Guru

How to…Write a romantic comedy

Posted: 18 May 2015

British screenwriter and BAFTA Breakthrough Brit Tess Morris is making a name for herself after having written the screenplay for the Simon Pegg starring Man Up on spec. Here the former journalist and soap opera writer shares her advice for other future romantic comedy writers…

Morris: I wrote Man Up on spec. It was a last-chance saloon for me, because I’d been writing for TV and I wanted to move into film. I’d hit a bit of a crisis point in my writing life and thought, “Right, if this doesn’t work I’ll go and get a proper job.” I took three months and just did it.

I was under the clock at Waterloo and someone did come up and ask me if I was someone else and that was how I got the idea for the film. But I was at a loss as to how to put it into words. I knew I had the dialogue and the themes. My best friend had read a book called Writing the Romantic Comedy by Billy Mernit and I was like, yeah, another book about writing. But I read it and it honestly changed my whole writing life. It unlocked the film for me.

He breaks it up into seven writing beats:

The ‘chemical equation’
The ‘cute-meet’
The ‘sexy complication’ turning point
The mid-point
Then you have the swivel second act turning point, usually when one of your characters makes the wrong decision
There’s the ‘dark crisis’ climax
And then your joyful resolution

In Man Up, I tried to subvert all of those things. But what I cannot bear is when people say something is an anti-romcom. I’m not trying to do that, I love the genre. But I tried to do something different. You know the romcom run? In Man Up, he does run to her, but he has fifty drunk teenagers behind him.

The balance should be much more in favour of comedy than romance, but what’s happening [in films] now is it goes too far one way. So it’s either balls-out comedy, or it’s too much romance. Personally, I would say 73% comedy and then you really go with it with your romance. Actually, maybe it should be more like 60/40, because you’ve got to have that underlying will they/won’t they factor otherwise people won’t care. If you’re only laughing, but you don’t care about them, then it’s a pointless film to watch.

Where we got incredibly lucky with Man Up was with Simon and Lake. It’s so important that your leading lady and man have chemistry on-screen. When you’re writing a romcom, you’re writing chemistry on to the page and then you’ve got to hope that later it’s cast well, which ours was. They could have the best script in the world, but if they don’t have that ‘thing’, then you’re fighting a losing battle.

When you’re writing a romcom, you’re writing chemistry on to the page.

The film’s got to be about something too. Often romantic comedies are not about anything. You’ve got to have an overriding question – in When Harry Met Sally it’s ‘can men and women be friends?’ A lot of bad romcoms will just be about a girl who can’t meet a man.

But romcom is not a dirty word. There are good ones and there are bad ones just like all films. They are feel-good films, you want to come out of them and feel something about your own life.

Now the movie’s coming out, it feels really amazing. It’s quite soul-exposing – the film is my film and has lots to do with my own life. But I’m so proud of it. I’m incredibly lucky, but I’m also s*ing myself.”

Tess Morris’s CV

She started by winning the Lloyds Bank Channel 4 Film Challenge in 1997.

“I was about 18 or 19 and doing a film and TV degree in York.”

She got her break on Hollyoaks.

“I was a journalist for a while and was interviewing lots of the Hollyoaks cast. The press agent said they were looking for writers. People can be very sniffy about soap opera, but it was the best apprenticeship ever for me.”

She was also in the writer’s room for My Family.

“I was in a room with people who wrote on Seinfeld and I had to hold my own and pitch jokes.”

Taking time off can be helpful sometimes.

“In my early thirties, I took a couple of years off writing and worked in development for a lot of independent film producers. It was after that – and reading a lot of bad scripts – that I thought I should have a go at this. I was like, come on, write a film and see what happens.”

There is a lack of women writing movie comedy.

“It’s a really strange place to be. There’s the heavily feminist side to me which says, ‘why can’t I just be [thought of as] a funny writer?’ I don’t think of my voice necessarily as female. I write about my life – you write about who you know, not what you know.”

Next up – Santa Claus!

“I’m writing a Christmas movie for StudioCanal and another film for Big Talk and the BBC. It’s such a weird feeling to have work! Every now and then I get a little bit uneasy. It’s a very long game, this job. You have to be very tenacious.”