Rotten Tomatoes posted an hour-long
video interview/chat with Guillermo del Toro, director of Hellboy 2 and the upcoming Hobbit films, and it's a really good view. That they broke it up into 12 segments is kind of annoying, but I well know that page loads/ad banners gotta pay the bills, so I can't criticize too much. (Better yet, it's English affiliates of RT, so we get to hear about a film's "ruh-in tuh-mah-oes" score.)
The first few segments are about Hellboy and the plans he's making with PJ to direct the Hobbit films, and those are good, but I found the last few segments the most interesting. In those del Toro talks about storytelling and traditional film structure and his battles with Hollywood over film structure.
The last part has some good stuff on pay off scenes and how the executives think films must be structured to tell a story logically, while his own focus is an emotional one. He thinks films are better adapted from fairy tales, with their very simple, pre-novel structure, rather than more modern works with multiple acts, rising and falling tension, false climaxes, etc.
I'm currently collaborating on my dad to create a detective novel; his story idea, my writing and organization, and I saw a lot of the conversations we've been having reflected in this del Toro discourse. I'm very interested in non-traditional story form and breaking the strict stylistic formulas, but I have also analyzed writing and read books on structure and studied novel construction a fair amount. So I have a pretty clear picture in my head of how this book needs to be structured and laid out; where the conflict should come from, how the tension starts to rise, where the emotional payoffs are, etc.
My dad, on the other hand, reads prodigiously, but he's not a writer and he doesn't deconstruct novels the way I do. He's got ideas for characters and some scenes, but most of them are not the sort of key, pivotal scenes that I create in my head when I'm outlining a novel, or analyzing one I've read. A lot of the scenes dad has envisioned most clearly are ones I think of as secondary, or even tertiary/irrelevant. But since they're important to him and the book is his dream (literally, if not figuratively), I force myself to reconsider and try to see how/where/why they would fit into the book. I challenge myself to find a different way to structure the plans I've made for this quick, funny, relatively formulaic mystery novel, so that those scenes aren't just there, but are crucial. It's an odd way to break the usual narrative structure, and it's interesting to see how the book is forming up as we create the outline and I start writing it.
Labels: guillermo del toro, movies, the mystery novel
