Leslye Headland has a saying she finds helpful when embarking on a new screenplay: “The first draft is a dangerous neighborhood. You shouldn’t wander there alone.
To the famous filmmaker famous for his Netflix series russian doll and the latest Star Wars series acolyteyour first pass through the script is bound to be imperfect. Listen to the full episode below to learn more…
Complete first draft
“Finish the first draft. Just finish it!” she insisted when I talked to her this week about my podcast, Script Apart.
Spend too much time thinking about every line of dialogue for immediate perfection, and chances are you’ll never get past the draft. Instead, it’s best to write as quickly as possible. Don’t hang around. Get out alive.
“Don’t go back and start editing. I know it’s tempting, but the best thing you can do is write a terrible version of the script. Use lines from other movies. Use the stupidest lines you can think of. Sometimes, in Put something in parentheses: “Say some love language here. “And keep going. Just don’t get bogged down in the first draft,” when we talked about how her first draft acolyte The pilot was – by her own admission – “terrible” and in trouble game of Thrones-The politics of the Jedi Order were ultimately removed in her rewrites.
This advice has been around for as long as screenwriting has been a profession, and understandably so—nothing will dampen the excitement of the story you’re eager to tell more than spending too long on a first draft. However, Headland’s way of imagining the first draft as a “dangerous community” made this suggestion resonate with me more than ever.
You can improve an imperfect finished script. The same can’t be said for a script that doesn’t yet exist because there’s no finished draft. That’s why from now on, I’m going to approach my first draft by imagining it as a journey to Tatooine: a wretched hive of scum and evil, as a famous Jedi once described it.
Try it yourself and see how it unlocks the power of your first draft.
Listen to the full episode of Script Apart powered by ScreenCraft, WeScreenplay and Final Draft above.
Read more: What screenwriters can do when they get lost in the first draft
Al Horner is a journalist, screenwriter and presenter based in London. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Empire, GQ, BBC, White Lies, Time Magazine and more.
