In Conversation with Robert Rosen

(Development News, October 2010)

“You better know how to talk…”

Screen Australia, in association with MIFF 37°South, presented a series of lectures at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival by educator and critic Robert Rosen, where he spoke on narrative storytelling and its significance both on and off the screen. Series moderator Sue Maslin poses 10 questions to this revered Hollywood insider.

Q1. What have you discovered to be the secret of successfully realising one’s vision on the screen?

When I was Chair of the Film Department and the Dean at the UCLA School of Film, Television and Theatre, it was perfectly clear that the great paradox, the core thing that was at the centre of creativity in film and television, was that the best works were personal visions realised in collaborative ways.

How the hell do you do that? You are working with absolutely the best people, who all have visions in their own right. All of you are storytellers – not just you, director, writer and producer – but also designers, editors, cinematographers and technicians. You all must become imbued with and understand the way that narrative works. You all must be able to participate.

When Quentin Tarantino made his first movie, he went to an older, wiser director and said, “How do I put my vision on the screen?” And the director said, “You don’t put your vision on the screen – other people with whom you talk put your vision on the screen, so you better know how to talk.”

Becoming articulate – theoretically, conceptually, intellectually – about story, narrative and how it works, is a requisite for creativity. So the notion of the personal and the collaborative, and the notion of theory and practice, became an essential, pivotal element of how we built the school.

Q2. So how do you teach creativity?

People say ‘you can’t teach creativity’ – you either have it or you don’t. Well, it’s true – you have an eye, an ear, life experiences that you bring to a work that are distinctive to you. But you can provide tools – and one thing tools can do is expand your sense of the possible so that you are querying and interrogating every aspect of the construction of story through sound, image and performance. And you can give courage. You can say that once you have seen the diversity of ways that stories are told, you may have the courage to find your own voice and tell it your own way.

Q3. Why is this idea that we need narrative in our lives, as social beings, in our communities, so fundamentally important?

Because it fulfils core human needs; that’s the way we make sense of the world. Otherwise you go crazy – you have all this input that’s unstructured, chaotic. Narrative enables you to put it together in some way that makes sense. Narrative is a way that you communicate. We hope to talk logically but we don’t talk logic; it’s narrative.

Narrative is a source of pleasure and at least part of it is hardwired. Research by neurobiologists shows that empathy seems to be hardwired in the brain. On another level – in the end, all I care about is the pay-off for creative people. It’s not abstract.

OK, this sounds big: narrative is the basis for survival. In order for us to survive, we need to live in the social world. In order to live in the social world, there has to be consensus about some things like, “You’re not going to kill him. You’re all going to walk out of here alive and happy.” How do you get that consensus when, as a human being you are physically separate from other human beings? You can do what you want; you can will your actions. How do you get that unity between self and community?

Well, you need to have values. You need to perform what one anthropologist called ‘the sleight of hand’ – that appears to resolve the irresolvable conditions of the human condition: self and community, for example, or repression and instinct.

Q4. So how does this translate into screen genres?

The Western is all about reconciling self and community. The sheriff alone in the street, in the gun duel – on the one hand, doing what a man’s got to do, totally on his own, establishing his identity – but his use of the gun is encoded within this vast social ritual. It’s got to be in sight and there are some rules about who draws first – it becomes a ritual of social solidarity. The Western is right in there, reconciling self and community. And that’s why it’s our epic, for America.

Q5. Some of the highly successful people that you brought to the school to talk about narrative storytelling were not necessarily from the creative arts or even from the screen industry – why was that?

To get a Native American storyteller to come in and talk about how “we would not exist in the midst of the homogenisation of American culture without our stories” was really important. To bring in, for better or worse, the CEOs of many of the biggest US corporations for whom branding is narrative because branding is fundamentally a product with a story.

Gene Simmons says, “I’m an ugly man who can’t sing but I know how to tell a story.” Kiss was based on B-Grade Universal horror films, the characters Simmons created. Decades later he is the endorser of about 2,400 products and is still performing. For him, it’s story.

Talk to the CEO of Six Flags Magic Mountain (theme park franchise in the US) when they were one billion dollars in debt and losing millions every year. He met with the various areas and said, “You think you’re in the carnival business – you’re not, you’re in the storytelling business. Let’s get our stories straight.”

The same in the political area. Susan Estrich is a professor of law at UCLA – she was the first woman to run a presidential political campaign, for Michael Dukakis. “That man,” she said, “had no sense of story. That photo of him in the tank factory with the funny little hat on – he looks like Mickey Mouse, he lost millions of votes. I told him, ‘Do not go to the tank factory!’ He didn’t understand how important story is to politics.”

