Miguel Tejada-Flores has worked as executive, producer and writer on various projects that have taken him from Hollywood to countries around the globe. His ever-growing and prolific slate of credits spans film and television in many genres including comedy ("Revenge of the Nerds"), animation ("Lion King"), sci-fi ("Screamers"), horror ("Beyond Re-Animator"), and thriller ("Atomic Dog"). Currently, he's working on several projects including a psychological thriller with the producer of "Hotel Rwanda."

Tejada-Flores studied literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz and after graduation, continued at the Sarbonne in Paris. He then studied filmmaking at the London Film School. Back in the U.S., he worked as an analyst for studios including Paramount, then moved on to Lorimar, where he rose to the executive ranks and later worked for Herb Jaffe's Vista Films as writer/producer/executive. And then his screenwriting career took off.

Tejada-Flores has been a speaker, panelist, and mentor at a number of events including NALIP's Latino Writers Lab and Latino Producer's Academy. He also taught screenwriting at Linfield College in Oregon. From influences on foreign filmmakers to what counts in a horror flick, from the artistic to the business side, it seems there isn't anything he can't talk about when it comes to the movie industry. A brilliant speaker, Tejada-Flores will be giving the keynote address at the upcoming Screenwriting Conference in Santa Fe (www.scsfe.com).

In this interview, Tejada-Flores talks about choices writers have to make, what he's learned over the years, and what writers need to master to survive in the business.

Q: Looking back on when you started, what's different today in how writers procure work?

A: There is one fundamental change, but that took place a long time ago. In the film industry in general, it was easier for many writers to make money and get deals off of story pitches. For a number of good reasons, that's no longer true. (Television, by the way, has always relied on pitching and that is still true, but most people that get television deals are established writers as opposed to new or untried writers. Television works differently than the dramatic feature film market.)

It's much harder for feature writers, whether skilled and experienced or untried with no credits, to get deals based on ideas. Probably, one of the reasons for that is that the market place at a certain point--after the long and semi-disasterous writers strike of 1989--became flooded by a sea of spec scripts. Many of the buyers realized there is a larger amount of good spec material than there ever was before. So, why should they waste money developing ideas that might never get made when they could buy scripts and make them instead?

The biggest change is that treatments are useless now. Treatments and loglines may be useful for having conversations with people, but most writers are obliged to actually write scripts now. Due to the fact that there are so many writers writing scripts, you can't just write a script. You have to write a great script. Good scripts go in the trash heap. The script really has to be great. That's a problem for many writers.

Q: Are they valuing execution over the idea?

A: No and yes. It's the idea and the characters and the execution. Occasionally, things will still be bought based on ideas, but the writer has to show some writing chops. A good writer has a number of storytelling tools at their disposal, and I can write in such a way that I can seduce many unsuspecting and many suspecting readers into thinking that a story that is not that good is actually much better than it is. But, when push comes to shove, that probably won't get the film financed.

Q: Any changes in the material they're buying?

A: The film industry has gotten both more conservative and more liberal. It's gotten more conservative in that at times, in certain segments of the film marketplace, people want more predictable and recognizable stories within certain genres. People in many areas are less willing to take chances. This is always a cyclical issue. They want original variations on tried and true themes, which they think they can sell. They want romances, romantic comedies, broad comedies, horror films, action films, and the conservative wisdom is that [those genres] have to correspond to certain things.

The other side of the coin is that as more and more people and companies lose money on motion pictures and go out of business, occasionally people are stunned to discover that films which don't appear to correspond to any simplistic marketing or storytelling formulas work well. Most of those films share strong personal visions and most if not all of them have memorable characters who are different than other characters we've seen and, in some way, touch parts of us deeply so that we actually want to spend an hour and a half with them. Some of them have memorable and masterful film story tellers or directors who are using directorial tools to make us become involved with the characters or the story. A brilliant and innovative director can elevate a story to something you won't forget. Of course, a great character will not work unless you have a great actor.

Q: You mentioned the success of films that don't appear to correspond to storytelling formulas. Can you give some examples of those?

