Robert McKee: Stories Go Shallow When Writers Would Rather Be Liked Than Be True | The Study

The Study is a new QDaily column for 2018. It is about how people build what they know.

Robert McKee clenches his fist and mimes a stomach cramp.

He has heard "the question" again.

He thought that this time he would finally get away without it. He is 77, long since the blazingly famous "godfather of story," "the teacher no screenwriter can ignore" — and yet people have been asking it for more than 20 years.

"Um... I see from your résumé that before you became a screenwriting teacher, you were a screenwriter yourself... so I'm curious... what made you become a teacher instead of staying a screenwriter?"

He is sitting on the sofa of a high-end hotel room in Beijing. Until then the conversation had been going pleasantly: the mystery novel at his elbow, his moviegoing habits, his wildly popular theory of story, the movie brats he taught at USC who became famous later but looked ordinary at the time, and a play he was in at eight or nine, where he played a cobbler.

Robert McKee's profession is teaching people how to tell a good story. In 1997 he published Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, revered as the screenwriter's bible and still selling. His name comes attached to a long list of prizes: 18 Oscars, 109 Emmys, 19 Writers Guild of America awards, 16 Directors Guild of America awards. Peter Jackson, who directed The Lord of the Rings; Jane Campion, who directed The Piano; Eric Roth, who wrote Forrest Gump...

Those people are his students, and those are the prizes his students won. His way of hitting back at the question goes like this: "Why do you want to know? Because your question has a subtext — let me say it out loud for you. Screenwriting is more romantic, grander; compared with teaching, it's the real creative work." And: "Why don't you ask it the other way round — you didn't become a screenwriter, you became a teacher of screenwriters, isn't that even better?"

He keeps reworking the question, then tries to answer it, is unsatisfied, and starts over.

Apart from that moment, the man in the dark red shirt, who has stirred two creamers into his espresso, holds on to the composure of a veteran speaker and a trained sense of rhythm.

In early June, Robert McKee's Story Seminar came to Beijing for the eighth time. Because the film and television business has grown so fast in recent years, the city hides more screenwriters than you would guess — it is the core job in the industry with the lowest barrier to entry. They all like Robert McKee, and they believe they will soon have the secret of storytelling in hand.

Robert McKee does not think he invented story theory. "They're simply facts." He only found them and sorted them into a system. Now scientists and businesspeople are his students too. Big companies, national television networks and NASA have come to learn from him. He has developed new courses, including Genre and Storynomics, and in 2016 he published Dialogue, the second volume of his narrative trilogy.

Years ago he told a reporter from The New Yorker that he was writing a novel called The Woman Who Tell Lies, about a famous woman writer whose talent has run dry and who meets, in a café, a heartbroken man looking for an old love. He had settled his characters from the start, and the whole novel could be said in one sentence, the way every Hollywood studio likes it — though perhaps short on novelty.

He never finished it. "I don't think I'll ever finish that novel." He still spends most of his time writing. "I have too many writing plans — the third book, Character, and other subjects that interest me. What matters most right now is getting everything in my head onto paper. I feel a sense of urgency."

On weekdays Robert McKee, now 77, writes in his study from 9:30 in the morning to 6:30 in the evening. The study has a fireplace, and the walls are hung with art. Some of it comes from his wife; some is his own collection. He favors the Latin American artists Francisco Zuniga, Francisco Toledo and Fino Tumayo. The work is not always pretty, he says, but it is very strong.

Since we could not visit him at home, his wife sent us photographs of the study. They also show a corner of the yard and a wooded path down to the pool.

When he is not away lecturing or teaching, Robert McKee lives with his wife, Mia McKee, at their home in Connecticut. She is a painter. Every evening after dinner the two of them set aside a fixed hour for television series — long-running serials have become his preference in recent years. Like most writers today, he believes the length of a series fills characters out in a way film cannot. Lately they have been watching Santa Clarita Diet, a black comedy set in a typical small California town, where both leads are real estate agents. "In the first episode the wife turns into a zombie, but her husband loves her deeply."

Turn on the radio any day and the news is full of terrific stories

Q: What books did you bring on this trip?

