Beau Willimon: Screenwriters’ Lecture

Beau Willimon screenwriter of twice BAFTA-nominated House Of Cards, has spoken with Nev Pierce, Editor of Empire Magazine, about all things film and television. Speaking as part of the 2015 Screenwriters’ Lecture Series Willimon talked about the experiences he gained from working in politics and how it informed his writing style. As well as discussing the differences between writing for film and television and how there’s no clear trajectory to becoming a writer.

• Read a full transcript of Willimon’s Screenwriters’ Lecture

Here are some of Willimon’s top pieces of advice for budding writers, from how to craft characters that resonate with audiences to making the most of every opportunity thrown your way…

Willimon highlights the importance of having a diverse and representative writing team, to ensure characters have an authentic voice. He explained that the authentic female voices in his work draw on the lived experience of “the women I employ on my writing staff, which is an important thing to do if you’re going to have female characters in your show.”

He also encouraged writers to explore creating characters with different backgrounds to their own, to learn and emphasise with a diverse range of people: “That said, I really am against the notion that the female characters should write the female characters and the male writers should write the male characters. What is writing if not the attempt to put yourself in other people’s shoes. So I expect my female writers to be able to write men well to the best of their ability, and vice versa. Now we’re all limited by our own experiences.

“There are certain things I will never be able to access because of things that are genetic, things that are in my upbringing, things that are cultural. We all have our limited horizons and often our unconscious biases, but I think writing is an attempt to acknowledge those and sometimes get beyond them and find the universal in all of our experiences.”

As a screenwriter Willimon is known for his research into complex political worlds as demonstrated in his works The Ides of March and House of Cards. He cites beginning his career in political campaigns as something which has provided a wealth of experience for him to draw on: “It’s my own personal experience and it’s also my writers’ own personal experience. And oftentimes the research is not so much political, it’s drawing from, you know you can see something happen on a sidewalk… that’s research. If you absorb it, if it means something to you, if you find yourself using it and colliding it with your character, so I think it’s about being open.”

However, he did also note that while it’s important to draw on lived experience, curiosity and openness are also key traits for a writer: “the adage ‘write what you know’ I think is a very wise one. But also it’s important to write what you don’t know, if only to discover the things that you know that you didn’t know.”

Rounding off the discussion, Willimon admitted that there’s no correct way of becoming a writer, “I always struggle when writers ask for advice because there’s no formula.”

However, he encouraged budding writers to get involved and make their own projects to gain as much experience as possible: “A big part of any form of success in any industry is looking for opportunities and then making opportunities if they’re not being laid at your feet. And that can be school, it could be going out and making your own film on your own, it can be, if no one is doing any of your pilots, writing a play and doing that with your friends, you know no one can stop you from that. There’s a million ways to create opportunities for yourself, but ultimately all of that is only there if you’ve got the pages.”

For more inspiring Lectures from the world of film, games and TV explore our Resource section.