You Never Stop Learning

6 Pages 1553 Words

“You Never Stop Learning”

“If you write a screen play that you can’t visualize, then you haven’t written the right thing.” - James Segars. James Segars is a semi successful writer/filmmaker who has written several successful independent films. Among these include The Fly, and Tools of Desperation, both of which received high praise at the 2001 Baltimore Independent Film Festival. While Segars is no Steven Spielberg, his unique and charismatic screenplays are creating some buzz throughout much of Hollywood. At the tender age of only 21, Segars has just completed his undergraduate degree in Film Mastery at Florida State University, and is taking his first step into the world of film this year by student teaching at the University of Southern California’s film program. Being an aspiring screen writer myself, I took this interview as a chance to learn, and gain insight into what makes a great screen writer tick, and what techniques, or tricks he use’s in order to get his point across.
“Writing for me comes very easy now. It’s used to be hard to reproduce scenarios and moods, but I’ve spent the past couple of years studying psychology, as well as observing how people interact in there day to day lives in order to get a better sense of what someone would say while they are truly mad, as opposed to scripting what someone would say when there mad.” Segar’s perspective is one that few have thought about, and perhaps that is why his films are receiving the critical praise they are. His films deal with real life issues that don’t show actors as “superior beings”. They talk just like you and me, with no cliché catch phrases that no one would ever say in real life. “In all fairness, the hardest part about writing is being original. It is my sense, and the sense of many others, that there are only about a dozen of so stories in the world; it’s just a matter of how you write or perceive them. Aft...