Once upon a time, television was the realm of poor acting and disenchanted directing and producing. It is said that long ago there was a Golden Age of television when wonderful shows as I LOVE LUCY, BONANZA or THE TWILIGHT ZONE actually changed the landscape, but that time had passed without much trace. All we had, then, was a bare scenery of superficiality and empty imagination. In those days we used to look at movies as the place for real dramatization and the home of talent. Very few actors with more than an ounce of self-respect and any ambition whatsoever would be caught playing for the small box and directors would get a better reputation creating video clips or commercials than working on television episodes. But then, something happened. Some would say that it was the advent of cable TV with its millionaire pay-offs or the prophecies of multiple channels and platforms in digital. However, another event comes to mind: suddenly, Writers became important. The figures of the Showrunners, Writers most of them, became warlords and noblemen. And then, as if by magic, the chains of mediocrity were destroyed and another Golden Age of television brought us a myriad of incredible and immensely talented shows. Legendary series as THE SOPRANOS or WEST WING surged from the shadows. And binge-watching was born with the likes of 24. Brilliant organizations as HBO and Netflix made history. Inevitably, as more and more shows target narrower and narrower niches, the Golden Age will slowly fade away. But let us enjoy its remnants while we can. As is my tradition, let me speak of a few shows I love, arranged in no particular order. I hope you like them as much as I do.

 

• GAME OF THRONES – I already talked about this incredible phenomenon here. I was already in love with this amazing story and characters well before it became a TV series. George R.R. Martin’s genius is apparent to anyone who passes their eyes through his texts. He dwarfs the likes of Tolkien or Rowling, in my view. And the series, worldbuilding in a massive unbelievable fashion, propelled him to stardom. It is a pity, of course, that Martin’s masterpiece wasn’t finished in the five years it took the series to catch up to the book’s storyline – I believe that as the screenwriters slowly replaced Martin himself, the quality of the plot diluted a bit. Maybe a lot. We still had brilliant writing, brilliant production design, and acting and directing until the end, but without the structure of Martin’s books, the producers were left to make poor plotting decisions that almost killed the series in the end. Still, it will be forever a phenomenon of the medium and the first of several HBO hits on this list.

 

• SHERLOCK – Steven Moffat, arguably one of the greatest TV writers of all time, signed what is perhaps the best adaptation of the novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever produced. The series design and Benedict Cumberbatch’s rendition of the sociopathic but genial detective overwhelm us with intelligence, balanced with the superb Watson of Martin Freeman and overshadowing forever the pathetic attempts of other movies and TV series to portrait these classical iconic heroes. Rarely have I seen genius so well represented and it is very difficult to keep your jaw from falling as you pursue the mysteries and conspiracies that come out of this series. And even if you feel obligated to focus on the brilliance of Cumberbatch and Freeman’s performances, and on the wonderful writing, we cannot miss the ever-talented directing that comes with it. We feel constantly one or two or ten steps behind Sherlock Holmes – as we should. And even the translation of the Victorian detectives to the modern age, with the clever adding of modern technology, does not break the link to Doyle’s novels. The different seasons, in the British tradition, are composed only by three or four movie-length episodes – but even if we spend only a few hours with this series, we will cherish every minute. Do not miss it.

 

• MR.ROBOT – The American response to the brilliance of SHERLOCK, Sam Esmail’s MR.ROBOT breaks some kind of mold. Extremely clever and profound, this series about a talented hacker involved in a powerful conspiracy to end the reign of oppressive massive corporations will blow your mind. The unbelievable Rami Malek gives life to this troubled and isolated hacker vigilante who always has a surprise up his sleeve. At each turn of the screw, we are left with more questions than answers but there is something extremely perturbing and relatable about the whole absurd story of Elliot Alderson, along with the surprising performance of Christian Slater. Still, what makes this show really powerful is the inspiring, creative and talented directing by Esmail. I really believe his name will become a household name in the near future, especially if he crosses the line into the realm of movies. He has a touch of Kubrick in him and his shots and solutions always feel a bit off and yet incredibly adequate.

