Writers Panel at the SBIFF 2011

Reviewed by Veronica Vanglin. Viewed at Lobero theatre.

2011’s line up of Writer’s Panel at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival was really impressive. Michael Arndt the writer of Pixar’s Toy Story 3, Lisa Cholodenko writer and director of The Kids Are All Right, Scott Silver – The Fighter, Charlie Mitchell – Get Low, amazing David Seider writer of The King’s Speech and Aaron Sorkin the brain behind The Social Network were all there. The lot of them were really smart, funny and interesting to listen to and Anne Thompson, the moderator, did a great job and had relevant questions.

Michael Arndt did a big debut with his first script Little Miss Sunshine that won several Oscar awards. Best writing, original screenplay was one of them. Pixar hired Arndt while Little Miss Sunshine was still in production and he got the difficult task to write Toy Story 3. It was difficult because Woody, the protaganist, was already so developed in the earlier two movies, so to find a new lesson for Woody to learn, and obsticles to over come, was not an easy challange. Lisa Cholodenko walked the less glamourous way to success. She was sitting in cafe´s writing on anyting she could get a hold of. The Kids Are All Right is based on her own life and it took her 5 years to finish the script. Scott Silver admits that the Fighter is a story that has already been done, but “I did it my own” he says. How, we will never know. David Seidler’s story goes back a long time. He had a bad stutter himself as a kid and saw King George VI as a big inspiration. He had a lot of coincidences while in the process of learning more of what happened. He found Linoel Low’s son whom could tell Seidler alot about his father’s process of curing the king. He also found out that his own uncle went to see mr. Low for his stutter. Aaron Sorkin already had the story, all he had to do was make it more interesting and make it work as a film. He emenated from Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post and from there he tried to go from facts as much as he could.

They gave their best advises for people who want to become writers. Most of them said that they write on index cards to keep the story structured and write with speed, don’t stop because it can be  struggle to start again. Scott Silver is a big performare of procrastinating. “I research until it gets ridicolous” Silver said. Isolate yourself and ask yourself questions about what you have in the story and what you want. Charlie Mitchell said that he had to take a break for a few days before he could write that something bad is going to happen to the main character. He says that he feels bad when the character have no idea.

The Writer’sPanel was probably the best Panel this year. Great moderator and a great line up. I especially liked how intelligent they all where and how they very often spoke in quotes. My favorite one came from David Seidler talking about how he felt when he first saw The King’s Speech:  “For the first time in my life as a stutterer, my voice had finally been heard.”