DOHA: Multi-award-winning screenwriter, director and leading US indie producer James Schamus shared his journey to becoming a filmmaker, at Qumra in a candid, humorous and inspirational master class on Sunday.
The session was the first of five master classes during the second edition of Qumra, the annual industry event by Doha Film Institute (DFI) designed to nurture the development of emerging filmmakers.
Schamus recalled how he got interested in film, growing up in Los Angeles and watching silent movies on Friday nights on TV. He described his first meeting with Ang Lee when he co-founded the US production company Good Machine in the early 1990s with Ted Hope, and decided to focus on making ‘no budget movies’.
“Ted loves to make lists and made a list of everyone who had made a short film in the last 10 years but had never made a feature. Ang had made a short while at NYU Film School and it was amazing. So we called his agent and were told he was working on some big projects and thanks for the interest but we heard nothing back.
“Then two weeks later we got a call out of the blue from Ang saying he’d won a screenplay prize in Taiwan and had $300,000 to make a feature and he’d heard we were the guys who made movies for no money.”
From that first encounter grew a long working collaboration that spanned nine movies, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won four Academy Awards and remains the highest-grossing non-English-language film in the US. It was screened at Qumra as part of the Modern Masters Screenings.
On the importance of casting directors, Schamus discussed how much he enjoys the casting process when working with first-time filmmakers.
“My heart goes out to actors. I admire them as they risk more than anybody and they are very vulnerable. They need respect so I always try to give as long and wide a space for emotions to play themselves out and let them know we will catch them if they fall. Casting is 90 percent of directing.”
On his recent move into directing – first with the short documentary That Film About Money in 2014 and his feature directorial debut Indignation, he said: “Directing is a disease that strikes middle-aged producers. I knew I was always susceptible, but I’d always had the luxury of writing for Ang so why would I have done it before!”
Asked about the key to success in becoming a screenwriter and his advice in overcoming the biggest challenges he has faced as a writer, he joked: “The biggest problem is getting started. Screenplays are a purely instrumental document; they are rhetorical documents that are not in and of themselves works of art. My definition of a screenplay is 124 pages of begging for money. You are not writing a sonnet, it doesn’t have to be particularly elegant, it has to be persuasive.”
The Peninsula
