbing Everest one inch per year as a writer. In fact, writing is my third career. My first love was acting. I did student theater, I even did a TV commercial for Quaker Oats cereal when I was about 12. My father was an actor, Jack Gilford, and hanging around him I got hooked on films. I picked up a Super 8 camera as a kid and shot and edited tons of stuff. Then I went to NYU Film school and after that started working as a production assistant. Then I backpedaled into theater and directed plays for about 10 years, off-off Broadway and at a fabulous place, The Westbank Downstairs Theater which was run by comedian Lew Black. That’s where I started writing. Friends of mine from that time relocated to the coast, but I liked where I was. I was in my mid-thirties, I knew I wanted to write and worked in TV. My first job was with the old series The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd then run by Eric Overmeyer. From there I gained enough experience and started teaching at NYU.
DW: Sounds like you’ve covered the scale.
JG: I was the sound guy, boom guy, did lighting, was the stage manager. In a way, writing is the last thing I’ve done.
DW: How does this experience lend to writing?
JG: Writing just took hold. I had to finally master something. Writing is all the elements. From directing I learned about the performance, and you write for performance. In the book I talk about writing for actors to perform, but the writing is secondary to the actual thing. As a writer you are the architect. An architect creates the plans, but doesn’t build the house, a builder builds it.
DW: From that, a chapter of your book is called “Screenplays Are Not Written – They Are Built.”
JG: It sets the foundation. You can’t enter an architectural plan. You don’t see a screenplay. I learned the basics of writing and laying the foundation, and had a feeling early on that film may not actually be a visual medium.
DW: Not a visual medium? That’s another section of your book.
JG: Well (laughs) that’s borrowed from my mentor at NYU, Paul Thompson. I tell that to my second year students. Film is a visual experience, but it’s a dramatic experience too. We go to see humans do stuff, so it’s a hybrid medium that uses visual tools that helps us experience human drama. But we don’t go out afterward and talk about color, composition, photography; we talk about what happened, what the characters did and said. And movie stars are the reason we go see certain movies and don’t see others—no matter how they look. It’s a star medium. We love to watch movie stars get into tough and dramatic and funny situations. We’re interested in the characters and what they’re going to do.
DW: Yet when the writing quality declines, the play, movie, or story does. I think back to the writer’s strike in the late 2000s when the James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, was made and it was the worst in a while.
JG: Love that actor though.
DW: Daniel Craig, yes, and the producers I believe blamed the writers’ strike. That story felt hacked together. I also love it when a trailer will say, “From the producers of…”
JG: That’s when they don’t have a star to sell. You can picture the marketing people sitting around a table coming up with a strategy, and they often get it wrong.
DW: Why?
JG: That’s a big question. Imagine you go to McDonalds every day, you always get a Big Mac, and only twenty percent of it is edible.
DW: And you keep going back.
JG: Remember, eighty percent of the product out of Hollywood is unprofitable. But we keep going back.
DW: In your book you have a section called, “If you don’t believe the story, who will?” What about a movie like San Andreas that is based on some degree of reality?
JG: Part of the job of a movie is to create its own rules that make sense to the movie, but may not make sense in real life. I call these “zombie rules.” As long as you can make an audience believe it, then you’re okay. But think of how many movies we see when we don’t believe it. It ruins the entire experience—and some of these are very realistic movies. They’re not fantasies.
DW: How have things changed since you were watching movies?
JG: In the sixties I grew up during the auteur movement. Throughout that decade young people were seeing the new Bergman, the new Fellini, the new Hitchcock, they were all making movies all the time. Now you don’t really have that. There are many great filmmakers today, but they’re fourth and fifth generation. In the '60s these were second generation filmmakers, the founders of modern movies.
DW: I heard we used to have foreign films whereas now you have independent films.
JG: I actually call them co-dependent movies. Yes, there was much wider distribution of foreign films. I think somebody found out that most audiences don’t want to or may actually cannot read subtitles and so we don’t see as many of them as we used to. Also, the amount of foreign films has declined. In the last 30 years the money and government subsidies for non-American movie makers has all but disappeared.
DW: Finally, what is your favorite cinematic moment?
JG: There are so many. One has to be in The Graduate where Kathrine Ross comes home and discovers Dustin Hoffman and Ann Bancroft in bed together. Nichols does these rapid cuts of the door opening and the reactions of everybody. Then the cinematographer, Bob Surtees, does this long shot that uses the graphics of the hallway lines to trap Dustin Hoffman. Then Nichols ends it with a rapid swallowing fade-out.
DW: Why is that your favorite?
