Written Interview: Alan Ball

In a 1-week screenwriting course I just taught online, we used American Beauty as a study script. Since the course is titled "Screenplay Universe: The External and Internal Worlds," and the tagline of AB is "Look closer," it is a perfect fit to explore the worlds beneath the visible world in a screenplay. During the course, I found this interview at InsideFilm.com with the movie's screenwriter Alan Ball. Here's a revealing excerpt:

My last season on Cybill, I had just switched agencies because I really wanted a features career, and I had done some screenplays. I had done an adaptation of my play, Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, and I had done a rewrite for Warner Bros. And I really liked writing in that medium, but I felt like the agency where I was wasn't really that powerful in features and they kept saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, we want you to have a features career," but really they just, you know, wanted to have my TV commission.

So I switched agencies and I went to UTA. And my features agent, Andrew Cannava, who, bless his heart, said, "Well, you need to write a new spec script because everybody has read these scripts of yours that are floating around town, they know what they are. I don't think I can get them set up anywhere, and I need something to reintroduce you to the features community because, frankly, nobody knows who you are."

And he was right. And so I said, "Well, can we meet somewhere and I'll pitch you some ideas I have." And I pitched him two fairly standard romantic comedies that were pretty, you know -- if I couldn't pitch them in one sentence, I could pitch them in two. And then I pitched him American Beauty, which I had tried to write as a play years ago and I had sort of been toying around with these characters and their stories for years. And as you can imagine, the pitch was rambling, but I think I was really excited, you know.

"You think it's about this, but it's about something else, and you're feeling it -- oh, and underneath it is all about this whole sort of what's the nature of reality and there's this kind of metaphysical thing." I was totally expecting him to just sort of go catatonic and fall out of his chair.

And to my surprise he says, "That's the one I think you should write." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because it's obviously the one you feel the most passionate about." It's the best piece of advice I ever got.

Two things. Yes, Ball got a start in LA writing for a sitcom (just like Charlie Kaufman). Second, remember that line:

"Because it's obviously the one you feel the most passionate about."

You can go through all the spec marketplace permutations and analyze your story concepts, both of which I think are important, but at the end of the day, you have to feel passion for your story. If you don't, don't write it. If you do, write the hell out of it.

You can read the rest of the Alan Ball interview here.