Inside the Untold Journey of Creating a Hit Movie Far from Hollywood Lights with Adam Burke and Jud Nichols
Ashley
And how do you guys… so you mentioned Syd Field and Blake Snyder, maybe you can touch on that a little bit. How do you guys approach screenplay structure? I know there’s always a lot of pushback. It’s sometimes it could be too formulaic. Some people just like having that sort of guidepost in your script, but maybe you can speak a little bit to that. How did you guys approach screenplay structure with this?
Adam Burke
I definitely leaned into the hero’s journey, the 12 steps in Joseph Campbell’s book, the hero’s journey. And I don’t feel like it’s formulaic because there’s moments where the hero denies the journey and then he eventually or she has to jump into it. There’s things like that, but how do you make them so they don’t feel tropey? And what I realized in this whole process is, no matter how you try to avoid tropes and get it to be right on film or on paper, it’s going to look different and be different when it comes out the other side. There’s just so many things that are left on the cutting room floor. There’s so many moments when you’re shooting that you think are going to be great and they don’t work. You’re on set. It’s just like, this isn’t working. How do we do this? How do we redo this? And so, yeah, as far as the structure, I would say I definitely leaned into Joseph Campbell’s 12 points, but it’s a feeling. I think the best thing that we found was table reads. Judd and I did a few of them together at the beginning and then eventually we brought in a couple of actors. And then towards the end, when we were in the last few iterations, we would bring in real actors from theater and from screen actors from the area. And we just paid $20 for the evenings for them to come in and do a read and some food. And it was great. Everyone had a blast, but to be able to hear the words come alive and what doesn’t work is extremely valuable. And then also just the flow of the story. I think the table reads were extremely helpful for me anyway.
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