About Steve :: Writer :: Interview

"Steve Martin: Writer"
Written By magazine

Writer's Guild of America
June, 1999

    
   
Steve Martin: Writer
http://www.wga.org/WrittenBy/0699/stevemartin1.html
Written By, the magazine of the Writer's Guild, West
Written By Richard Stayton

"Her beauty is not a model's beauty. It's the beauty we see in someone at the second glance. The woman who turns you around from the inside, after hours or maybe days have gone by. Right now, dressed in her bathrobe, she is looking up at the sky. Not longingly, but curiously, as if she were looking for something."
From Roxanne


If you're looking for the arrow through his head, or the wild and crazy guy, read no further. But if you're open to surprises, here's a serious and literary guy with something to say. Ever since 1988, when he won a Writers Guild award for his Roxanne screenplay (based on the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand), Steve Martin has been quietly emerging as one of the best writers in and outside the business. His lineup of achievements is formidable: scripts for L.A. Story, A Simple Twist of Fate (suggested by George Eliot's novel Silas Marner) and Bowfinger's Big Thing; several plays, including the hit Picasso at the Lapin Agile; sketches and stories for The New Yorker and The New York Times; collected writings in his bestseller, Pure Drivel; critical essays for art publications; a screen adaptation of A.R. Gurney's play Sylvia (in pre production) and a novel in progress. Not bad for a kid born in Waco, Texas, raised in Garden Grove, California, who performed magic and balloon tricks for tourists in Disneyland's Merlin Shop during high school, then at Knott's Berry Farm as an undergraduate while seriously studying to become a professor of philosophy. (Granted, Martin considered an academic career to be "the same as show business.") When Bowfinger is released on July 23, yet another side of Martin will reveal itself: a satirist who can aim insider barbs at the industry he's grown to love and hate. He remains unpretentious about his literary ambitions, as you'll soon read, and if pushed for profundity will quote novelist J.P. Donleavy: "Writing is a way of turning your deepest pain into money." Martin is adamant that he'll never endure stand up comedy again, and in conversation you get the feeling that, despite his lucrative screen performances, he'll soon be a lapsed actor pursuing fulltime his evolving passion: writing.

Richard Stayton: This seems like perhaps the most fertile period of your life.

Steve Martin: In terms of writing, definitely. So many things started for me in the 1990s. This association with The New Yorker and the ability to write those pieces I didn't have the ability to write those before. I don't know what happened. I suddenly started writing them and there they were. That led me into other kinds of writing, more thoughtful things. I'm just in the mood.

RS: In Pure Drivel, you describe taking three years off, vowing to do nothing. And during these years you 'accidentally' wrote plays, sketches, screenplays and had what you call 'a reorganization of self' a 'retrogression.'

SM: 'If you really want to work, stop working.' If I'd kept working at the pace and the motivation I was working at...well, it was just dull. Nothing good was coming from it. So I just rested, met friends, read, traveled and did all this work by accident. I wasn't even aware I was doing anything.

RS: So during this time off from your career, did you just write as an excercise, or do you write every day?

SM: No, no. Just write when I feel like it.

RS: That's a luxury.

SM: I know. It is a luxury I have. But I still get the work done. I mean, I wonder if I could live on my writing salary, and I don't think I could. Even writing one or two days a week, that's all I really do. Unless I get hot on something, like a screenplay. Then I'll work every day or five days a week.

RS: Do you work with pen, pencil, typewriter or computer?

SM: Computer. It's fun to type. But yeah, the thing is, it's like, with a New Yorker piece, if I get the idea, I won't write anything down. I'll think about it for a week or two, and then when I go to write, it takes an hour or two, or maybe a couple of days.

RS: Do you start from a character? For Steve Martin, performer, to portray?

SM: No, I don't think about that at all. With Roxanne, three days before shooting I said to the producer, 'You know, I never thought of how I'm going to play this.' It wasn't that I was writing it with myself in mind to act in it. In other words, first I write, and then I'll act.

RS: Then are you a writer first and performer second?

SM: I don't think of myself as a performer anymore. I can talk easier about writing than I can about performing. Performing, I've talked about it enough. I can't even think of one thing new about it. And I'm more interested in writing.

RS: When did you begin to change your focus?

