dd:
Noel, you are well known as the author of the best selling
Hard Core Roadshow: A Screenwriter's Diary from 1997.
It is less known that you have made forays into the field of
digital writing, having served as a consultant in seminars
on interactive fiction. What was the aim of these seminars
and what was your role in them?
NB: My experience in
new media is limited, frankly, to 'using' (why does it sound
like an illicit drug?) and to - as you have it - consulting.
I'll point out that this came about while I was teaching
screenwriting at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto (this
is an elite film school, Canada's rough equivalent of the
American Film Institute in LA). In the late '90s, the CFC
opened its Habitat New Media Program to train students in
the arts and techniques of digital storytelling. In 2000 I
was invited to join the Habitat faculty as a storytelling
consultant. The idea was that a screenwriter implicitly
understands how to bridge the gap between the written word
and the image, how to tell stories in pictures, and how to
'play with time,' writing in a story mode built on 'cuts'
between moments.
Students in the program
(most are sophisticated people in their 30s with diverse
professional and creative backgrounds) form teams and
develop prototypes for story-oriented new media projects.
The focus is on 'digital interactive storytelling' - which
as we all know is a great-sounding phrase that barely hints
at the minefield of contradictions and complexities of a
practice that often feels more like a proposition than an
actual artform. Through two terms in this program, I gave
student teams feedback and advice, usually at pains to
remind them that technology that permits the user to
navigate a story-world spatially is a great innovation but
it doesn't exempt the artist from delivering the emotional
and intellectual satisfactions that we demand from more
conventional forms of 'story.' I used to repeat Billy
Wilder's dictum for screenwriters and movie directors:
"Never be boring."
dd:
The option of alternative navigation in hypertext has been
enthusiastically welcomed in the late 80's and during the
90's. It failed to convince the audience, and even scholars
don't all see the future of digital writing in the link
anymore. As Tim Parks states in his article "Tales Told by
the Computer" in The New York Review of Book's in
October 2002 about our ambiguous relationship to alternative
and linearity: "The mind's frequent yearning for a freedom
from linearity, often expressed in the nonchronological
ordering of events in the text, is held in fruitful tension
with (indeed expressed through) the implacable forward
movement of the numbered pages. A desire to be outside time,
free from linearity, can only be expressed within time and
the bounds of the line." Do we, longing for an alterable
world, at least want it to be described in a well-designed
unalterable way?
NB: I think we're all
curious about new ways of seeing and thinking and reading.
Brion Gysin and William Burroughs experimented fifty years
ago with 'cut up' fictions, essentially texts written in
which sections or lines were cut from one place and pasted
elsewhere, to see what surprising narrative turns and
insights might be yielded by an experiment in guided
randomness. But even finished cut-ups unfold in linear
sequence. The Surrealist Andre Breton developed the
Surrealist parlour game called "The Exquisite Corpse," in
which one 'player' would write the first three words of a
sentence - an article, an adjective, and a noun - and then
fold the paper over so that the next player could not see
it. The next player would write a verb, an article and an
adjective... and the next player would finish the sentence
with a noun. The paper would be unfolded to reveal
surprising nonsense sentences (or surprisingly good poetry).
For example: "The exquisite corpse drinks the new wine." As
long as there were enough people to participate, these were
alterable sentences; yet the finished products were still
lines that we read from left to right. Clearly, we are
readers and viewers in a structurally-bound world. Writing
and films are unavoidably expressions rooted in time and the
bounds of the line.
The question is, can we
create well-designed alterable stories on the computer?
People who know much more about this than I do have probably
thought about the nature of time and perception as they
consider these questions. So I'm probably just following
others whom I haven't read when I guess that the solution
probably lies in adding verticality to the horizontal
narrative model, making an x-y graph out of the idea of
'story.' Can this more multi-dimensional model free us from
the idea of the link as a digression along the horizontal
line? Perhaps we'll get used to viewing multiple screens of
text and image, with narrative possibilities unfolding
simultaneously. Mike Figgis's "Time Code" film (with its
four-way split screen) was an interesting early experiment
in this area.
dd:
"Hard Core Roadshow" is about taking a book and turning it
into a script, which in turn becomes a film. Could you
imagine taking a book and turning it into a piece of digital
writing? Could you imagine creating such a piece from
scratch?
NB: This is an
interesting question: would a writer with experience
adapting literature for relatively mainstream movies see an
upside to adapting literature for digital media? Yes,
perhaps, in the case of short fiction, no in the case of the
novel or longer narrative nonfiction.
Short fiction or poetry -
from the traditional short story, to experimental
microfictions, ficto-criticism, poems, short literary
collages, and perhaps comic books and graphic novels - might
lend themselves to new media adaptation precisely because
the conciseness of these forms limits the user's interactive
options and contains the experience to a matter of minutes
rather than hours. I also think that, from a production
standpoint, there's a do-ability factor in these shorter
forms (in terms of visual and sound production, hypertext
options, narrative branching) that might prove far too epic
an undertaking in the case of the novel. In terms of
economics, such projects are likelier to be financed in an
arts-grant context than as commercially underwritten
entertainments with a profit motive. From an art-making
standpoint, there's a lot of freedom available to the
adapter of short fiction as long as there's no commercial
imperative to be 'popular.'
