When you read Divinity director Eddie Alcazar saying, “There is no script for this film,”1 for most armchair experts, that’s a big, flapping red flag. According to DC Studios CEO James Gunn, shooting with unfinished scripts is “the number one reason for the deteriorating quality of feature films.” Since taking on his new role, Gunn’s vowed not to green light a film until it has a finished script. Hollywood’s endemic lack of respect for screenplays (and their creators) is so notorious, though, that the mission statement is news, rather than the insight. Akira Kurosawa is oft-quoted in the same vein:
“With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.”
Of course, even the best scripts are far from sacrosanct. Film-makers often need to rip them up due to budget or scheduling constraints, unforeseen challenges with locations, or any other random adversities that impinge on production. Planned reshoots are standard stages in a big-budget film’s schedule and “we’ll fix it in post” a well-worn cliché. Even if all of those words make it to the edit suite as intended, whole pages, sequences, storylines can ultimately be stripped out, needs must.
Some of the most famous moments in popular cinema were unscripted or unplanned too, from now-notorious episodes in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984) and Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023) to iconic lines like, “I’m walkin’ here!”, “Here’s Johnny!” and “Here’s looking at you, kid.”2 Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s screenplay for The Blair Witch Project (1999) was only 35 pages along and the dialogue intended to be entirely improvised, an approach which later influenced the production of Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (2010). Christopher Guest’s mockumentary ouevre showcases largely improvised dialogue, from Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap (1984), through his own Waiting For Guffman (1996) to Mascots (2016). And then there’s the improv-heavy, “line-o-rama” approach, proven and popularised by writer/producer/director Judd Apatow, where performers are given free rein in front of the camera to riff on and develop what’s on the page.
Closest to Divinity, in some ways, is Coherence, James Ward Byrkit’s well-received 2o13 sci-fi thriller, carefully planned but filmed without a script and with an improvising cast. Byrkit has explained:
Instead of a script I had my own 12-page treatment that I spent about a year working on. It outlined all of the twists and reveals, and character arcs and pieces of the puzzle that needed to happen scene-by-scene. But each day, instead of getting a script, the actors would get a page of notes for their individual character, whether it was a backstory or information about their motivations… The goal was to get them listening to each other, and engaged in the mystery of it all.3
Other film-makers make a virtue of sparse or non-existent scripts, from page to screen. Screenplays are evidently much more than dialogue but, in those terms alone, there are films which are purposefully laconic. JC Chandor’s All Is Lost (2013) contains only 195 words in all its 106 minutes, and only 154 of those words for solo star Robert Redford.4 Luc Besson’s Le Dernier Combat (1983) contains only two. Not to entirely gloss over generations of silent movies (and their later tributes and homages), but there are many modern films that prioritise visual storytelling without aping young cinema. There are a number of films that indulge in sublingual dialogue, like Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973), Steve Oram’s Aaaaaaaah! (2015), Sasquatch Sunset (David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, 2024) or the gibberish stylings of Nude Tuesday (Armağan Ballantyne, 2022). There are more generally meditative works, works of slow cinema and, of course, the haiku-like screenplay for Walter Hill’s The Driver, “the purest I ever wrote”.
However, the received wisdom is that to start production without a full script (consensus seems to be somewhere around 20-25,000 words, though they tend to be measured in pages, roughly one per-screen-minute) is to court certain disaster. Many notable box office successes with a reportedly slipshod approach to pre-preparedness – e.g. Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008)5, Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)6, Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)7 – contradict that, though. And recently, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie method for developing the Mission: Impossible films has flipped the concept on its head, purposefully devising, developing and even shooting the action set-pieces before a narrative framework has been decided in order to make sense of them.8
For Alcazar, though, shooting without a full script is simply a different mode of film-making, hewing more closely to his voluminous storyboards and informed by the stop-start nature of his production, principle photography stretching to a year, “over the course of seven different shoots.” As he describes:
I shot a bit, edited for two or three months, then shot again, because I wasn’t really confined by a script. I had my storyboards, but I wanted to leave it open for new and fresh ideas. My biggest goal is try to figure out a way to make films that don’t deny any creative ideas. It just sucks when you’re like, “Damn, I should have done this.” 9
Actors, inevitably, had to sign on without even the promise of a standard blueprint. Lead actor Stephen Dorff was given just 30-40 pages of a script for Divinity, from which he then observed Alcazar “embellishing the idea”1. For Bella Thorne, in the admittedly much smaller role of Ziva, there was no script at all. Noting Divinity was also shot on film11, Dorff concluded, “[Alcazar] basically took some of the most challenging things and decided to make a movie with all of them. But that is what makes Eddie Eddie, and what makes this film dynamic and exciting.”
We’re used to hearing about how central storyboards and pre-vis are to modern film-making, especially fantastic or genre cinema, so perhaps it’s easy to imagine a tightly-visualised production where the action is locked down and the dialogue either spontaneous or superfluous, depending where we find ourselves on the spectrum of Alcazar’s “fresh ideas”. According to Divinity cinematographer and frequent Alcazar collaborator Danny Hiele, though, that’s not quite the case:
We did have storyboards, but they serve more as a general reference rather than a shot-for-shot blueprint. When the actors are on set and run through a scene, that’s when things really take shape. The storyboard informs us of basic needs like close-ups or wide shots. In essence, it’s like free jazz: we have a team and a general theme, and we improvise within that framework without going off on a tangent.