M: I brought a murder mystery from a series, by a Black writer, Walter Mosley. I also brought a book of short stories — you'll want the title, and I honestly can't quite remember it. It's a contemporary collection; let me think, it should be A Collapse of Horses (by Brian Evenson). The title is odd, because horses is plural. I can picture one horse collapsing from exhaustion, but a whole herd? So I find the title rather interesting. The stories all take place in the far American West, and they involve spirits, supernatural experiences and so on. They aren't really ghost stories, though they are strange. Anyway, they're terrific — enjoyable, easy to read. I brought another mystery too, I think it's called Old Joe, slightly postmodern short pieces, Western stories mixed with the supernatural. Very interesting.

When I travel I like short stories. If I bring a novel, I get to chapter three or four, and then the problem starts: if I teach four or five days straight, that's four or five days without the book, and by the end I've forgotten the plot and have to go back over the earlier chapters to remind myself. Short stories don't do that to you.

Q: I take it you don't like being interrupted either?

M: No, but being interrupted halfway through a book is not as maddening as being interrupted halfway through a film. If I'm interrupted while reading a novel, I can go back to the same page, the same words, and carry on. With a film or a play there is something called narrative drive. You move forward with the story: what happens next? And after that?

A film in a cinema or a play on a stage cannot be stopped. At home you can pause a film. But I don't like to, because film and theater have rhythm. Novels have rhythm too, but weaker, and not a musical one. In performance — in film and theater — the rhythm really is musical. If you want the deep pleasure of a film or a play, you should want to see the whole of it and think about it afterwards, not stop in the middle.

Q: What's a good story you've heard recently?

M: Every day, all I have to do is turn on the radio, and the day's news is full of terrific stories.

Q: Really? I've never thought of it that way.

M: The stories are superb. Take one I heard just now, from Paris. A four-year-old boy slipped off a balcony and caught on the balcony one floor down, so there he was, hanging in midair, somewhere between the sixth and seventh floors. Then a refugee from Mali climbed straight up the face of the building to get him, like Spider-Man. Floor by floor, up he went, and somebody filmed the whole thing.

The other one is... politics. I don't know how it is in China, but in America the political news is frightening every day. This morning Roseanne Barr, the star of the show Roseanne, posted a racist tweet — really out of line. ABC fired her and canceled the show. Over a year her advertising alone brought ABC $50 million, and they fired her anyway; tens of millions of dollars thrown away. Because a racist remark could damage the network's reputation. They knew that if they kept a racist's show on the air they might lose viewers, and then they'd lose money too.

Those two nonfiction stories — you could call one a heroic story and the other a scandal.

Q: What do you find interesting about them?

M: They're very interesting. Think about it. Put yourself in the refugee's place: he is in France illegally, and anything that draws attention could get him deported. Yet he climbs six floors up a building to save a child, risking his own life to do it. The moment that gets out, everyone knows there is an illegal immigrant in France, and he gets sent back to Africa. What actually happened is that the president of France gave him citizenship.

The second story. Here is a woman making a million dollars a week. She posts a racist tweet, the network fires her, and the million dollars is gone. She must have known what that post would cost her, and she did it anyway.

These people did something good or something bad, for reasons of their own. If I stand where they stood and ask why they chose as they did, in what frame of mind, and why that one option out of an infinite number — what could be more interesting than that? Human nature by itself is endlessly interesting. So these two aren't merely a heroic tale and a piece of gossip. Both decisions, saving the child and sending the racist tweet, were irrational. They made irrational choices.

Consistency of style in a director doesn't add up to authorship

Q: You've said that people today don't treat storytelling as an art, and that in the 1940s and 1950s it was otherwise.

M: But they take it more seriously all the time now, because of the long-form television series — Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Mad Men. The writers of those series, the people who make those terrific stories, we call show runners. They now get the same respect as novelists and playwrights, and we treat them as great creative artists. In film, though, people still think the director deserves the credit.

Q: You don't sound happy about that — about the director taking all the glory in the end.

M: If the director also writes the screenplay — a director like Ingmar Bergman, who writes his own original script and then directs it — that man can be called an author. But some directors adapt novels or hire writers, and then interpret a story that already exists according to their own reading of it. To my mind those directors are not authors. The French have their auteur theory; they may be willing to call that kind of director an author. I am not.

Consistency of style in a director doesn't add up to authorship. Nor does interpreting someone else's original story qualify anyone as its author. The director is an interpretative artist. Superb interpretation is often what separates a good work from a great one, and it is what makes the telling graceful and strong. In that sense the director is like the conductor of a symphony; the conductor has to interpret the composer's music, a composer's composer. The creation still comes from the composer.