With comics or graphic
novels, there may be some more commercial potential,
especially if the narrative experience contains game or
puzzle elements. (By the way, Roberto, this
story-or-game-or-puzzle distinction strikes me as a major
conundrum in the semantics of new media classification,
since the popular audience seems to want interactivity to
mean 'play').
Why can't I imagine adapting
the traditional novel (in any genre or stratum of
'literariness') for new media when I have done so and will
do so again for film? First the simple economics: who's
paying the adapter? The grant-supported artist, or the new
media explorer adapting a short fiction as a labour of love,
can fulfill a variety of expressive goals where the time
invested is relatively short and production costs are
relatively low. In long-form adaptations, where is the money
going to come from to finance a complex, labour-intensive
piece of work that could take years to develop? As a writer,
I don't see a living in it yet because I don't see much of
an audience-base (unless, again, we're talking about games
with a modicum of narrative complexity). There is an
established industry and market for games. There is at best
curiosity about the potential for digital stories among some
culture-forward types but as yet no broad market. Outside of
gaming, people seem to prefer their entertainment to wash
effortlessly over them, like film or television - lie-back
as opposed to lean-forward experiences. I suspect that
average people checking out digital storytelling will wonder
where their reward is (i.e., is there a victory to be had? A
point total? A new personal best?). When they see that they
are not playing a game, and that the reward is the
experience itself, they'll bail, finding it to be more
'work' than 'play.'
As to the question of
creating original new media work... of course I could see
doing this. Of course, I'd have to take my populist
inclinations into consideration and perhaps try to aim high
in a low genre, like the mystery, to create something like
the new media analog to Godard's "Alphaville". I would want
to do more than arouse the idle curiosity of the user, I
would want to give her a stake in the story. I would
probably create a puzzle element, something to solve. But
for me, this is where things get fuzzy - at what point are
you really designing an elaborate game?
dd:
Roadshow provides great insight into the commercial
world of scriptwriting, one of the hardest is that there are
many people who have the final say on what the screenwriter
creates. Do you see a comparison between this connection of
text and film, and the connection of text and technology in
digital writing, where the writer does equally rely on many
aspects of a complex setting and may have to give in to the
progamer who has the final word about how something can be
rendered on screen?
NB: Certain
production realities have always influenced the writing of
films. In the Habitat program, the same considerations were
always coming into play in the creation of digital story
prototypes. Did the programmer have the 'final say'? It was
usually more of a collaborative process. It would depend on
the talents of the programmer and the limits and
capabilities of the technology. "We can do this with Flash,
we can do that shooting digital video, we don't have the
time or money to shoot a stack of fifteen versions of this
'scene' but maybe we can do three...." You see what I mean?
Where physical production or rendering come into play,
whether in new media or film, the writer and his/her
collaborators often have to make narrative adjustments and
improvisations to take technological or physical limitations
into account.
In writing the screenplay
for "Hard Core Logo" - adapted from an experimental novel by
author Michael Turner - I had to 'show' what the book had
'told.' I had to create a dramatic context and invent
incidents to illustrate things that the book might have
glossed or summarized. Sometimes, on a limited budget, the
screenwriter has to rework a script because the production
cannot afford a particular location, or cannot afford a
particular stunt. Sometimes a scene that you'd like to set
in a moving car has to be set somewhere else because the
production cannot afford to lock off a city road, or hire
elaborate camera-car equipment.
Generally a screenwriter
must take into account whether she is writing a modestly
budgeted independent film or a big-budget Hollywood film.
I've done both (my Hollywood film is in the works at any
rate). Lower budgeted films offer creative freedoms in terms
of theme and character that you don't get in Hollywood
films; big budget Hollywood films offer freedoms in terms of
writing for an epic scale that are not there at low budget
levels. The writer also takes into account the tastes and
demands of a director and actors, which are sometimes at
odds with one's own. Perhaps it is only the novelist or poet
who has complete and total control over her work.
dd:
What would be a screen writer's dream for digital
media?
NB: Rather than
adaptation, I am much more interested in the idea of the
emergence of an original new media genius who makes a life's
work of constructing an absorbing experience that is created
specifically FOR the computer, that perhaps (when the
technology exists) fulfills a Hamlet On the
Holodeck-type of potential, drawing the experiencer into
a simulated environment that all at once delivers the
aesthetic arrest of symphony, literature, film, theatre, tea
ceremony, and any other ritual construction you can think
of.
To this extent I've heard of
this film/television/new media project by Peter Greenaway
that sounds interesting. There's an enticing description of
it from the project's website at
www.tulseluper.net:
Peter Greenaway's
work in progress, The Tulse Luper Suitcase
Trilogy, is an ever-expanding series of simultaneous
divergent incomplete elements that (as is Greenaway's
wont) will probably demonstrate the (impossible) attempt
to express the infinity of representations that comprise
the whole world. It will incorporate many media forms:
three feature films, a TV series, two CD-Roms, 1001 (of
course) Internet stories, and it will take place
simultaneously in many cities throughout the
world.
Sounds like a step in the
right direction to me.
dd:
Let's see if a star from the old media can show us the way.
Thank you for the interview.
posted: February 14,
2003
dichtung-digital