A key way that Divinity differs from Coherence, say, is that it was funded entirely, albeit modestly, by Steven Soderbergh, with no conditions. The results, inevitably, speak for themselves, but one through line in the praise and criticism of Divinity is the conclusion (or perhaps concession?) that it’s “best understood as a vibe”12, in the broader grand tradition of midnight movies – it needs to be experienced, among people, not read like a book – though perhaps that’s an easy shrug to “style-over-substance” criticism.
One thing we can assume, for better or worse, is that Divinity is exactly the film Alcazar (whose background is in VFX and 3D animation) wanted to make, whether he knew it or not. Curiously, though, for such an evidently auteurish approach, one of Alcazar’s drivers is the desire to cede control. Eschewing a more traditional script was a deliberate step towards that:
In visual effects, you do have full control over everything. You’re literally working in a 3D space where every character is a puppet. You move them frame by frame and you look at every detail. The reason I got into filmmaking was just so I don’t have to do all that stuff. With characters especially, I want to be surprised. I want people to surprise me with their performances, or whatever area they’re in while we create the film.13
So, no-script film-making is not new, nor is it necessarily out-of-fashion, but it’s still rare to intentionally barrel into principal photography with no script and no intention to write one. In this regard, the teachings of Scott Shaw, author, actor, filmmaker, composer, artist, journalist, photographer, blogger, erstwhile martial artist and proponent of Zen Filmmaking14, are instructive. In his own words:
The impetus for the birth of Zen Filmmaking occurred after the first weekend of production on The Roller Blade Seven. [Director Donald G Jackson] and I were very disappointed with the performances of the massive cast we had hired to take part in the film. We looked at each other and realized that the majority of them did not have the talent to truly pull-off the roll of the character they had been assigned. With this, we came to a realization to just go out and film the movie, not expect anything from our cast and crew, and make up the story as we went along. After a few days of this style of production, I had a realization, based in my lifelong involvement with eastern mysticism. I looked at Don and said, “This is Zen. This is Zen Filmmaking.” And, that was it.
The foundation of Zen Filmmaking, and the guiding principle of each of the 161 films Shaw has directed since his first solo Zen Film, Samurai Vampire Bikers From Hell (1992), is…no foundation. More practically, no screenplay, as Shaw explains:
First of all, and perhaps most importantly, from a philosophic perspective, screenplays keep you locked into a stagnate mindset. If your film is created around a screenplay, then your cast and crew are very reluctant to allow things to change. But, if you go into a project with simply an overview of a story idea, then your project becomes free and new inspiration is allowed to occur at any moment. And, believe me, from someone who has made a lot of films, you never know what new inspiration will strike or what great unexpected situation will present itself when you get to your location, have your cast in place, and are open minded about what you will actually film.
The other reason to not use a screenplay is based upon the fact that in your mind’s eye you can write a great story, have it set in elaborate locations, and acted out by great actors. For anyone who has ever been on a low-budget movie set, you quickly see that this is not the case. So, what occurs by writing an elaborate screenplay is that you are only setting yourself up for disappointment. But, with no screenplay, you are free. Any production is allowed to happen as it happens and become what it becomes.
Shaw has developed six tenets of Zen Filmmaking which guide and shape his practice and that you can explore at his website, here. “If you acutely plan your productions, with screenplays, storyboards, and locations,” he argues, “there is no room for the instantaneousness of Cinematic Enlightenment to occur.” He concludes, “In Zen Filmmaking, nothing is desired and, thus, all outcomes are perfect.”
Sean Welsh
Weird Weekend present Divinity on Friday 28th June, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
- Eddie Alcazar, as told to Constanza Falco Raez, flaunt.com ↩︎
- Casablanca famously commenced shooting with only half a script; the equally famous “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” was dubbed by Bogart a month after filming concluded. ↩︎
- James Ward Byrkit, “How Gotham Nominee James Ward Byrkit Made ‘Coherence’ in 5 Days with No Script or Budget”, Indiewire ↩︎
- Nine of them are “help” ↩︎
- Ref star Jeff Bridges, “They had no script, man. They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn’t know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, ‘You got any ideas?'” (as reported by Gizmodo) ↩︎
- Ref screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, “It was not at all locked in. We had enough to start shooting the first ten days. I was writing frantically ahead of schedule… If I wasn’t on call as an actor that day I was holed up in the cabin writing the rest of the movie.” (Money Into Light) ↩︎
- Ref star Russell Crowe, “It had 21 pages when we started shooting…it’s the dumbest possible way to make a film.” (BBC Radio 1) ↩︎
- Ref Writer/Director Christopher McQuarrie, “There’s that little GIF of Wallace And Gromit, and Gromit is putting the track in front of the train. That’s very much what making Mission: Impossible is.” (Empire Magazine) ↩︎
- Eddie Alcazar, as told to Scott Macaulay, filmmakermagazine.com, October 17, 2023 ↩︎
- Eddie Alcazar, as told to Constanza Falco Raez, flaunt.com ↩︎
- Not just any film, but Kodak 16mm reversal film, “a very tricky film stock”, according to Danny Hiele, in American Cinematographer ↩︎
- Christian Zilko, Divinity Review, Indiewire, October 15, 2023 ↩︎
- Eddie Alcazar, Anthem Magazine, October 6, 2023 ↩︎
- Zen Filmmaking is a Register Trademark. ↩︎