JG: It’s all about Katherine Ross’ shock and we as an audience experience it just like she does. It's a true genius moment. On another level it’s Mike Nichols showing how much he's absorbed from the European art films of the '50s and '60s. Also, it was the freedom that American filmmaking was about to go through in the next ten years. This was the era of Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg—the Easy Rider-Raging Bull era and The Graduate really opens the door to all of that. Even the opening of that movie just announces, “cinema!”
Clip: The Graduate and tribute to Katherine Ross
JG: A second favorite moment would be the bed scene in Chinatown. It’s shot from a single overhead shot; no editing, and the dialogue is so self-conscious and understated, it’s the core of the whole film. Polanski knew how to use the widescreen and he used 52mm lenses so beautifully, He’s my main man. A true world master. He’s never let me down.
DW: Polanski is a true cinematic storyteller though he didn’t make fast-moving films.
JG: It is one shot and it is so sweet and quiet and deadly. That’s what the scene is about. It’s the Mobius strip of Jake Gittes's life and it foreshadows the tragic ending. It’s well known that Polanski pushed Robert Towne to write a real film noir. The original script, which I read in film school, was more a bitter satire like Shampoo and The Last Detail his other masterpieces. Even Towne has said in interviews that Chinatown is unlike anything he ever intended. He quit the movie about halfway through the shoot.
Clip: Chinatown
JG: A third favorite uses a great transition with a single edit and celebrates the magic of basic montage. Lawrence of Arabia has a scene where Lawrence gets his assignment. He’s playing with a burning match, putting it out with his bare fingers and then the match goes out and—pfft!—we’re in the Arabian desert. It cuts to a sunset. Everyone who loves movies knows this moment.
Clip: Lawrence of Arabia
DW: Why is that one of yours?
JG: I believe this was the moment I decided to become a filmmaker. This is the movie that drugged me into becoming a filmmaker. I was 11 years-old when I saw this on the gigantic screen at our neighborhood movie palace, Loew’s Sheridan in New York City. I never recovered from it and I’ve seen it over fifty times—about ten on the big screen. Just look at the opening. How do you kill off your main character in the first three minutes and then keep an audience watching your film for another three-and-a-half hours? David Lean—that’s how!
Dave Watson is a writer and educator in addition to being editor of Movies Matter. He lives in Madison, WI.
Dave Watson: How did you get started?
Joe Gifford: Every time I do something new I’m getting started. I’m still waiting to get started. It’s like climbing Everest one inch per year as a writer. In fact, writing is my third career. My first love was acting. I did student theater, I even did a TV commercial for Quaker Oats cereal when I was about 12. My father was an actor, Jack Gilford, and hanging around him I got hooked on films. I picked up a Super 8 camera as a kid and shot and edited tons of stuff. Then I went to NYU Film school and after that started working as a production assistant. Then I backpedaled into theater and directed plays for about 10 years, off-off Broadway and at a fabulous place, The Westbank Downstairs Theater which was run by comedian Lew Black. That’s where I started writing. Friends of mine from that time relocated to the coast, but I liked where I was. I was in my mid-thirties, I knew I wanted to write and worked in TV. My first job was with the old series The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd then run by Eric Overmeyer. From there I gained enough experience and started teaching at NYU.
DW: Sounds like you’ve covered the scale.
JG: I was the sound guy, boom guy, did lighting, was the stage manager. In a way, writing is the last thing I’ve done.
DW: How does this experience lend to writing?
JG: Writing just took hold. I had to finally master something. Writing is all the elements. From directing I learned about the performance, and you write for performance. In the book I talk about writing for actors to perform, but the writing is secondary to the actual thing. As a writer you are the architect. An architect creates the plans, but doesn’t build the house, a builder builds it.
DW: From that, a chapter of your book is called “Screenplays Are Not Written – They Are Built.”
JG: It sets the foundation. You can’t enter an architectural plan. You don’t see a screenplay. I learned the basics of writing and laying the foundation, and had a feeling early on that film may not actually be a visual medium.
DW: Not a visual medium? That’s another section of your book.
JG: Well (laughs) that’s borrowed from my mentor at NYU, Paul Thompson. I tell that to my second year students. Film is a visual experience, but it’s a dramatic experience too. We go to see humans do stuff, so it’s a hybrid medium that uses visual tools that helps us experience human drama. But we don’t go out afterward and talk about color, composition, photography; we talk about what happened, what the characters did and said. And movie stars are the reason we go see certain movies and don’t see others—no matter how they look. It’s a star medium. We love to watch movie stars get into tough and dramatic and funny situations. We’re interested in the characters and what they’re going to do.