SM: In the 1990s somewhere, probably when I wrote my play (Picasso at the Lapin Agile). I had been searching for something. I was going along on the same path, and I thought, 'I know there's a next step in comedy. I don't know what it is.' I even thought of having a salon with my comedic friends, just to talk about it, see what was next on the horizon instead of just stagnating.

RS: You were stagnating?

SM: A little bit, but simultaneously I was writing this play. Later, I looked back and saw that the thing that I was searching for I was already doing.

RS: When did you realize that?

SM: After the play was accepted. The writing of the play was the coming together of five or six events. One was just the need to do something a little different. The second was sitting in the theater in New York seeing a very funny play, and I said, 'Now this takes talent to write a play and make people laugh in a theater this takes talent. I wonder if I could ever do that.' I went through it logically. I'd been in front of audiences my whole life. I'm good at editing. If something's not working I fix it, because I have to listen to the audience night after night, which is theater. Simultaneously, I was reading this John Richardson book on the life of Picasso, because I've always been interested in Picasso. And everything just came together. I just thought: 'This is the subject I'm going to write about.' I felt I had something to say about it, too. That's the important thing. You've got to have something to say.

RS: What did you feel you had to say?


SM: That art and science, at their most creative levels, operate in the same way. The thinkers of art and science have creative, mystical insights that are not a formula. I believe that the theory of relativity appeared to Einstein whole. It wasn't linked to anything. I'm sure he worked on it, but initially I believe it just sprang into his mind and he saw things in a different light. I think that's what an artist does, too. I deeply believe in the subconscious as the writer's friend.

RS: Is the subconscious always your ally? Can't it lead you astray?

SM: That might be, but I think in our little Hollywood world, where you get trapped into being not creative, the subconscious is our friend, because that's where everything creative comes from. I remember this quote by David Mamet from this great little book called Three Uses of the Knife. Mamet says that nothing artistic has ever come from the conscious mind. I know what he means.

RS: How do you access the subconscious?

SM: For writers, I think time away from the work is very important. I think if you fill yourself up with conscious thoughts when you're writing, you're just killing off access to your true creative side. And if you rid yourself of those conscious thoughts you have to have conscious thoughts in order to get the thing done, that's what writes it but you also have to open those doors to unconventionality which just rests inside you. Time away helps those thoughts come up, they just start occurring. I think every writer has had the experience when you have a problem and can't write anymore. You're at a dinner, and suddenly an idea pops into your head. I think it's because your subconscious is constantly working. Sometimes when I get stuck I just pose the problem: Why am I here? I don't know what this character is going to do, I don't know what that person is going to say. I take two, three days away, or sometimes a week, and just stop working, and suddenly there it is.

RS: How does that match with your work in Hollywood?

SM: There's an important moment in my work. After I wrote my play, I thought, why can't I write a screenplay with the same spirit as my play? When I wrote my play I didn't know what I was going to say. Why can't I do a screenplay like that? You have to know kind of what you're going to say, but why don't I just write what I think is funny and what's making me laugh? When I was writing my play I was laughing. I kind of lost that. So that's the spirit with which I approached Bowfinger.

RS: Isn't that risky when a film costs millions to make?

SM: Mike Nichols once told me, 'I think in everything we do, there should be a moment when you've written something and say, "Can we do that?"' And so I had a lot of those moments in Bowfinger. Of course, the answer is always yes, you can do that. I don't mean just pushing the envelope, either. I don't mean sexually or [with] language. I mean our own limitations that we set up inside our head: What we think is funny, what we think isn't funny. You've got to break through that.

RS: Do you ever judge a film's success by how much money it makes? Ever write just for the money?

SM: That's a hard question to answer, because you always want it to make money. But it's not why you're writing it. It's not [that] at all, no. Because how can you write a big hit? It's not the way it works. You write something good and then it becomes a hit, in my view. You can't write with dollar signs in your eyes if you're going to do anything good. It can be done and people do it, but it seems like a much safer route to try and write something good and interesting.

RS: So first you write from heart and soul, for yourself?

SM: Always. But I'm in a luxurious position.

RS: Did you ever know anybody in the business like Bowfinger?


SM: A lot of times, especially early on. Same kind of energy, same kind of desperation. I don't think it comes through in this film, but there's an anger that people have. I knew one producer who had a bowl on his desk filled with razor blades with people's names on them.

RS: On the razor blades?

