In this interview segment, Tim Kashani asks veteran screenwriting teacher Robert McKee about the differences he observes between his own generation of film school students and today’s students. McKee acknowledges the question, hinting at a forthcoming discussion on how contemporary film education and student attitudes have evolved compared to the era when he attended the University of Michigan.
You began at the University of Michigan as a film student, and you began into the world as a professional before you became an educator.
Yeah.
What do you notice different from when you went to film school to people that you are seeing today? Generationally?
Oh, it's, it's, it's 180 degrees. Um, when I went to school, film school was the third study that I had. My first bachelor's degree was in English literature. My master's degree was in the theater. My PhD was cinema. And from those 3 degrees, I mean, I started going to school at the university in 1959. And throughout the '60s, then I was doing my bachelor's and my master's, and then I came back late in the '70s to do the PhD. And you could see that the world had completely turned around. And fundamentally, it was this difference. In the 1960s, when I was working in English literature and I was writing, taking creative writing classes, and I was writing plays and short stories, and when I was in the theater directing and acting, the problem was emotional control. We were all just raging with emotions. And what we wrote and the way we went about acting and directing and whatnot had an incredible intensity. And often, we were just emotionally out of control. And we wrote things that are absolutely Readable, unproducible. I remember once, as an actor, I was in an acting class, and I was doing a scene from Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, and it's a love scene, very passionate love scene. And the actress and I got so emotional in that scene that when we went to kiss, our heads slammed together so hard that we both perforated our lips with our teeth, and we stepped back from the kiss, and we were both bleeding. Okay, now I don't mean that happened every day, but okay, the problem was emotional control. Then I go back 20 years later, and it's the opposite problem. It's now emotionless. It's now— the attitude is that it's not an art form, it's a game to make money, to become famous, that it's all about commercialism and trends and writing this summer's hit. Or copying other people, and your career is more important than your creativity. When I first went into the arts, creativity was the only consideration. Career, if it happened, great. If not, didn't matter. You're struggling to be an artist. Today, it's the other way around. It's all about careers, and creativity is second second to careers. And as a result, so much of it is so unemotional. Or if it is emotional, it's intellectualized emotionalism. It's what writers think is emotional. It's not what writers feel is emotional, it's what they think is emotional. So they just write to imitate emotions because they don't feel them. That's a general great overstatement because I'm sure there are umpteen thousands of exceptions to what I just said. But I've been doing this for 50, 60 years almost, and I can see the pendulum. It swung from emotion out of control emotionally to overcontrolled emotionally where we are now. Obviously, you want a balance, and the best of writers strike that balance to this day. I mean, certainly somebody like Vince Gilligan writing Breaking Bad understands genuine emotion. He's not imitating it. The current generation, people over 21 today, I think that part of the problem is that games, technology, computers. That whole technological explosion has changed human experience radically. Kids do not go out and play anymore. Kids have supervised play, or they sit at home staring at a screen. And so they're raised in a very different culture. And so, you know, but God knows they're smart. God knows they can work their way around a computer screen. And, you know, so it's not that things are lost. I'm looking forward to, I think, a wonderful future.