 

• BAND OF BROTHERS – Here’s another show for the history books. Literally. It tells the true story of WWII’s 101^st Airborn Division’s Easy Company as this group of ordinary men become extraordinary by doing their job in the intense theatre of the European War, from the invasion of Normandy through to Germany itself. Sponsored by the capable and iconic hands of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, these 10 movie-length episodes use filming solutions we recognize in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. The series is amazingly powerful, featuring also testimonies from the survivors of Easy Company themselves. With very few women through the whole thing, it is, however, one of the best war stories ever produced. It’s incredibly solid in every way. The directing, the music, the acting, the design, the producing, the cinematography: everything is top-notch in this 2001 HBO series.

 

• TRUE DETECTIVE – It is widely noted that this is a series that has been decreasing in quality since the outset. Each season is an isolated detective story and I do think that the third season, with Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff, is the lesser of the three so far. I liked the second season with Colin Farrel, Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn – the ending much better than the beginning, I must say. However, the season that made this series a legend was the first one: 2014’s season with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson enacting a story by Nic Pizzolatto with the solemn and inspired directing of Cory Jojy Fukunaga. This first season was tense, heavy, challenging and finally extremely cathartic. An example of the exciting and fulfilling range of incredible TV shows of the current Golden Age.

There are a lot more shows that deserve mention, of course. It has been a privilege to witness this era of creativity in television, as we suffer the relatively bland products of the Hollywood movie business. As I said, let’s enjoy it while it lasts. There are already signs that the time of greats is passing. And this is all I have to say for tonight. See you around the next campfire, fellow travelers.

Someone asks: any tips on building up antagonists? I’ve heard of many things. Some people go with that mainstream thing: «no-one gets up in the morning thinking they will do something evil or thinking they are bad guys.» «They have always good reasons to be bad.» You know the type? «Maybe you should even go deep into their background and find out how they have been traumatized by their mother or something.» Don’t get me wrong: these are not particularly bad tips. They’re just a little bit, well… misguided.

Let’s just check a few bad guys, shall we? For instance, think of Spielberg’s JAWS. The antagonist is… a shark. A killing machine. It doesn’t really have a profound reason to be like it is. It just wants food. That’s it. And how about Mr.Smith in THE MATRIX? He’s a machine. He just wants to finish his mission and be free of ‘the smell’ of humans. No immediate Freudian conflict there, is there? No ‘I’m-a-good-guy’ syndrome. Very different from, for instance, Cersei in GAME OF THRONES. Her main motivation is to protect her family and especially her children – and she learned to be tough in order to do that. Or think of Magneto in X-MEN: he is a racist but he seems to have been cornered into that way of thinking – he just wants to survive, to be respected, to be free. Think of Hyman Roth, played by the smooth and wonderful Lee Strasberg in GODFATHER II – he is so subtle and normal, just doing business and looking like a gentle old man. All these antagonists are very different in-depth, subtlety, sophistication, cruelty, and strength – but they are all excellent antagonists. There is no one way to build up antagonists. In fact, the whole Craft of writing is mainly focused on building conflicts between antagonists and protagonists. There is also not one particular way to build up protagonists. If they serve the story, they can be perfect. And antagonists can simply be bad. There are evil people, and also sociopathic and psychopathic people who don’t know the difference between Right and Wrong, Good and Bad. And they don’t need particularly deep motivations to do very cruel things – as we can see throughout History. There are people who are motivated by basic Power, or the freedom to do Harm. There aren’t always ‘good reasons to be bad’. Yet, the story itself needs deeper motivations.

Some narratives don’t develop on the pillars of conflict. Virginia Woolf’s KEW GARDENS, for instance, which I find an excellent short-story, does not live on conflict. But the vast majority of stories are based on a conflict between antagonists and protagonists. It could be a story of Man against Nature, as in JAWS, or Man against God, or Man against Himself, but conflict based stories are the most straight forward, the easiest and the most common kind.  Even in love stories. At the center of love stories, there is always an obstacle to love. The better the obstacle the better the love story. And so, in Reiner’s WHEN HARRY MET SALLY we have a conflict between Love and Friendship. In Ephron’s SLEEPLESS IN SEATLE you have Distance as an obstacle to Love. In Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, the main obstacles are… well… Pride and Prejudice.  You have a good obstacle to Love, you have a story.