SM: Yeah. People who wronged him. I love the peripheral Hollywood. There's a whole world outside our core that is real, that represents people trying to get into the business, people who are in the business and just need a break. I've always had an affection for it because I was once part of it, too. I remember when I started I didn't know anything about how to get in. It's a little different now. I think people have a better understanding of how to get in.

RS: Your first writing job began in 1968 with The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The gig was an accident?

SM: Yes. A girl I was dating knew Mason Williams, the head writer, and she gave him some of my material. They were looking for young people under 30, because it was 1967. It was just a fluke.

RS: You knew nothing about writing at the time?

SM: I had written things in college, silly little riffs. That's all I submitted to them, and later some of them were published in Cruel Shoes, a book I did. I really learned about writing, about structuring humor and jokes, writing scenes, writing sketches. You know, I'd never written anything funny in my life before I got that job. I'd never done any writing except for these little pieces in college that nobody understood.

RS: Growing up, did you ever have any thoughts of becoming solely a writer?

SM: Not really. I was writing to be a stand up comedian. That was writing on my feet, really. You sort of add something in one night, then you remember it, develop it.

RS: Still, you won an Emmy for The Smothers Brothers, and you co wrote a variety of scripts with Carl Reiner. You also won a Writers Guild Award for Roxanne, your first solo script. What inspired that script?

SM: At the time I was just examining movies, my movies, and I thought, what is more interesting than story? Nothing. And I always loved Cyrano de Bergerac, and I thought there's a great, great story. And I got the play, read different translations, had my own translation done. I thought it was ripe for updating, because many of the references in the play are 19th century, and some of them don't mean anything to us anymore. I knew that the long speech in the bar, where he has to do 20 jokes about his own nose, could be done with modern jokes and modern references. But why do it? I was talking to a friend of mine, David Goodman, who's a screenwriter. 'I want to do this update, but I can't justify it.' And he looked at me and said, 'Cyrano gets the girl.'

RS: Your next solo script was L.A. Story.

SM: I was deeply involved with that script. I felt I was really on to something, something from inside me. The similarity between L.A. Story and Bowfinger is that I didn't always know where I was going, which I think is key to writing non fomulaic screenplays. Because if you don't know where you're going, the audience doesn't either. The characters guide you and the story starts guiding you, and things occur as you're writing it that you could never plot on 3 by 5 cards.

RS: It's a double love story in that the weatherman character also has a love affair with Los Angeles. Your city resembles a midsummer night's dream forest.

SM: I really wanted it to be a mystical place. However, Los Angeles is not mystical, but it is magical. It's kind of balmy and sexy, and it has so many different levels.

RS: In the 'Hissy Fit' story from Pure Drivel you wrote about a New York journalist coming to a 'thong based culture...As the surface is unpeeled, a deeper level is revealed, but just below that the surface level appears again.'

SM: So many levels here, of aspiration and intelligence. In New York, the level is pretty constant, it's either intellectual or nothing. Here, it's intellectual, it's fantastical, it's stupid. It's just a real melting pot of the brain.

RS: What makes your most successful scripts work, both Roxanne and L.A. Story, is that they're love stories. Both end with these great confessions of love. In that wonderful voice over at the end of L.A. Story, you say, 'There are only two things in my life I will never forget '

SM: 'There's someone for everyone.'

RS: 'Even if you need a pickaxe, a compass '

SM: ' and night goggles to find them.'

RS: And 'Romance does exist deep in the heart of L.A.' In Bowfinger there aren't any references to romance.

SM: I wanted to write big physical comedy that wasn't sentimental. Although it turned out that there is some sentimentality in Bowfinger, because they sort of get happy that they made the movie, but there's no romance. That's part of the premise.

RS: That there's no romance in Hollywood?

SM: No, just that in the movie I didn't want this big love story. I wanted to dwell on the comedy.

RS: Where did the idea for Bowfinger originate?

SM: I'm not sure. When I was shooting Pennies From Heaven I thought, 'Gee, we've got the sets, and we've got the camera, and we're shooting this particular script. What if there was another script for the same sets, the same actors and the same costumes?' And I sort of joked around with that. For a while we did one free take after each real take of this false movie we called Looking for Ernie. You know, I'd just be going, 'Where's Ernie? Where's Ernie?' And we'd shoot it as a joke. Something in that sparked the idea that you could create a film without a central figure.

