Writing, Arts & Entertainment

Research

Lesson time 09:45 min

Good research is the key to a great script. Bad research is a waste of time. How can you tell the difference? Aaron shares lessons from Malice and The Social Network to help you gather the information you really need.

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Topics include: Two types of research • How to talk to people • How to interview

Aaron Sorkin

Teaches Screenwriting

Aaron Sorkin teaches you the craft of film and television screenwriting.

Preview

There are two kinds of research that you do when you're writing. The first is nuts and bolts research. That's literally find out how many nuts and bolts were used to make the Golden Gate Bridge. It's hard research, specific research I don't mean hard difficult. I mean that it's specific. It's not subjective at all. With a movie like Steve Jobs or The Social Network where I'm technically illiterate. I don't know much about computers at all, so there was going to be a lot of the first kind of research of the hard kind. How does a computer work kind of thing. The other kind of research is when you don't know what you're looking for yet, and it's research where you're trying to find the movie. For instance, with the movie Steve Jobs, I really didn't know what I was going to write. I didn't know what it was going to be about. Of course, I had Walter Isaacson's biography to work off of, but I knew I wasn't going to be writing a straight biopic. So I wanted to meet with and talk with as many people as I could who were close to Steve and hope that some points of friction made themselves known and that I could write about that. With the second kind of research, you absolutely you need to hear it yourself, because again, you don't know what you're looking for and you never know what might pop up. With The West Wing, someone will say in passing, you know, gee, did you know that the president's motorcade leaves as soon as the President gets in the car and that sometimes a junior aide will get left behind when they're out in the middle of the country someplace and somebody ran into a gas station to buy a postcard, they came out they found that the motorcade was gone. You think, great. There's an episode. That kind of thing. [MUSIC PLAYING] You never know where a cool story is going to come from. So that's why you want to talk to as many people as possible. By the way, people are very nice. They will oftentimes come to you. You'll get an email saying I heard you're doing a movie about this. Let me tell you my story. But it'll be dozens and dozens of people that you're talking to over a stretch of months. You have to start somewhere it's. A standing jump. So again, using Steve Jobs as an example, you knew you wanted to start with Steve Wozniak with people in the book who were close to him. And then in talking to them, they'll say gee, if you really want to know about that, you should talk with this person and that kind of thing. You'll find at the end of all of it, that 90% of the research didn't make it into the movie, but you need to do it anyway. In this case, it was easy. It was a high-profile project that was a high-profile book and then it became a high-profile movie. I have a research assistant and usually it's that research assistant tracks down the e-mail address. I don't know how he does it. I'll find out though, and ...

About the Instructor

Aaron Sorkin wrote his first movie on cocktail napkins. Those napkins turned into A Few Good Men, starring Jack Nicholson. Now, the Academy Award-winning writer of The West Wing and The Social Network is teaching screenwriting. In this class, you’ll learn his rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell. By the end, you’ll write screenplays that capture your audience’s attention.

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Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin teaches you the craft of film and television screenwriting.

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