So, in summary, a good antagonist must have one principal, important characteristic: His/her main goal is incompatible with the protagonist’s goal. That’s it. Now if you want a blunt instrument or a precise delicate scalpel is up to you and what you want to do with your story. If you want an evil chess master or a basic volcano, it’s up to you and the story. So it all comes down to the main goal of the protagonist. What does he/she want? And this goal depends on one thing… well… actually two: your Theme and your Message. What is your story about and what do you want your readers to retain in the end? What do you want your protagonist to learn or not to learn in the end? That you must not be too proud or too prejudiced to see Love just in front of you? Or that you can be so blind that you will lose your family as you try to protect it? Or do you want a protagonist so driven and stubborn, like Marv in Miller’s SIN CITY, that he will never learn until he’s dead?

Whatever you do, you must always ‘Save the Cat’ for a protagonist. I spoke about it here. The protagonist must be likable in some way, otherwise, we will not identify with him/her, and if we fail to identify with him/her, we will be in trouble to achieve the Catharsis in the end. Or you can invert the roles. You could argue that in MACBETH, for instance, we do not care for the protagonists, we care for the antagonists. But we must care for someone. For someone we identify with. We suffer with. Because that is the next step in the phenomenon of storytelling, the phenomenon that Aristotle once described: we suffer with our characters. And at that moment is the thing that we must really take care: the Human Drama. Even though the story lives on diversity, on the uniqueness we impose on it, what really draws people in is the identification with the deeper problem of the character. The deep common problem of the protagonist and/or antagonist.

Think of a movie like JAWS: a sheriff who is scared of water and who came to a small coastal community to escape from the confusion of urban civilization is confronted with the threat of a killer shark. The Theme is Man against Nature – or Civilization against Nature. The Message is: only when you respect Nature can you deal with it (or something of the sort) – Civilization disrespects Nature at its own peril. Now, this is a deep common problem that affects all of us and which most of us can relate with. How you then develop it around the conflict between a sheriff and a shark and make it a unique story is at the core of your talent as a writer.

And that’s all I have to say for now. See you around the next campfire, fellow knights.

Today came out an article of mine on Writing in English in the Portuguese Portal of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I talk about my difficult and somewhat controversial decision to write in a language which is not my native Portuguese and how it worked. You can read it here:

Why Write in English: The Journey From My First Language to the Second 

Hope you like it!

Many years ago I started learning about Learning. I was fresh out of college and I started getting involved in Executive Training. I ended up becoming a trainer and educating all kinds of publics in behavioral matters – from top executives in imposing multinationals to the unemployed poor or the young outcasts. It was an incredible journey and it made me think about a lot of things – including ‘what is our role as educators’? Now – teaching short courses on some matters may seem an unimportant role in the Education business, but it has a few characteristics that give us trainers some perspective. First of all, we mostly do not give grades to our students: we are graded ourselves – students grade us. Secondly, we are hired for our effectiveness and reputation: if we aren’t good at what we do, we don’t make a living – so grades matter. Thirdly, and in my particular case, I worked with a whole range of students with many different traits – showing me what works in general and how to adapt this or that. Fourthly, we actually have training in education and pedagogy – something you would be surprised how many teachers and educators actually lack – including most professors in this or that. And finally, we have a lot of freedom about what we teach – making us both more accountable and more creative in the way we work. I have a degree in Business Administration and I ended up studying a lot of Psychology and Law besides that subject – but pedagogy was something I really had to learn. It also informed me and built me up a lot for when I ended up teaching Creative Writing and Screenwriting. And there are a few things I want to share with you about all this.

First, Education is not about Information. In my parents’ time, the stuff they taught in school would make you giggle in embarrassment nowadays. My parents had to memorize all the railroads in Portugal, and all the rivers and waterways. You had to know the capitals of all Portuguese provinces and districts as well as the ones for major countries in the world. So in the past, much of the matters taught in school were about two things: discipline to memorize, and Information. Today, that would be absurd. We have computers and networks to memorize Information and there isn’t a single thing of the data I mentioned above that would take more than a few seconds’ search on a Smartphone by a 10-year-old.

