“What do you have to do to get your movie made?”
“You do whatever it takes.”
That was James Dalessandro interviewing Bobby Moresco to a packed room of aspiring filmmakers at Northern California’s Screenwriting and Filmmaker Expo in beautiful Napa Valley on Friday, March 26th.
The audience was all ears. Bobby Moresco is a back-to-back Oscar winner for Crash and Million Dollar Baby and James Dalessandro is a best-selling author and screenwriter of Pixar’s soon-to-be first live action film about political corruption in San Francisco during the time of the Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire.
It was obvious the two men had respect for each other. The road to getting a script produced is not an easy one. While being turned down by every studio in Hollywood, Bobby had both family cars repossessed and had to give up his house because he couldn’t pay the mortgage. James quipped that 1906 has been in development longer that it took San Francisco to be rebuilt after the earthquake and fire. Both were emphatic: if you can do anything else in life, anything at all that will make you reasonably happy, do it!
Writers live every moment thinking they have nothing to give, but they claw at their souls and give it their all. And this is what it takes to become a success. Bobby said that no one can stop you from writing, directing, producing, but they can stop you from getting paid. He advised that you have to take control of yourself and not depend on someone to give you anything.
Despite the challenges, they offered words of encouragement and advice, one of the most important of which is find your voice; look for something personal in the human condition that you want to explore. Find a story that keeps your fire lit.
Drama is two ideas of equivalent strength in opposition to each other. Essential to any piece of drama is the core question, "do I care what's going to happen next?"
On the subject of writer’s block, “Sit at your desk involved in your world. Something will come. Even if it’s bad, it will lead to good writing.”
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