If the director is also the writer — Truffaut, say — then to me he is an auteur. Godard too, because he wrote and directed. I have no trouble calling those two auteurs. But now every second-rate French director adapting a novel wants to call himself one.

Q: You taught at USC, which has a long screenwriting tradition and has turned out many great directors and writers. Did you meet anyone there who left a strong impression?

M: Yes. Of course students come both excellent and ordinary, and I did meet some very talented ones. George Lucas was a student at USC. Steven Spielberg never actually studied there — he was a very ordinary high school student, a C student, thoroughly unremarkable. But he was passionate about film. He went to Cal State Long Beach, a small school, then dropped out, came to USC and volunteered to shoot and edit, making things with the young filmmakers there. That's how he and George Lucas met. He pretended he was enrolled at USC, but he wasn't at all — ha.

So yes, I sometimes saw very good student films. But at 21 or 22 there is no telling. Back then they were mostly learning craft. At school they watched a lot of good professional films and learned by imitating them. The best students imitated very convincingly, because they could see the fine differences between a good film and the rest. Even so, you almost never saw a student make something new at that age, something that hadn't been done — a camera position or a lighting setup no one had used. Everything they did had already been done in the previous hundred years. If those good students did well at school, they might get into the business later, and maybe in their thirties or forties, with a taste of life behind them, they would have something original. As students, that's unlikely.

Q: What was the climate of screenwriting like then? Did a lot of people have the film dream and want to write great stories, or were most writers just making a living?

M: Both, of course. There's one type: they love film, they love the art, they want their name on a picture, they want into the business, into Hollywood. They have a social ambition. They may or may not have any talent.

There's another type, and fewer of them. A small number love the art of film and genuinely have something to say. If they couldn't make films, they'd write novels, plays, poems — they'd create one way or another, because they have the talent, and the talent obliges them to use it. I like these people, because the urge to express is inside them; art lives in their bodies. They're rare. Among everyone trying to break into film and television, they're a small fraction.

And most of the talented ones don't last. They are too sensitive; they bruise easily, they get discouraged. I always tell them: if you can't make films, you can always write novels. Nobody can stop you from writing a novel. If you have a story in you, a world full of characters, if you can see conflict on different levels and see people's inner lives, you can write a novel. Some young writers never know how to put down the first line. But they shouldn't be worrying about the words. It's the screenwriter who should worry about words: he has to carry the most meaning with the fewest of them, which is very hard. Good novelists, of course, know how to imply.

So I always encourage the people who aren't good at the social side of the film world to write novels, to get their stories on paper. Maybe one day Hollywood likes the story and calls them.

Bad stories fascinate me too — I wonder whether there's something deeper in them

Q: About your own writing — how do you usually start a book?

M: The usual way... though that has changed now. I used to teach for a long stretch, several years. Students would ask me a lot of questions and I would answer them. Once I had taught long enough — long enough to have lectured to many thousands of people, to have heard nearly every question there is and to know the answers — then I might start a book. Story came out that way. But Dialogue — I never taught a class on dialogue. There was a section on it inside the big story lecture, but I had never gone into the subject on its own. So I had to do a lot of research myself.

Then there is Storynomics. I had taught a storynomics course, and then I realized I still needed a business expert, so I found Thomas Gerace, a Harvard Business School graduate and the CEO of a marketing company. With his help we wrote Storynomics together.

Now I'm writing a book about character. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. The book is called Character, but you could call it Human Nature. How complicated human nature is. In it I'm trying to explain human nature to writers and give them a method for thinking about how people behave at different levels of life. So it takes an enormous amount of research. If I never finish this book, I'll go on studying human nature for the rest of my life anyway.

Q: You believe a screenwriter has to get inside a character and act him out. Does that come from your years as a performer?

M: A great deal of what I do now comes from my years as a stage actor and director. I acted in about as many plays as I directed — I directed more than sixty and appeared professionally in roughly the same number. What directors and actors do in the theater is take the script apart, interpret it piece by piece, and put it back together. You break it down, then you rebuild it. To break it down you have to understand the author's work, because a play must be performed as written; there isn't the room for improvisation that film and television allow. So the theater years have been a great help to me.