RS: So the Bowfinger idea gestated for almost 10 years?

SM: It was even longer than that. I think it was more like the mid 1980s. It was around when I was writing Roxanne. I remember I was married, because I ran it by my ex wife.

RS: Do you always test stories with others before writing?

SM: I talk ideas down with people. Get a little feedback, if they think it's interesting, and that helps me a lot.

RS: What, if anything, came from the subconscious while writing this script?

SM: An example? In Bowfinger I was writing along, and I had this stuntman character, and I didn't know he was the star's brother. I came to this scene, and then the stuntman said, 'Well, I'm his brother.' Now, I knew I needed something plotwise there to happen. But when you're just writing along, and you hear him saying that about being his brother, and you didn't have any idea that it was going to turn out that way, I think it proves something about the subconscious.

RS: So you sit down to write a script and you don't really know what's coming, is that correct?

SM: Well, you know, anything can happen. In this case, with Bowfinger, I knew the beginning, I knew some of the characters, I didn't know all of the characters, and I knew the end. In the end, all I had was they get the movie done. And I had maybe a couple scenes in my head, but it was just more pleasurable to start writing and see what was going to start happening. Writers get a rhythm in their head, and they go, 'I know we need something here. I know that something has to happen here at this moment.' I often think I know that this is completely opposite to what I said but you know by page 20 something better be started. Maybe by page 15.

RS: Have you ever studied screenwriting books, or taken a class on how to write a script?

SM: No. I think if you have something to say none of that matters. If you're trying to write a screenplay as a generic thing, all that technique matters. If you have an idea, nothing matters. If you're an artist, it doesn't matter. You have something to say and you've got your way to say it. I thought Pulp Fiction was an important screenplay, because it broke all the rules. And The Crying Game. We see that it's possible to have a 20 minute scene off the top in two shot. I think there's the rules for when you want to write something generic, and no rules when you're going to write something that's actually really interesting.

RS: What other movies have influenced you?

SM: My own successes and failures have influenced me more than anything. When I say something better happen by page 15, that's because in the movies I wrote, you find yourself, when you're editing it, moving up the major event to where it would be approximately page 15. I noticed when I wrote a 125 page screenplay, 30 to 40 minutes is being cut out, so I didn't write 125 page screenplays anymore, I wrote 106 page screenplays. Because why cut out 30 pages? It's got to damage your movie in some way. These are my own little rules.

RS: You once quoted e. e. cummings, 'Like the vaudeville comedian, I enjoy the precision that creates movement.' Does that still hold true for you?

SM: I think so, absolutely. Precision creating movement. I don't mean physical movement as in running. I'm talking about movement in the audience, of laughter.

RS: What are you writing now?

SM: A longer piece. A novel.

RS: A comic novel?

SM: A novel, but not really comic. It's got some funny things. I don't know if I'll ever publish it even. It's just something I want to write. It's something that I want to write about that happened to me, in a way.

RS: Is it something you want to talk about?

SM: You know, when writers start talking about their novel...well...

RS: Sounds like the proverbial novel in progress that every writer imagines, right?

SM: Yeah. Seems pointless.

RS: Is there any single moment or event that changed Steve Martin the performer into Steve Martin, writer?

SM: No. I'd say it's maturity, age, self examination, experience painful experiences - conversations, talking, thinking about it. Thinking about life. And it's having something to say. In my case, I've lived long enough. Learning how to open those doors up, to understand that you do have something to say. It took me this long to finally discover that I had something I want to speak about.

RS: Can you express that 'something' outside of your work?

SM: No I can't, because it's expressed in the individual piece.

RS: If they read nothing else, what would you want to say to your Guild peers, if anything, that you know to be true about writing?

SM: Always make room for the unexpected in yourself. To allow the unexpected thought into your head, and to be able to completely turn something around and go in a completely different direction, if you're guided that way by spontaneous thought.

++++++++

Side Bar
To be read if I win:
Thank you very much for this great honor. It was a collaborative effort and I would like to thank those who gave their comments, criticisms and suggestions.

To be read if I don't win:
You pigs, you idiots. You wouldn't know a good screenplay if it walked up to you and vomited on your shoe.

--Steve Martin's acceptance speech upon winning the "Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium" Writers Guild Award for Roxanne
 		    
 
Back to Top