Frank Spotnitz… Ten truths ARE out there… and other Screenwriting Truth Bombs

Here’s just some of what he generously shared with us in response to Bob’s notably perceptive questions:

He’s a “big believer” in luck. Be ready when it pulls up. “I think for all of us as writers – you work, you work, you work and you wait to get lucky. You can’t control when that’s going to happen. All you do is you just keep working and working and hoping you’re ready when that moment arrives.” He believes the reasons The Man in the High Castle didn’t get produced by anyone else were “one it was about Nazis – which scares people – and two it was vastly expensive. For Amazon, both of those things were pluses. They wanted to be noticed, they wanted controversy and they wanted to spend a lot of money. So it was just luck.”

Keeping a long narrative arc engaging is “really hard to do”. He reveals that in the X-Files “we were making it up as we went along and learning as we went along”. It occurred to him “probably in season three” that all the stories had to intersect into one. “I really didn’t know and it was when the movie came about that suddenly we had to have a coherence because the studio was insisting the movie had to give the audience something they couldn’t get from the TV series.” During the season four Christmas break they had to plot the movie, finish season four, broadcast season five and then release the movie. “So that’s when we really had a formal understanding of ‘how are we laying out all the clues of what’s going on with the aliens?’”

Writers learn things about themselves as they create their story worlds. As a writer he believes you “organise your fictional world in a way that you think is true…so it reflects you, whether you intended to consciously or not”. One of the themes he’s come to embrace is the importance of doing the right thing – but he says you shouldn’t expect the world to reward you for that. It’s something he teaches his own children. “I say you have to do the right thing because you have to live in your own skin.”

Character inversions can illuminate. In the Emmy-nominated X-Files episode “Memento Mori,” Scully is diagnosed with cancer. In one scene read with great sensitivity by Lowe and Taylor, Mulder visits her in hospital. “It was an inversion of the characters because it was (about) Mulder’s faith. It also, I think, was showing the secret of the show. In that ‘deeply romantic’ scene you see just how much Mulder loves Scully. “It’s a scene in a storyline that should belong exclusively to Scully, but actually the episode is as much his as hers. Because she’s so brave and stoic in the face of this diagnosis and he can’t accept it. I didn’t realise actually on the page the power of that scene until I saw how David (Duchovny) and Gillian (Anderson) played it.”

Popular references help convince the audience that the story is real. X-Files was his “film school for understanding that the way you scare people is by making things seem normal and familiar”. That’s why X-Files “by and large did not take place in big cities or with wealthy beautiful people – it was as ordinary as possible”. In The Man in the High Castle the cars were just like our cars – “only there were no optimistic tailfins like we would have had on our vehicles…It feels familiar but it also feels kind of upsetting, because it’s not exactly right”.

Be prepared to let go of some things. Especially in the Writers’ Room, so often the things he’s most attached to “fall out because it doesn’t fit the story”. When you’re doing it right “at a certain point the story has a life and logic of its own, and sometimes my external intention doesn’t survive”.

In serialised storytelling, “make sure you mine that moment fully before you go on”. In this environment of streaming, almost everything is serialised. In a serialised story “you’re only going pass this point in your characters’ lives once.” So “don’t go so fast in your plotting that you skip moments of realisation, character growth, emotional drama and texture”.