Foxtel Screenwriters’ Address: Elliot Perlman

This week author and screenwriter Elliot Perlman delivered the annual Foxtel Screenwriters’ Address, held in conjunction with the Australian Writers’ Guild.

Perlman is the author of The Street Sweeper, Seven Types of Ambiguity, The Reasons I Won’t be Coming and co-screenwriter of Three Dollars, which won the AFI and film Critics’ Awards. 

At his address he mused on the writer’s obligation to entertain:

Here are selected excerpts:

There is one obligation the writer has, no matter the style or form of writing, that comes over and above all else. Before the writer does anything else he or she has to entertain. You have to hold the audience’s attention. You have to distract them from what they were doing and thinking before your work came to them. Just as the physician’s first obligation according, to Hippocrates, is to “first, do no harm”, so the primary obligation of the writer is “keep the audience interested”, at least enough to keep watching, reading or listening to your work.

But do people want to see the world they know in their entertainment or do they want to be taken from that world? Some do and some don’t. Do people want to be educated, enlightened or sensitized to the problems of the world or do they want to escape those problems? Some do and some don’t. Some do on some days but not on other days. Some people thought they never do but found they sometimes do. Some people used to but are currently going through a period where they don’t.

But if people’s perception of the world is at least in part a product of the stories they read, see or hear, then it is also incumbent on the writer to at times portray the world as it is – in the way that Dickens, Zola, Steinbeck, Arthur Miller did – so that the audience’s view of the world remains in touch with reality. This brings us to the matter of the contemporary Australian reality. There is a lot about the Australian reality of today that should concern us not just as writers, but as citizens and as human beings, things that go to the very core of contemporary Australia, things that often go unremarked upon.

Writers have the opportunity to shape the way the world sees itself. Most people see the world not only through their own experiences, which are necessarily limited, but through an understanding of the world that’s informed by all the stories they’ve ever heard, read, been told or seen, stories our predecessors told and now through the stories we tell. Writers are integral in the framing of people’s perceptions of the world. Writers take glimpses of experience, their own and others’, and place them side by side until a narrative is made that helps to make sense of the world, even if the sense is that the world does not make sense. There’s comfort to be gained for the audience in knowing that they’re not alone in feeling this. The work that inspired you to write in the first place did this for you. Writing is something the world needs people to do. The fruits of a writer’s labour can bring comfort, elucidation, enlightenment and even pain relief.

You write because, like all artists, there’s an urge in you to create something of value ex nihilo, out of nothing. In the words of Stephen Sondheim, writing for his version of George Seurat, the French post-expressionist painter, “Look I made a hat/Where there never was a hat.” It’s how you know you’re you, perhaps the only time in your life you recognise a you that’s genuinely distinct from other people.