My friend Brad came up with the idea for a space movie a few years ago. A story so childish and ridiculous, there was only one way he could pitch it to me, and that was using arm gestures and “blasting off” sound effects he made with his mouth.
It’s so profoundly stupid, it’s brilliant, (at least to me), but no one in their right might would want to make it. Yet that’s exactly the kind of story I’m interested in making into a movie, and it wouldn’t even be a blip on my radar today if my writing was exclusive of the silly, the inane, and the childish.
Kids aren’t constantly weighed down with all that chubby baggage of adulthood, and don’t worry about thinking of themselves as “artistes.” Nor do they worry about what a movie should look like and sound like and feel like. They just have fun and let their imaginations run rampant.
Try thinking like a kid if you need your imagination fired up. If you can’t let your own imagination go wild, what makes you think someone reading your screenplay, or even watching the movie made from that screenplay will let their imagination go wild?
Lose yourself for a half hour and pick up a toy car or a some action figures. Have them talk to each other. Remember playing “cars” in the dirt with Matchbox cars? Or with your Barbies or your Star Wars figures? The movies you made in your head were awesome, and they didn’t need anything but you and imagination.
Put on a skit with your stuffed animals, talk to your pets with cartoon voices, play hopscotch, light some firecrackers. The idea is to loosen up your stiff adult head and start thinking again like anything is possible.
Yes, playing with toys will make it appear to others that you’ve gone batshit, so do it in private, or at least let your loved ones know what you’re up to so they don’t call the cops. However you do it, the point is to liberate your imagination from the constraints your adult life and your adult education, and especially your filmic education, has placed on you.
It’s really less about acting like a kid and more about getting outside your normal patterns of behavior and stimulus.
Many experts on brain function say the only time your brain ever grows new synapses (links between brain cells, which lead to new thoughts and new modes of thinking), is when you’re placed in new situations and are forced to adapt, change, and learn.
Putting yourself in new situations can be as easy as eating at a new restaurant, jumping in at a party and meeting new people, or finally giving a dime to that bum on your corner you’ve been ignoring, you cheap bastard.
–Excerpt from The Screenwriter’s Cheat Book