Q: When did you first go on stage?

M: At eight. The play was Martin the Shoemaker, a story with a religious meaning. The hero is a cobbler who one day dreams that Jesus will come. When he wakes he starts getting ready, scrubbing his house clean. The house is small, but once clean it looks fine. Then people start arriving, one after another — the poor, the hungry, and so on. All day he looks after each of them. By the end of the day Jesus has not come, and he thinks the dream was a lie. Then a voice tells him: "Jesus was among the poor who came to see you today. Because you helped them, you helped Jesus." A warm little story. I no longer remember which teacher chose me for the lead, but she could never have guessed she had changed my life.

Q: Once you'd mastered the principles of story, did reading or watching films change for you? Does it get boring?

M: Not for me, no. My wife understands this well, because now and then the two of us watch some truly bad stories. For me that's interesting too. I think: how did they make it this badly? What were they thinking? What effect were they after? Why did it fail? So bad stories fascinate me. I wonder whether there's something deeper in them. Or how the thing could have been told well.

If a story is unusual, I'll watch it a second time, even a third, to work out what they're saying and how they're saying it. Then I can learn from it.

Because storytelling is my trade, all stories interest me. From when I was very small until now, it has always been like that. There's an English expression: it's so bad it's good. Plenty of stories are like that — so bad they're good. They're good because they're bad enough.

The two experiences are different, of course. A good story stirs your emotions; you feel with it. That's a vicarious experience. Watching a bad story, you're entirely in an analytical, critical frame of mind.

When you watch mediocre work you realize that making something really good takes a particular gift. The people who made the mediocre thing did their best; their emotional intelligence is simply limited. That's how they see the world, so flat, shallow characters are all they can make.

Q: I noticed that the last part of your seminar is a shot-by-shot analysis of Casablanca. Why does that film matter so much to you?

M: Because I need one example that can illustrate everything I teach. I've tried others — Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters. Good films, but they have limits; used to demonstrate my theory, there's always something they don't reach. Casablanca is different. It has six stories: the central one is a love story, plus five subplots. It is at once a romance, a political drama, a comedy, an action film and a musical drama, which lets me explain every one of my principles.

But I should say that this is not a "favorite film." I have no favorite film. Having one is rather silly — you're fencing yourself in. And a favorite gets in the way of the next good film you see.

It doesn't have to be a cinema. I don't want to watch films with those people

Q: Whose work or ideas shaped your theory of screenwriting?

M: Aristotle first, without question; everyone should like him. In the 1930s there was a writer who wrote a great deal about writing, John Howard Lawson. He wrote a very good book, The Theory and Technique of Playwriting. And a novelist named Henry James, who also wrote a lot of essays about writing. I believe it's called The Art of Fiction — an important book. At the time nobody was really writing about screenwriting, at least nothing with much influence. So it's those three: Aristotle, John Howard Lawson and Henry James.

Q: Did you read them at university?

M: Yes, about sixty years ago.

Q: Your doctoral dissertation was about narrative structure too, wasn't it?

M: Well, about story. I never finished it. I spent about three years gathering material and read more than three hundred works. I wrote a few chapters, thirty or forty pages, and then I had to go sell my screenplays and had to stop. The outline of my lectures, and of the book Story, did come from that dissertation. I'm very glad now that I never finished it. I still had the research files from those years — big boxes, stacks of index cards, sorted by category. When I got them out and looked again, I couldn't read them; the language was so academic. I thought, thank goodness I never finished, because nobody would have read it. With luck, twelve people in the world. Then again, you don't write a dissertation for people to read. You write it to get the degree.

Q: How often do you watch films?

M: Once a week. So about 50 a year. Of those 50, maybe 5 are any good. Occasionally we watch a film on television as well. But the series are too good now. My wife and I both work every day — I usually write all day, and she mostly handles the business side for me. She's an artist herself; her studio is at home and she's usually in it during the day. We work until evening, more or less. After dinner we have our fixed time for series, and we talk the episode over afterwards. The American show we're watching lately is Santa Clarita Diet, a black comedy set in California.

Q: Are you someone who has to see it on a big cinema screen?

M: I do like the big screen. I think everyone does. But now we have a choice: the cinema's big screen, which means going out, buying a ticket and sitting there; or a smaller screen, which you can watch whenever you like and with whomever you like, friends or family.

