The Most Important Screenwriting Lecture You’ll Ever Encounter
'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' writer-director Céline Sciamma’s BAFTA lecture about her process challenges everything you think you know about screenwriting.
It’s very likely you presumed the headline of this article was unnecessarily hyperbolic, clickbait even, but, trust me, there is a very strong argument that the ideas presented in Céline Sciamma’s 2019 BAFTA lecture are so disruptive — that they challenge the traditional approach to screenwriting so radically — that the lecture in question might actually be the most important one on screenwriting you ever encounter. Because everything you think you know about outlining, characters, and conflict is about to be thrown out.
Sciamma — who is the writer-director of celebrated, truly breathtaking films like PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019) and PETITE MAMAN (2021) — begins her lecture by confessing how she writes contradicts her firmly held belief that films “should be prototypes and invent their own language.” But even with an experimental dynamic, she adds, “you still have to find a way of doing it, a method or process for searching and finding the ideas.”
For Sciamma, writing is all about questions and her method of doing that — her “central notion” as she puts it — is desire. One might quickly assume she’s describing need, which is often at the center of conflict, but that is not at all what she means by the word.
To me, writing is about having desire for ideas, therefore it is always about trying to build an architecture of multiple desires. The word desire is traditionally linked to cinema…yet desire is not a word we associate with screenwriters, or words. It is associated with the idea of images and making images. As a writer, you are only asked about desire as an initial spark that puts you at work: the desire to write that story. Or, in the more introspective psychoanalytic question: the desire under your story, your secret desire. It is pretty rare that you get to refer to your present desire, or desire building up.
For Sciamma, putting desire at the center of her process isn’t about anything like making her projects feel “organic or personal”. It’s about making the screenplay “sharp and uncompromising”.
It is about the construction and being radical with yourself, not self-indulgent at all. It’s about resisting easy pleasures and resisting the temptation of belonging. At that point I’m sure that feels quite abstract, mostly because desire doesn’t feel reliable as a method. Desire doesn’t even have the reputation of being accurate — can we trust someone’s desires?
Sciamma goes on to describe her job as a screenwriter to be locating that place where desire — both hers and her characters’ — is “precisely hitting…finding the point of impact and getting accurate about what you want, rather than thinking of desire as a romantic mystery about yourself.”
This screenwriting process requires three steps, which I will lay out in her words, explained through the lens of PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, with context from me.
Trigger warning: these steps fly in the face of everything you are taught in screenwriting manuals or from Hollywood. Yes, some of it can border on semantical with how screenwriting is taught in the States, but even in these cases, the nuance is actually quite revolutionary when you properly interrogate it. For the most part, Sciamma’s approach is a rebuke of much of contemporary mainstream cinema in Hollywood and certainly other English-language markets. Brace yourselves.
CÉLINE SCIAMMA’S THREE STEPS OF SCREENWRITING
STEP 1: GLOBAL DESIRES
The first step is identifying and locating your global desires for a film, understanding them, and being honest about them. This takes time because there are several impacts on different zones: political desire, aesthetic desire, production desire — you have to locate them and trust them enough to deconstruct them.
For PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, I had several big desires, for instance, that once located were designing the map of the film. I wanted to write the present of a love story, how it is born and how it grows patiently, but I also wanted to tell about the memory of a love story, what is left of a love story.
Both these levels were equally desired and not compromising means crafting the storytelling that would allow both dynamics.
Here, she lists off some of her desires as a filmmaker for PORTRAIT:
She wanted to show an artist at work and write an artist/model collaboration that would depart from the fetishized muse tradition.
She wanted it to be a period piece, but tight-budgeted because she didn’t want it to be dusty and meticulous and mundane.
She wanted it to be a contemporary form even though it’s set in the past.
In other words: these are the reasons she wanted to write and direct this particular story.
Those desires are mostly political, as you can see, and it can seem a little bit cold — but political desire for the film is at the heart of the decision to actually write it because it will be about finding a hard solution to these theoretical desires.
STEP 2: LOCAL DESIRES
Everything in Sciamma’s second step intrigues me enough that I’m going to attempt it myself with the script I’m about to start. It overlaps to some degree with the general way I construct my own story notes, but her approach is so regimented that it seems likely to improve upon how I’ve learned to find meaning — or justify — scenes. The brutality of it is certainly appealing.
The second step is about working on the local level, which means the scenes. The scenes are the center of my writing process — each scene as a unit of desire.
Technically this is how it works: It is about having two files opened on my laptop, two lists.
The first list is very free. It’s a list of ideas for scenes, sometimes images, a line of dialogue. They have no connections with one another and are often not connected yet with the plot of the film.
For PORTRAIT, Sciamma’s first list included:
Having the character of Adèle Haenel running fast towards the edge of a cliff.
Actually setting fire to the character.
An abortion being painted.
A group of women singing an unknown tune in the night.
A sentence: “Don’t regret remember.”
A long take on a character listening to Vivaldi’s Summer in a concert hall. This would be the final scene in the film.
Those are the desired scenes, the ones you don’t have to look for. They are your compass, the ones you make the film for. Those belong to the list of scenes you desire. Sometimes you don’t even know why. You just know they will be in the film, and you should respect that a lot.
The other file is a list of scenes you need, the steps that are inevitably building the story, the ones that are logically unfolding your pitch or plot.
