ABSTRACT
In 1978, Milos Forman and Frank Daniel hired me to teach directing as a full-time assistant professor at Columbia University's Graduate Film Division. A crucial aspect that was missing from Columbia's directing program when Forman and Daniel came aboard, and from virtually every other film program in the world, was the craft of story development and the writing of the screenplay. Mike Leigh, the English director of Secrets and Lies and Vera Drake, works on developing a screenplay through improvisations with his actors over a long period of time, yet it is possible for to people make people's entire film without ever having a completed screenplay. To shoot film requires mastery over complicated technological world that is expensive, extremely time consuming, and because of its cost, limits full exploration of craft. Film is not literature, and a full understanding of the plasticity of the medium is necessary to tell a good film story.
