Responses from Mark Jonathan Harris

Are there any books on craft or writing exercises you recommend?

As a long time screenwriting teacher, I've reviewed dozens of books about the craft, most of which expound the same Aristotelian rules, and the same three-act structure, and which I find useless (and even inimical) for creating original and compelling work. Yes, stories should have a beginning, middle, and end, " but not necessarily in that order," as Jean-Luc Godard has said.

The one book I've found wise and helpful as a writer of both prose and screenplays is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders. His careful readings of the Russian stories he's selected are astute and his comments on his own writing process resonant. His advice applies to literary fiction as well as popular movies. I recommend it to all my students. Sadly, they often prefer how-to manuals that provide models for conventional work.

Could you describe your experience with collaboration?

I began my writing career as a crime reporter in Chicago, switched media to become a documentary filmmaker, but continued to write articles and essays, and also fiction, both children's novels and short stories for adults. Film is a social art, an inherently collaborative medium. No one makes a film all by himself.

I've also had the good fortune to have a wonderful and sensitive editor for my five children's novels. Again, my books are far better for her careful reading of my manuscripts. My wife, too, has been a patient and discerning editor of my fiction, unafraid to call attention to any failure of nerve, lapse in tone or grammar, and general wrong headedness. I'm indebted to her for the many readings of my work.

My collaboration with my subjects and my filmmaking partners is one of the joys of filmmaking. I've worked with the same editor, cinematographer, and producer on multiple films. They are all more skilled at their craft than I am. My films would not have been successful without their participation. Our on-going dialogue, the aesthetic debates we have about the work, are some of the most enjoyable parts of filmmaking. Every film I make, I screen rough cuts for colleagues with whom I teach and whose work I respect. Their comments invariably help me to see my film in a new perspective. It's an integral part of my filmmaking process.

Making documentaries and writing fiction share more in common than their differences. I write fiction to discover the truths I failed to see or understand at the time I was filming or experiencing them. As Don DeLillo has remarked, a writer “learns to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.” My children’s novels depict children struggling to cope with problems created by adults—divorce, displacement, homelessness—problems not of their own making, circumstances I also examined in documentaries like Foster and Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, where children have to contend with separation from their families because of neglect or war, certainly problems they did not create. Many of my lastest stories revisit other formative childhood experiences, but viewed now from an adult perspective. My stories also explore the intersection of race and class in Los Angeles, the Ellis Island of the 21st century, where I’ve lived for the last 50 years.

Does your "day job" inform your craft?

I've taught documentary filmmaking and screenwriting for many years at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.  My teaching informs my filmmaking and my filmmaking my teaching.  When I find myself in trouble during shooting,  I ask myself what I would tell my students. If I find I don't have a good answer,  I realize I have to formulate a new rule. Teaching has forced me to examine my own process in order to articulate what has often been intuitive and unconscious, and to develop a more disciplined and critical approach to my own work. As a teacher,  I've been privileged to oversee hundreds of films made around the world.  In the summer I teach a workshop for Emerging Global Filmmakers, sponsored by the American Film Showcase, the U.S. State Department's premier film diplomacy program. The documentaries these filmmakers are shooting are inspiring.  In wanting to make a difference, many of them are taking on sensitive and controversial subjects; in doing so, they're risking their lives in countries like Myanmar, and Thailand, and China.  Their desire to confront the social and political issues in their countries reminds me why I became a filmmaker in the first place. I'm proud to share my experience with them and to help them achieve their goals.  Through my participation, I feel that I, too, am helping make changes to societies all around the world.