Sir David Hare: Screenwriters' Lecture

David Hare, writer, director, and man behind the recent big screen adaptations of The Hours and The Reader has shared his thoughts on what makes a successful film.

Speaking as part of the 2011 BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters’ Lecture Series he said “a film director is the only one who can make the abstract concrete” as they “align everyone’s views and to make everybody understand the degree to which they are making the same thing”. But at the same time, Hare added: “The screenwriter’s job is to begin that process. To be the first person who does that… the first person who imagines what it will be like”.

Watch highlights from Hare’s talk below:

From theatre to film

Moving into feature film after a successful career in theatre, Hare wrote and directed Wetherby (1985), an award-winning drama about the mysterious death of an enigmatic young man. He also wrote and directed Paris By Night (1988), in which a politician makes a deadly choice when threatened with a scandal, and adapted Josephine Hart’s novel Damage (1992), about an MP’s passionate affair with his son’s fiancée.

His more recent work includes two adaptations for Stephen Daldry. The Hours (2002) exploring the effect of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway on three generations of women and The Reader (2008) about a law student in post-WWII Germany re-encountering his former lover as she defends herself in a war-crime trial.

So, with such a wide-ranging portfolio of films already, what excites Hare most about the world of film right now and the future of the industry?

“It seems to me all the interesting filmmaking that’s going on at the moment, not all, but most of the interesting filmmaking is either to reinvent genre completely or to work outside genre…the stuff that’s interesting is breaking genre up.”