Education is also not about Knowledge in the stricter sense of the word. Knowledge in a broad sense means a lot of things and it can comprehend many of the concepts I’ll be talking about, but Knowledge in the stricter sense is just a more sophisticated and comparative way to process Information. A lot of the Knowledge we have in the world is also accessible by Smartphone if you search for opinions of many academics on any particular search or for articles on this or that subject. So, in this sense, Education is not about Knowledge as well – Knowledge falls short.

And Education is not about Skill. It’s not about how to do this or that. For a while, behavioral training was involved in this shroud of theory about Skills. The goal of training, some said, is to develop Skills in trainees. However, anyone who’s been there and knows a couple of things about this will know that it is impossible to develop the Skill of a Leader in 16 hours, or get someone to write better in 8 hours. And also, you just spend a few minutes in any classroom around the world and you’ll gather that developing Skills is not in the mind of most teachers – they are looking for something else. Skills are not enough.

Education is also not about what to think about something. Many people would like you to think in a certain way about a whole lot of things. I can see it in Creative Writing, for example: people are taught to write in a certain way, discouraged to use certain words or certain techniques, stick to a certain POV or dismember this or that character, etc. This is called Indoctrination and it is similar to Religious training – it limits your Skill and Creativity.

What I read once, somewhere, and impressed me ever since is the following: Education is about Options. Education is about improving our students’ resources and give them more options to deal with a range of problems. Education is about Critical Thinking and about Freedom. In other words: it’s about developing someone’s ability to analyze a problem and devise the best course of action from the wider possible range of solutions for that problem – including brand new solutions. This is absolutely essential for Creative Writers: as every single publisher and every single reader out there is always looking for a unique text. Success in writing depends on both your effectiveness and your uniqueness. And this can only be achieved through Critical Thinking and Creativity (thus, Freedom).

Now, this text was prompted by two things I read that illustrated the two sides of this spectrum. On one side was an article from an academic calling himself elitist and debunking writings from non-academics, saying non-academics are lazy and don’t study all kinds of hypotheses and thinking that was done for thousands of years. Academics, he seemed to say, have more Knowledge than others and so they know better. I don’t completely disagree with this assessment, to be honest: academics study a lot and know a lot and most of the time they are the spearheads of our Knowledge. Universities all over the world significantly and systematically and constantly improve our lives. But I have a few issues about that ‘elitist’ claim about academics. I know a few academics and believe me: many times they are simply wrong. This happens because they are not perfect and because our Knowledge is not perfect, but also because Academia is many times more concerned with politics and money than with Knowledge and Education. Academics themselves don’t agree with each other and sometimes they don’t commit to opinions themselves. On the other hand, as Kurt Lewin once said: «There’s nothing more Practical than a good Theory.» Yet, many theories out there are simply not practical: they can be right in a lab, but they don’t work in real life. When we are stuck with Academia we are often limiting our options and that is a pity.

On the other side of the spectrum was a comment made to me by a Trump-supporter. He accused me of basing my opinion on fake news coverage and movie-star rants. That is not true: I read books on History, books on Politics, and books on Economics, and a lot in between. That gave me a little bit of Knowledge and helped me analyze the problems and think about the options on the table. I base my opinions on my Education and my Knowledge and the opinions of many – not on Indoctrination, Emotional Attachment or Religious Thinking. I say Trump is nepotistic not because someone said so but because he appointed his daughter and son-in-law to the White House. I say he is a racist not because someone told me but because of what I heard him say after Charlottesville. I say he is a sexual abuser because of what I heard him say about women, because his lawyer is in jail for helping him with his abuse and because I believe the accounts of dozens of women about his abuse. I say he is autocratic as I see him try to circumvent the Judicial and the Legislative branches. I equate him with Nazis because of what I see him do and say about immigrants. I say he is corrupt because of scandal after scandal, of resignation after resignation of corrupt officials from his Executive. I say he conspired with the Russians as I hear Intelligence officials testify in Congress and as I see him bow down to Putin in Copenhagen and in every international policy of the United States for the last two years. And on and on…

The best antidote to tyranny and stupidity is Education. We need to develop our Critical Thinking and our Free Thinking to improve our lives, our society, our world, and our culture. And that’s the role of Education and educators: to improve our options. To improve other people’s options. To get us all to make better decisions. We don’t need to be dried up academics, but it is incredibly dangerous for all if we allow ourselves to be dragged down by prejudice and ignorance. Knowledge, in the broader sense – in the sense that includes Skill and Information and Critical Thinking and Wisdom – improves our options and our decisions. So let us commit to it, I challenge you. Our Freedom depends on it.

