'The Write Tools' #15 - Ian Barry

Welcome to another edition of ‘The Write Tools’: a blog series featuring authors, artists and their favourite tools.

Today's guest is screenwriter and director Ian Barry, who has worked in film and television in Australia and abroad. Recent directing work includes Sea Patrol, Rescue Special Ops and Farscape. Ian is now writing a film script dramatising male youth violence.

Ian, your 'tool' is actually a swag of laptops. Your career spans some three decades - have you always worked comfortably on computers?

I began writing on an Olivetti portable typewriter when I was 16. It was a toy. I graduated through various models and brands of typewriter until my last, a Remington golf ball which I left up in the rafters of a house I sold back in the early 90's. Typewriting, re-typewriting and re-re-typewriting is something I'm glad to have left behind.

I do tend to think of scripts and screenplays as typed, rather than handwritten. Do you think the computer in general, or the laptop in particular, is suited to writing for film? If so, why?

The computer revolutionised writing for me. I began to see writing, with the cut and paste abilities of a computer, more as sculpting. Structure is a tough taskmaster in screenplay writing. It's about many things of course - interesting protagonists that grow, sub characters that support and facilitate the journey of the main characters, thematic consistency and a resolution that is usually more effective if it's satisfying. However, well thought-out structure is the vertebrae that determines whether the screenplay stands or collapses. Structuring and computer 'sculpting' go hand in hand.

So you never use a pen?

My handwriting phase is mainly at the outset, when I'm conceiving a story. Later I will handwrite if I think of an idea at a red light, in a cinema or restaurant. I finish up with a pocket of notes and I have about a 50 percent chance of later deciphering my scrawls. All those go into the computer.

The computer is where I start the real engineering - when I write a treatment or scene breakdown - the bones where I can get an overview of story and structure. A computer will let you keep many drafts of these breakdown so you can try things without losing anything.

So when I write a full draft, I really want to do it on a computer. Often I will start writing a scene not from the opening, but from the plot point moment - it might be a line of dialogue or an action that is the whole reason for the scene. Then the scene will 'grow' from that. You can do this with a pen, but it can quickly become a shit fight.

Lastly, I go for laptops because I make most of my living from directing. A lot of that directing is overseas or out of my home town. I need my writing tool in my briefcase wherever I am.

But why three? And why older ones? Is this something about writing for the screen?

I find I still have use for three computers because my screenplays stretch back a way and the many generations and drafts of a whole bunch of projects are scattered and archived across the three. Many screenplay writers seek instant gratification. That is, they want to write the perfect draft and then sell it straight off to a production company and see it on the screen. Writing a novel is a hard slog, but writing screenplays mostly involves more drafts, more politics and more disappointment. There was a billboard all over LA when I was there a couple of months ago. A retailer spruiked "more outlets than unsold screenplays." Screenplays are mostly unsold and unmade and are a source of constant disappointment and frustration to the writer.

Consequently, I changed my mindset about screenplay writing some time back. I think for sanity's sake you have to think of writing a screenplay like house renovation and maintenance - it's only completed when you sell the house or make the movie.

So, you might finish a draft, put it out there, get a whole bunch of notes, criticisms, reactions and away you go again on another draft. If you think of your screenplay as an organic, living entity that needs ongoing nurturing or like a house that might need repainting, you spare yourself the pain and delusion that it is a work of art chiselled in granite.

With one of my projects, the "renovations" went on eighteen years. I started shooting the show virtually on the 18th anniversary of beginning the first draft. It showed me this: you can hawk around your screenplay for 15 years in your own country, go to the States (where I was living at the time) and pitch it to Viacom on a Friday afternoon and have the money committed on the following Monday morning. This taught me a lot about running the distance, never thinking a screenplay is dead and keeping your archives - even if they have to be on three computers.

Many readers and writers appreciate the enduring qualities of manuscripts; of pen and ink, still legible after centuries. Do you ever worry about the ephemerality of the computer?

A screenplay is only a blueprint. If you asked Frank Gehry if he was worried that his blueprints might not last, I'm sure he'd say, 'It's about the building.' So too with TV and movies. The paper or hard drive they were conceived on become obsolete the moment they are made. Of course all things are ephemeral and the big concern in my industry is the longevity of the hardware formats, like film prints and DVD. All these have to be backed up and duplicated at intervals because of deterioration.

And are you sentimental about these laptops in any way? Do they provide some familiar point of reference in hotel rooms or foreign cafes?

Great question Damon. I am accused of being a sentimentality junkie about many things. I cry at the drop of a hat or the right chord in a musical score. Yep, very attached. Especially the older ones - they have travelled far and long, got me through dark nights of the soul and I will lament their passing. I once woke in a hotel room in the North of Malaysia, only the pulsing green light of my G3 on sleep mode told me I hadn't entered the afterlife.