The best way to create compelling fiction is to ground oneself in real world narratives.
Hitchcock obviously has his Hitchcocks. He must have: nobody speaks in fresh tones without having listened closely to the madding throng that murmured and shouted before.
It’s true for everyone, including those who seem to recreate the world as if they were singularly capable of sight in a darkened world. Jean-Luc Godard, who died in September at 91, was just such a guy. A cranky self-absorbed artist from a wealthy background, Godard changed everything. You don’t have to know his work to have been influenced by his work. Anti-establishment, anti-semetic, and an enfant terrible who’s self absorption sometimes forced long friendships into sad, revanchist retreat, he also challenged and ultimately changed how storytellers of all stripes think about how to tell a story. His movies shifted cinema’s tectonic plates, but their influence reverberated far beyond movie theaters. By testing the precept that stories didn’t have to move linearly, or smoothly, or with clearly drawn character motivations, he challenged established rules about how stories might be told in all sorts of creative work. Godard never sounded like the kind of person who’s company I would have enjoyed, but that has nothing to do with the respect I have for his willingness to interrogate and refract what had come before.
Godard had his antecedents, of course. In fact, it’s largely because he had been such a serious student of literature and cinema that he knew the basics well enough to twist them into pretzels. That’s a critical thing, and one often dismissed by the wannabes. There could be no Beethoven without a Mozart. There could be no Christopher Nolan without a Stanley Kubrick. There could be no J.K. Rowling without a J.R.R. Tolkien.
I can’t pretend to actually like many of his movies. Respect? Absolutely. “Breathless” still shines like a magnesium flare. “Alphaville” asserts a creative parentage on so many vital works that would not only follow in cinema, but also in books, theater, and more, even if the movie is a little tedious. “Contempt” commands us to pay attention because it asks us to take stock of our own lives. But let’s be honest: they can drag, they can thumb their noses at the audience with a sense of self-important hauteur; they can simply make a mess that I don’t necessarily want to deal with. But even if he’s not always my cup of tea, I’ve written an entire essay about his ruminations on the universe as considered in a cup of coffee. I simply can’t deny the protean influence Godard exerts.
The point here is that nobody creates in a vacuum. Nobody emerges with a fresh take without already being fiercely and voraciously pursuant of something that foundationally has nothing to do with pure commerce. Money makes things possible, but money by itself has nothing to say. Artists with ideas look to other artists, and other people, and what comes before is always the genetic code for what comes after. Just like children, we may know the parents, but we can still scarcely predict where their lives will go.
Godard famously hated to fly. He allegedly said it forced him to be without a cigarette for too long. (Remarkable, I think, that he lived to be 91.) I don’t smoke, but if you do, this is your moment to blaze a Gauloise, shake your open hand at the latest headlines in Le Monde (or your major news source of choice), and put pen to paper—or keystroke to 21st century laptop as the case may be. After all, if you don’t capture and refine the ideas that move you, your ideas will never have a chance to influence someone else.
PS — Next month I’ll present a companion piece to this. What happens when we believe we’re creating something new, but in fact, we’re not? Check it out on the first Monday of the month!