[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: What is the emotion manufacturing and distribution industry?
Andy Guerdat, Television Writer, Producer, Instructor, and Podcaster: What is that? That’s the entertainment business. That’s what we’re doing. We’re not chasing trends, we’re not making trends, we’re not doing all those things that executives and critics and people would like us to think we’re doing. We are trying to make people feel something, whether it’s movies, television, anything, that’s the goal. You’re not educating people, you may do those things in addition to moving people, but your job as a screenwriter (and the screenwriters are the first filmmakers), your job is to make people feel something. You’re in the emotion manufacturing business and the distribution of that emotion, that’s what we do, that’s our job.
Film Courage: When people think of Hollywood, we think of glamour and action but really it’s like a puppet, we’re having our strings pulled?
Andy: Absolutely, I mean that’s the contract. The contract we make with the audience is they pay us money in the form of a box office ticket or in the form of paying their cable bill or their streaming app bill and in return we make them feel something, that’s our contract with them. They don’t even necessarily know it. If you ask them they probably wouldn’t necessarily describe it (the audience) that way but it is that. It could be laughter, it could be tears, it could be being scared, it could be having your pulse buzzing with excitement, it could be getting turned on, but it’s something that makes them feel something, that’s the relationship between the filmmaker, the screenwriter and the audience.
Film Courage: What’s the difference between expressing emotion and evoking emotion?
Andy: The difference between expressing and evoking emotion is radically different and Incredibly important to for the screenwriter to identify any kind of writer we’ve all been told and we have a in society now there’s sort of sense of we’re all supposed to be expressing ourselves and that’s great it’s a wonderful thing to do but I don’t want to see your therapy session and you don’t want to see mine and I certainly don’t want to pay to see your therapy session. Our job is not to just express ourselves, if you just want to…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
About:
Andy Guerdat has been a working writer/producer in film and television for the past 45 years, with hundreds of credits in movies, half-hour comedies, hour-long dramas, theater, and animation. He is currently a consultant at Disney TV Animation.
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