Q: Which do you prefer?

M: My answer is a big screen in an empty room. It doesn't have to be a cinema. I don't want to watch films with those people. To begin with, they have no manners about it; they talk through the picture. So my wife and I have a big screen in the bedroom, at the foot of the bed. It looks wonderful. And nobody is chattering behind us.

Q: Where do you write?

M: When I first started writing, I wrote in restaurants. There were five or six in town I went to, and I'd rotate among them, sit down and order a coffee. The waiters all knew me; whenever I stayed a couple of hours they'd keep topping up the cup so it was never empty. I wrote in restaurants for the particular background sound they have, the murmur of people. There were no telephones or internet then, nothing to distract you easily. That background noise seemed to help my early writing.

Later I had a study of my own and stopped going to restaurants. I'd been telling myself I couldn't write in silence, that I needed some noise. It turned out I was wrong: I can write in silence perfectly well. So I suppose I've grown up a bit, and found out I'd been fooling myself, playing games with myself. What I took for habits were only private rituals.

In their eyes popularity matters more than truth, and that's why their stories are so shallow

Q: Have you seen any Chinese films this year?

M: Not this year. But before every trip to China I ask the staff here to find me the three films of the past year that they think are best. This time either they couldn't find them or they forgot — they didn't bring them. Chinese films of the last few years do feel different. There was a period, thirty years ago, when China's Fifth Generation directors were dazzling world cinema. They made a lot of excellent work, and then, for reasons I don't know, they drifted further and further from their own style.

After that came a run of avant-garde experiments. Not only in China, of course — worldwide. What they really amount to is being different for the sake of being different, and they have two parts. First, the fashionably fragmented story. You take a fashionable technique, chop the story into bits and paste it back together like a collage, as if that were some great achievement. In fact anyone can chop a story into pieces at the editing bench and reshuffle the deck. A child could do it. It really takes very little talent.

Second, taboo subjects. Poverty, sex, LGBT people and so on. Put the two together and you get a fragmented story about a taboo subject, and that is what passes for avant-garde, for cutting edge. The avant-garde artists think themselves very important, too; they have a hero complex, as though they were fighting the whole world. In a sense they are impressive... but what I want to say is that when you fragment a story about a taboo subject, you are hurting those very people. If you really care about the poor, about sex workers, about anyone on the margins, you should make them a taut and moving story — say, a coming-of-age story about being gay.

Q: A documentary?

M: Not a documentary. Fiction. Tell a story properly, with a central character in it. Documentaries are fine, of course; they tell us a great deal. But when you make one you still haven't lived the life your subjects live. They are in front of the camera and you are off to one side; they and you are two different kinds of people. By filming them you have a record of them, that's all. Drama is not a record. In drama, in film and television, you actually live the life the character lives, and through empathy you feel what he feels. Documentaries don't call up empathy — sometimes they may, but not necessarily.

If it were me, I'd take a taboo subject, say people on the margins, and tell a direct, truthful, powerful story about them: what kind of life they live. So that when people watch, they feel they are inside the story, going through what the characters go through, instead of watching from outside.

The trouble with avant-garde artists is that they are more interested in themselves than in other people. They want to show off their talent and their ideas. Now and then I do see an experimental film that is terrific, built out of pure coincidence and the randomness of life. Run Lola Run, the German film, for instance. Very interesting.

I can teach some things about story and character. But the writer himself has to look further into life; he has to work at avoiding fixed thinking and stereotypes. Too many writers today... I'm about to start complaining. Too many writers want too badly to be liked, to be popular. In their eyes popularity matters more than truth, and that's why their stories are so shallow. They know how to cut corners, to do whatever pleases the audience, and that is exactly what guarantees they will never make a good film.

On the other hand, they may well find an audience that buys it. In China, for instance: there are 1.3 billion people, so winning even 1% of the audience makes you a financial success. But I can't tell Chinese filmmakers what to do. All I can do is teach what I know. Once they understand the art form, they'll practice it in the conditions they live in, and we can see how it develops.

Still, I know China can make terrific films, because it did thirty years ago. I still remember several fine ones: Shanghai Triad, Ju Dou, To Live, Farewell My Concubine. More recently, Lust, Caution. The acting is superb and the adaptation is excellent. I even have the original novella — about a hundred-odd pages.

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