It’s all about telling your story and winning support and you don’t do it abstractedly, you do it based on narrative.

Q6. So how do you teach this idea of narrative?

One of the assignments I gave to students at the film school was, “You’re making a movie and you’re telling a story: you have a political figure and you have one shot, one scene to convey that person has charisma – not abstractly but feeling it in your gut. Find the gesture.”

For me, I was thinking about Bill Clinton at an event at the White House. He’s giving out gold medals to people who were community organisers – this is the big moment in their life. There was an old man who’d been a fantastic community organiser, he gets no recognition in the Latino community. After putting on the medal, Clinton puts his arm around the shoulder of the guy and, with the other hand, points out his family in the audience and gets them to stand. And suddenly there is an electrical line running from his arm around the guy’s shoulder, putting him together with his family in this moment in his life. That’s working the stage – that is a scene in which a gesture tells a vast story.

Q7. In many ways you’re talking from a vantage point of a studio system that’s colonised and become the dominant narrative the world over. But it’s one of many narratives. Are there stories that cross cultures or time that are pervasive to all people, not just those of the dominant ideology?

Yes, and no. There are certain themes that are so deeply rooted and widely shared that they cross all cultures. Things like self and community, instinct and repression, inquisitiveness and scarcity, life and death. But the specific spin that you use, the specific articulation, has got to come out of your culture. And it is that combination of universality of access to the theme and the specificity that comes out of the uniqueness of your own culture, that will make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for example, sell $100 million despite the fact it’s got subtitles.

In essence, you have to draw on the worth and value of your own stories. But not in an idiosyncratic and self-indulgent way. The themes need to be transcendent and cross boundaries.

Paul Schrader (screenwriter of Raging Bull, Taxi Driver) taught a screenwriting course and his assignment was really interesting. He said, “I want you to think of something deeply and profoundly traumatic in your life. Don’t tell it – find a metaphor for it and tell the metaphor.” Something sufficiently close to you that you can give it verisimilitude, texture and dimension – but sufficiently distant from you that it will be of more interest to your lover and your mother. Something that will speak to broader audiences.

Q8. At the moment we’re being profoundly challenged by the possibilities of the digital media landscape and non-linear forms of storytelling. What’s your sense of where it’s all going?

Really interesting question. If I knew, I would be as rich and famous as our students. It’s one of the things we’ve got to take for granted in a historical sense. In 1895, movies were new. When people saw moving images on the screen, at least some of them said the world will never be the same again. These were transformative media, not simply evolutionary media.

The television that really hit in the 50s didn’t exist before then. Why do we assume it’s all over? That media forms – ways of telling and delivering stories – which will become ubiquitous in the culture, are only going to be a gloss on what existed in the past? I think down the line there will be new and equally transformative media forms.

Q9. What do you think we will be watching in the future?

I’ll bet money five years from now you’re going to increasingly see live performances, moving image media and digital technology interlaced with one another for one reason – you can’t pirate it. More than that, theatre can be big business – no one has really learned the lesson of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or the pleasures involved in live interactive relationships with the media, and expanded that in new forms. Somebody may do that.

Perhaps even the notion of interaction that extends beyond theatre. Interaction with multiple screens in multiple spaces, including the street, activities and what have you – new forms.

Q10. Do you think the nature of storytelling itself will change?

For me, Inception was a really interesting film. I’m not sure that it’s good, that’s not the point. But I find it an amazing milestone – why? Here we have a movie that is abstract, multiple layers of dreams within dreams within dreams. They give you explanations of the rules in the film that are so complex that you gotta be smarter than me to figure them out.

The storyline has no significant arc. It has a star – Leo DiCaprio – but it’s not a star turn. Essentially the star is in the construction. You have a bombardment of sound and images that is closer to a nightmare than a dream. The notions of temporality, spatiality and causality, for which we expect a kind of analogy to the real world, don’t exist. It is, for all intents and purposes, an avant-garde movie.

Now you know the folks at Fox didn’t sit around saying, “We’re going to spend $160 million on an avant-garde movie and see how it does.” Clearly they assumed it was mainstream, which is an indication that things have changed.

Things in the area of narrative have changed deeply and profoundly. Is it that it’s akin to the game – are we now accustomed to dealing with stories in the structure of games? I should add that Inception’s opening weekend in the US was $63 million. By the end of the week, when it should have plummeted on Monday, it was $91 million. People are now making projections of $300 million domestically.

Is it a new form of narrative? I think it’s a new form of processing experience. It is a new cognitive mapping of the world that younger people have in how they perceive and interior-ise and intersect and interact with narrative. This is a qualitative shift in how we experience narrative, and that’s a milestone film.