WRITING FOR THE INNER GEEK

There was a recent interview with Pixar director Andrew Stanton over at Suite101 and Slash Film pulled this quote from the article:

“The day we start thinking about what the audience wants, we’re going to make bad choices. We’ve always holed ourselves up in a building for 4 years and ignored the rest of the world, because nobody are bigger movie geeks than we are, so we know exactly what we are dying to see with our family and kids. We don’t need other people to tell us that. We trust the audience member in ourselves.”

I believe that there is some truth to that statement. However on the other side of the coin I also follow Bill Cunningham's point of view in which as a writer we need to get back to our pulp roots and think in terms of what a pulp writer would create.

Writing for that inner geek inside of us all is brilliant and is what we should always be doing, but in doing so we are walking a fine line. We can easily see something in our minds a scene that we are writing as being the next most exciting thing to happen on film, but a audience may not see it with the same pair of eyes.

To me to appease that inner geek and the audience at the same time is the real trick to pulling off a great script. The challenge is to know when to listen to yourself versus how a audience may react. That my friends is how a good script can be made.