For PORTRAIT, Sciamma’s list of scenes she needed went like this:
The scene where the painter is commissioned by the mother.
The scene where the painter arrives at the castle.
The scene where the painter sees the sitter for the first time.
The scene where the painter starts to paint.
The scene where the sitter discovers a portrait.
The scene where the maid gets an abortion.
Those scenes seem much simpler to write because they belong, they are needed. But actually, my work is all about making them belong to the other list.
They must become desired, every single one of them.
My rule is that not a single scene must stay on the “needed” list. Every scene has to have its own desire within it and the biggest job is thinking strongly about each scene in that list and finding something that hits you accurately — which means deeply.
This takes most of my time in the writing process, because I don’t actually start writing the continuity of the script until those two files become one. The painter will arrive by boat and jump into the water to save a canvas; the model will surprisingly be critical when she sees her portrait for the first time, rather than intimidated; the abortion scene will take place with the baby sharing the frame with the character terminating her pregnancy.
Sometimes you don’t find an idea that you have a strong desire for because sometimes a scene is about getting from a place to another place — what do you do then? I used to think useful scenes should at least be shot for editing hypotheses, but now I don’t anymore. I am being radical with this belief. At the stage of my fourth film, I decided to get rid of the scenes which had been sticking for too long in the “needed” list. I just erased them.
The hard part of that process is that when you go along with the convention and the rules of storytelling, you feel you are writing, it looks like you’re writing because it’s efficient and understood. It takes a strong will to go deep. You have to accept the fact that you are choosing unsatisfaction for a while. You are not writing, you are thinking about writing.
At this point, Sciamma explains that she moves on to writing dialogue, except she does so from a place where characters have no back stories and no futures. Only the moment they’re in, and for her, that means their desires. Her characters are wholly, as she puts it, “desire-driven”.
She attributes this to the fact that she writes female-driven stories and, for women, deprived of their own agency by the patriarchy for centuries, this means “desires”. Fiction, she explains, is not a safe place for female characters, they can’t get rid of their oppression, they can’t create better futures. They have this moment and nothing else, which is why PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE only explores its characters desires.
The consequence of this approach is that PORTRAIT is not about an “impossible love story” in which rules must be overcome. This is because their love is possible, so she just removed the obstacles. “The enemies, the traps, men,” as she says. The impossibility, the traditional conflict inherent in such stories, was left outside the conversation of the film because it would be waiting for the characters once they returned to the “real world”.
This she calls a “big rule” we, as screenwriters, follow, convinced “the obstacles between the character’s desire and its fulfillment would be more interesting and valuable than telling about the desire itself. “It’s weird,” she adds, “but this is how we learn screenwriting, as the art of conflict.”
STEP 3: RETURN TO THE GLOBAL SCALE
At this point in her process, Sciamma is ready to write rather than just thinking about writing.
Once you have all your scenes as a list of strong desires and local solutions, you then have your narrative and you can ensure you read your film and go back to this global scale. At that moment, you have the opportunity to fully see and understand the desire you have for the narrative.
If you now see a pattern between the local desires you found in the scenes that tell you about your higher desire, your desire for storytelling, your reflection on cinema.
For PORTRAIT, it appeared quite clearly, the desire was to break the narrative of conflict and once you make that diagnosis, you should go for it all the way.
Conflict is at the heart of all dramatic storytelling in the West, so wrap your brains around what she just suggested she intended to do with this film: pitch conflict out the window. I can’t imagine a more ambitious, deranged, glorious challenge for a narrative storyteller.
And going all the way with this script was writing a love story based on equality, breaking this narrative of conflict was made possible by the fact that it is two women meeting so there is no gender domination. And then I decided there will also be no intellectual domination even though it’s an artist and a model, and also never to play with social hierarchy. It was a decision I had to take because we are born and raised in cinema being taught that conflict is the natural dynamic of the storyteller and that a good scene is in a way a good bargain between characters.
So no conflict — boring? I got the Best Screenplay award in Cannes, so maybe, but also, I guess not.
Rightly deserved, I should add. Then, she continues:
Lack of conflict doesn’t mean lack of tension.
Lack of conflict doesn’t mean lack of eroticism.
Lack of conflict actually means new rhythm because of a dialogue not built on bargaining.
Lack of conflict actually means new power dynamics that allows new surprises and suspense.
That’s what is at stake in a story with equality actually. Equality brings unconventional power dynamics to the screen. So basically as a viewer you don’t know what is going to happen, which is the base of being both entertained and committed to a story.
In no way am I suggesting that Sciamma’s screenwriting process is superior to any other. But her process can and should act as a mirror, revealing ugly flaws in our own approaches because, frankly, I really don’t see how anyone could read this and not reconsider, reframe, revise how they understand the craft of screenwriting. This lecture demands self-reflection from anyone who comes across it and cares about the art form.
Incidentally, Sciamma’s lecture is exactly why I argue screenwriters across the globe — but especially those who understand screenwriting through American film— should study international cinema as a route to personal creative growth and disruptive innovation in their work. There are more ways to tell a screen story than Hollywood wants you to believe, as Sciamma forcefully demonstrates here.
You can watch Céline Sciamma’s complete 2019 BAFTA screenwriting lecture here:
And for those unfamiliar with PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, here is its trailer. I cannot recommend it (or Sciamma’s other films) enough.
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