Split Personality: Random Thoughts on Writing for Theater and Film

In the spring of 1983, my play The House of Ramon Iglesia was produced off-Broadway by the Ensemble Studio Theatre. I was seduced very young by the theater, and, after many years of readings, workshops, false starts, and broken promises, I had finally lost my theater virginity. More than twenty years later, when The Motorcycle Diaries premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, I finally lost my film virginity.

In the years between those events, and continuing to this day, I have lived a double life: my overt love is the theater; my secret love is film. In theater, I have been able to carve out a niche as a writer of "magic realist" plays (whatever the fuck that means), exploring the experiences of a Latino mind and soul set in a non-Latino world. In film, I have made a living. I started out doing rewrites of other writers' works (mostly for Disney), then, on the luckiest day of my life, I met Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station and Behind the Sun) and was hired to write Ernesto Guevara's coming-of-age story.

In theater, my work is seen by hundreds of theater fans, many of whom work in theater. In film, I have reached a much greater audience, perfect strangers mostly. Hardly a week passes when I don't meet someone who wasn't deeply touched by experiencing The Motorcycle Diaries.

Two loves. One lifetime of constant balance. Two sensibilities. Two audiences. Two languages. Two esthetic philosophies. Two ways to narrate a story. One pen, one hand, one hopelessly split brain.

Whenever I teach writing, I tell my students that you write a play with your ears and a film with your eyes. Theater is powered by spoken language—though too much of contemporary theater has been sadly watered down, and language in theater imitates the pale, cool language on television. Still, when theater language is hot—in the hands of, say, Caryl Churchill or Sarah Kane—it blows your mind and kicks your ass and takes you to sublime, terrifying, and sexy places.

But what's magical in theater can be an unnecessary crutch in film. I seek to write all my screenplays as if they were silent movies. I try to empower the camera as if it were an active member of the cast—narrating its own point of view, creating its own tone, and sustaining its own mood. I want a camera that is always in motion, like a restless intellect using its eye to find out the truth. In film, I seek to use sound as spectacle, to use juxtaposition to jar the imagination, to use visual details to substitute for the nouns and verbs I normally would have used in a play.

But that's hard for a language freak like me to give up. What I have learned to do in film is to write dialogue that is as spare as possible and to invest the screenplay's narrative with as much complexity and creative energy as I can. I believe a screenwriter should editorialize on the page, design the film, instruct the actors, spell out the mood, and be subjective, to allow the reader to live the experience of the movie. Nothing in a screenplay should be left to chance. I make sure I speak in the language of colors, shapes, shadows, light, reveals, juxtapositions, sounds, textures, temperatures—visceral, smelly, heat-intensive language meant to get inside the experience, where the audience really wants to be.

And that's all fun. I transmit my enthusiasm for stage dialogue into a circus of description and atmosphere in the narratives of my screenplays. (It's probably great training for a would-be novelist.) What's a lot less fun is living with the role of the screenwriter in the industry food chain.

In American theater, the playwright is central. From meetings with directors, to conferring with designers, to casting the play, to observing rehearsals, American playwrights are producers, auteurs, authority figures. We are Mom. But although I was very well taken care of by the...