I used to be a very annoying kid. I had a fascination for movies since a young age and I would spend hours chasing people down to be able to describe to them thoroughly the latest movie I’d watched. Every single scene. And until my 20’s I was capable of remembering every single movie I had seen. After that, the movies became too many or my memory too evasive and I started making mistakes about this or that picture, this or that actor, this or that name. I still remember very well the first PG-13 movie I saw in a theatre. It was 1977’s Mike Newell’s mediocre THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. My parents took me one evening, while my younger brother and sister remained at home. I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. This was at Cine Santa Maria, in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. I don’t know if it still exists. And I remember the first PG-13 movie I went with my brother: it was 1980’s THE SEA WOLVES, with Gregory Peck, Roger Moore, and David Niven, and we saw it at Cine Casino, in the same city, where we lived. And I remember the first James Bond movie I ever saw: it was THUNDERBALL and I saw it with my father and brother in Lisbon in ’82 or ’83.  And the first time I saw THE SOUND OF MUSIC with my mother and siblings at a theater in Lisbon. And 2001 – A SPACE ODYSSEY in Lisbon which I saw with my mother when I was 13. I hated it then. Love it now. See how annoying I can become? Movies blow me away. I love them. I can’t stop talking about them.

For a long long time, I never dared to think I could be involved in making them. I’m a Portuguese writer living in a country with a poor tradition in movies – and as I grew up and through most of my adulthood, the movies made in Portugal were absolutely not movies I’d want to see. Nobody made commercial movies in this country for 50 years. Now there are a few attempts at it, but poor and far between. No-one makes movies in Portugal without a subsidy from the Government. And when it comes, the producers get immediately most of the money they will ever get from it. So they don’t have any incentive to please the public – they just have to please the 5-person jury that decides who is getting the money. It’s a horrible corrupt system and it supports horrid uninspiring amateurish movies they make every year. It also works by promoting and feeding a very small group of so-called professionals. We, the Portuguese, ended up being successful in breeding good film technicians who work every year and are well trained, but we are very poor at developing talent who could direct, write, produce and create good movies.  We have literary writers on par with the best in the world. We have a few who have earned or deserved the Nobel Prize.  Think of people as Saramago or Fernando Pessoa. For such a small country, it’s really amazing. But when it comes to scriptwriting, we are awful. Scriptwriting, I usually say, is the most technical of all Fiction writing. You really need to know what you’re doing. And in this country, for the most part, people don’t.

When I started writing movies I didn’t know that much about it. I wrote a few scripts over the years, in my 20’s. I wrote some short-movies and some long features. It can be very frustrating to write for cinema because you can write and write and write but unless you convince someone to produce the movie, it will never leave your desk drawer. Writers are the only professionals in filmmaking who do all the work before there is even a glimpse of some money coming in. You can write many scripts, for years, without earning a cent! Just look at Guillermo del Toro, the Award-winning writer-director: the other day he unveiled 17 scripts he completed without ever having the chance to make them. 17 scripts! This is the commitment a screenwriter must have to the Craft.

I never wrote 17 scripts. At least not long features, anyway. I wrote nine or ten. Some of them when I had no idea what I was doing. But I did know a few things people around me didn’t. I remember I was invited by a movie director to watch the first cut of his million-dollar movie. I watched it and when he asked me what I thought, I said: «Well, you have an 80-minute movie with a 20-minute ‘set-up’…» To which he replied: «What’s a ‘set-up’?» That’s how bad it was… Still, I did know what a ‘set-up’ was. And yet, my scripts weren’t being produced and I still was an outsider to the Portuguese would-be-film-industry (and I guess I still am).