DW: Yet when the writing quality declines, the play, movie, or story does. I think back to the writer’s strike in the late 2000s when the James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, was made and it was the worst in a while.
JG: Love that actor though.
DW: Daniel Craig, yes, and the producers I believe blamed the writers’ strike. That story felt hacked together. I also love it when a trailer will say, “From the producers of…”
JG: That’s when they don’t have a star to sell. You can picture the marketing people sitting around a table coming up with a strategy, and they often get it wrong.
DW: Why?
JG: That’s a big question. Imagine you go to McDonalds every day, you always get a Big Mac, and only twenty percent of it is edible.
DW: And you keep going back.
JG: Remember, eighty percent of the product out of Hollywood is unprofitable. But we keep going back.
DW: In your book you have a section called, “If you don’t believe the story, who will?” What about a movie like San Andreas that is based on some degree of reality?
JG: Part of the job of a movie is to create its own rules that make sense to the movie, but may not make sense in real life. I call these “zombie rules.” As long as you can make an audience believe it, then you’re okay. But think of how many movies we see when we don’t believe it. It ruins the entire experience—and some of these are very realistic movies. They’re not fantasies.
DW: How have things changed since you were watching movies?
JG: In the sixties I grew up during the auteur movement. Throughout that decade young people were seeing the new Bergman, the new Fellini, the new Hitchcock, they were all making movies all the time. Now you don’t really have that. There are many great filmmakers today, but they’re fourth and fifth generation. In the '60s these were second generation filmmakers, the founders of modern movies.
DW: I heard we used to have foreign films whereas now you have independent films.
JG: I actually call them co-dependent movies. Yes, there was much wider distribution of foreign films. I think somebody found out that most audiences don’t want to or may actually cannot read subtitles and so we don’t see as many of them as we used to. Also, the amount of foreign films has declined. In the last 30 years the money and government subsidies for non-American movie makers has all but disappeared.
DW: Finally, what is your favorite cinematic moment?
JG: There are so many. One has to be in The Graduate where Kathrine Ross comes home and discovers Dustin Hoffman and Ann Bancroft in bed together. Nichols does these rapid cuts of the door opening and the reactions of everybody. Then the cinematographer, Bob Surtees, does this long shot that uses the graphics of the hallway lines to trap Dustin Hoffman. Then Nichols ends it with a rapid swallowing fade-out.
DW: Why is that your favorite?
JG: It’s all about Katherine Ross’ shock and we as an audience experience it just like she does. It's a true genius moment. On another level it’s Mike Nichols showing how much he's absorbed from the European art films of the '50s and '60s. Also, it was the freedom that American filmmaking was about to go through in the next ten years. This was the era of Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg—the Easy Rider-Raging Bull era and The Graduate really opens the door to all of that. Even the opening of that movie just announces, “cinema!”
Clip: The Graduate and tribute to Katherine Ross
JG: A second favorite moment would be the bed scene in Chinatown. It’s shot from a single overhead shot; no editing, and the dialogue is so self-conscious and understated, it’s the core of the whole film. Polanski knew how to use the widescreen and he used 52mm lenses so beautifully, He’s my main man. A true world master. He’s never let me down.
DW: Polanski is a true cinematic storyteller though he didn’t make fast-moving films.
JG: It is one shot and it is so sweet and quiet and deadly. That’s what the scene is about. It’s the Mobius strip of Jake Gittes's life and it foreshadows the tragic ending. It’s well known that Polanski pushed Robert Towne to write a real film noir. The original script, which I read in film school, was more a bitter satire like Shampoo and The Last Detail his other masterpieces. Even Towne has said in interviews that Chinatown is unlike anything he ever intended. He quit the movie about halfway through the shoot.
Clip: Chinatown
JG: A third favorite uses a great transition with a single edit and celebrates the magic of basic montage. Lawrence of Arabia has a scene where Lawrence gets his assignment. He’s playing with a burning match, putting it out with his bare fingers and then the match goes out and—pfft!—we’re in the Arabian desert. It cuts to a sunset. Everyone who loves movies knows this moment.
Clip: Lawrence of Arabia
DW: Why is that one of yours?
JG: I believe this was the moment I decided to become a filmmaker. This is the movie that drugged me into becoming a filmmaker. I was 11 years-old when I saw this on the gigantic screen at our neighborhood movie palace, Loew’s Sheridan in New York City. I never recovered from it and I’ve seen it over fifty times—about ten on the big screen. Just look at the opening. How do you kill off your main character in the first three minutes and then keep an audience watching your film for another three-and-a-half hours? David Lean—that’s how!
Dave Watson is a writer and educator in addition to being editor of Movies Matter. He lives in Madison, WI.
