“Wax on. Wax off.” For movie fans from the 80s, that dialogue is immediately identifiable as coming from The Karate Kid (1984). The screenplay was written by Robert Mark Kamen who has gone on to a notable career as a screenwriter including such movies as Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), A Walk in the Clouds (1995), The Fifth Element (1997), The Transporter (2002), and the recent release Taken (2008), another in Kamen’s successful collaborations with French writer-director Luc Besson. Interesting to note that Kamen also has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the U. of Pennsylvania.

This interview was recently featured at WGA.org. Here are a few excerpts:

Beyond the Karate Kid movies, how has the practice of martial arts informed you as a writer?

Well, I can write great action scenes. Action scenes are written like little movies. They’re in three acts, almost, and you have to fill up each act. And since I know a lot about fighting, I can be specific about it. But what I find is, you don’t have to when you have great choreographers like Cory Yuen or Woo-ping Yuen, who did Unleashed. You just sort of inform the scene by making it in three acts and let them put in all the technical stuff.

Do you have any advice for writers who may be struggling or trying to persevere at the beginning of their careers?

Oh, the way I look at it, they are all my direct competition, so I mostly tell all of them to go find another job and become lawyers. No, writing screenplays is so different from other writing, and if you really love it — a lot of screenwriters write because they want to direct, and they find screenwriting really painful, and they want to get out of it as soon as possible. And if that’s the case, I have nothing to say to them. That’s their path towards what they really want to do.

But if you want to be pure screenwriter, it’s much harder than when I broke in. Everyday there’s somebody at the studio that’s the flavor of the month. Completely ignore everything about the business, is my advice to anybody writing movies. Because if you pay attention to the business, it will kill you. You have to focus if you just want to be a pure screenwriter. And there aren’t a lot of us. There are a lot of guys and girls who want to be directors, who want to be producers, they want to expand. Don’t read Variety. Don’t listen to gossip. Don’t live in L.A., and write.

I write original screenplays every year besides the movies I get made, and I just put them away. Write what makes you excited, and if it makes you excited, and you’re any good, it will excite somebody else. And if it doesn’t excite them to buy it, it will excite them to let you write something that they have. Focus on what makes you happy every day, because you have to sit down every day and look at that blank page. And what’s gonna get you off? What’s gonna make you happy that day besides finishing the day, is that you write something that makes you have that particular feeling.

Enjoy the rest of the interview here.