Then one day, a friend of mine, a young movie director called Nuno Madeira Rodrigues invited me to co-write a thriller in English with him. We worked on the script for a year. I always thought it was a good exercise, but I had learned over the years it most likely never be made. He, however, always believed we could produce it and got the money for it. And so we produced the movie. We ran castings in L.A., and in Lisbon, and in New York – American, British and Portuguese actors. We filmed in a small town in Portugal called Oliveira de Azeméis and in Lisbon, and in Oporto, and in Brooklyn, N.Y. And it was a nightmare. We were way over our heads. Every single day there was an impossible challenge we had to overcome. It was a mess, not the least because people in Portugal were not used to do the things we were doing. But we got it done. I don’t know how, but we did. We called it REGRET. And we had it distributed in the US. And in Canada. And Puerto Rico and other territories. You can still watch it at Amazon, here. Of course, we never made a cent from it, but it was an incredible experience: both frustrating and rewarding – I can still find things I really like and things I really hate in the movie, not unlike the experience of producing it.

Since then I’ve written four more short-scripts and two TV-pilots that were produced. None was particularly successful, but it doesn’t matter. I loved doing them. And so here are a few random lessons I learned from these experiences:

1. Stop Following Your Dreams – Dreams are both too little and too much. Too little because Reality is so much richer and full of surprises than Dreams. And making things come true is much more than to ever dream them. Too much because you will also realize when you get there that the experience will often disappoint you. Nothing is as good as we idealize it. But if you feel it’s worth the effort, go for it. Don’t let it die in your dreams. Being involved in filmmaking was my long undervalued dream. And I don’t regret for a minute making it come true – even if it was harder than I ever thought possible.
2. Don’t Underestimate Knowledge – We are always climbing on the shoulders of giants. Learning the hard way is not studying and climbing the ladder step by step. Learning the hard way is falling down the stairs and crashing your head against the wall.
3. Keep It Structured, Stupid – When they say ‘structure, structure, structure’… believe them. A movie is a monstrous relentless machine. If you don’t structure it scrupulously in the script, you’ll pay for it later. Producers don’t buy badly structured scripts for good reason – structures increase control, save money and prevent risks.
4. Your First Act is Your First Fact – Always make sure your First Act is top-notch. Most people in the industry will never bother to read or watch more than the first pages/minutes if they’re not impressed.
5. The Only Easy Day is Yesterday – Remember the SEAL’s motto? It applies to Writing as well. Nothing will ever be easy and you might as well get used to it. Every time you write the best script you’ve ever written it’s still not good enough. Until it is… So don’t give up. Roll with the punches. Keep going.
6. Listen to Producers – This seems counter-intuitive, right? Producers have a knack for ruining scripts. I believe that’s true. (I bet it was the producers who made the wrong decisions in GAME OF THRONES, for instance.) But they also will tell you what they want and many times they are… right. Here are some things I’ve learned from them: a) always have a hot girl in the movie; b) A Xmas story with dogs can be as interesting and as marketable as an action thriller with monsters; c) always have one great ‘watercooler moment’ (a moment people will be commenting over the watercooler on Monday.) d) always go with a High-Concept (see here). Etc, etc.
7. A Good Actor Saying Your Text Is The Greatest Thing You’ll Ever Know – An actor will reveal your text. If it’s a bad text, if it has errors or mistakes, if it doesn’t work – you’ll find out immediately. Seeing a bad actor destroying your scene is not pleasant. Your text is good, but the actor sucks – and most people will say it’s the text, for sure. But when it works… when you have a good actor picking it up and running with it – it’s… a-w-e-s-o-m-e. It will bring tears to your eyes. Even if he/she changes the text to make it livelier and fuller and richer – it’s awesome! You know that feeling you feel when you finish writing your novel, or your script? That feeling of fulfillment? You feel it every single scene, every day, every rehearsal. It’s just awesome!

And these are simply a few of the lessons I got from my experiences in filmmaking. I know there are more and I hope there will be a lot more in the future. See you around the next campfire, fellow warriors.