A: There was a legendary directorial film and legendary character portrait by Darren Arenofsky called "Pi" about a physicist who was going insane pondering the nature of reality. That's not a broad comedy. It's not an action piece. But the film is mesmerizing. It takes you inside of head of the character and deals with the nature of reality, and allows the director to get an astounding performance from the actor and to take us somewhere we've never been before. I don't think the film made a lot of money, but it made many reputations including that of the director, who went on to many other things.

Several years ago, there was a movie that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The writer spent years writing the script and was obsessive about the script. He also directed it and he was obsessive about the directing. It deals with what happens to people who spy on other people--what happens to people who judge other people when they have an emotional connection to the people they are judging. The film is called "The Lives of Others."

Q: An excellent movie.

A: The man that wrote it spent years writing it and he does a brilliant interview on the DVD, which is worth watching for any writer. In it, he talks about the origin of that particular film. Every film has its own origin. He's a very thoughtful and obsessed writer and he got the inspiration to make that movie after reading a quote by the founder of the Russian Revolution Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was a brilliant and strange and obsessed human being.

Lenin once attended a piano concert where a great pianist played an emotional, stirring, and moving rendition by Beethoven. I think it was "The Moonlight [Sonata]". After the concert, Lenin was in tears and he wrote in his diary that he could never ever listen to Beethoven again, because if he listened to Beethoven, he said he could not make the revolution. Which means that if he allowed himself to have emotional feelings about the things he was doing, his emotions would get in the way of him being able to do some of the things which were, at moments, extreme or brutal. And that's what the movie is about. The movie is about a character who has the same purity of belief that some priests or spiritual people do, but who lives in a society in East Germany in 1950s, which was a legendary society for corruption and the fact that the East German police, the Stasi, had somewhere between a quarter and a third of the entire country on payroll to spy on each other. Everybody was watching everybody else. Everybody was paranoid. It was a difficult and trying time for most ordinary human beings.

The guy who is at the center of the film is someone who is obsessed. He is brilliant at spying on other people, getting information about their private lives and using it to destroy them in the name of a political cause that he deeply believes in, so much that he has never questioned the human or emotional fallout of what he's doing because he doesn't need to. He knows he is doing the right thing. During the course of an investigation, something happens which is impossible, which he never foresaw. He begins to have an emotional connection with the people [he is supposed] to spy on and destroy. What's that going to do?

[The film] does also fit a mold. Here's the mold it fits. When you see that movie, it's a compelling portrait of a character who had both external problems and internal problems and at the key or crucial moment of the film which also could be described as either the resolution of the film, or the climax, or the heart of the film, the character is forced to make a choice. And it's a very real choice and what that character does will change everything in the world around him, and himself.

Even though the film may not fit into the traditional marketing or genre molds, it is a film with a classic dramatic structure. It takes a character and a story and it builds that character to a moment of both conflict and resolution. The whole film takes you to that moment in the same way that when you see great paintings, especially in the classical tradition, the painter has used a lot of tricks and techniques to lead your eye and your feelings to certain things in the painting. Really great writers can do that.

Another film that's a great example is "The Motorcycle Diaries." Che Guevara as a young man is a doctor going around Latin America looking for the meaning of life. When he finds the meaning of life, if he does find something that means something to himself, it will also put him in a position of jeopardy and choice and risk, both internally and externally. The whole film moves towards one amazing moment and one amazing scene. It's really extraordinarily brilliant in doing that. The film affects people in different ways but it always has power for them. I talked with the screenwriter (who is also a playwright) at one point and I asked him if he consciously knew that there was this center of the film towards which everything else led, and he said, "You bet." So, it helps you as a writer if you also know where your story is going, but in this particular case, the place where the story is going is the place where the character is going too.

Having said that, different films have different requirements. If we're doing that film, that's one thing. But if we're doing a vampire film, my basic [priority] is to scare the shit out of you. But also, to scare the shit out of you in a mesmerizing and unique and entertaining way, which is unlike any other vampire movie you've ever seen. So, is a character really going to help me there? Or should I come up with a bunch of cool stuff the vampires can do? Good question. I just contradicted myself. There is no one way to go.

Q: And that is a source of confusion. Writers are given rules about structure and told their stories have to fit certain molds, and then they're told to go write something fresh and different.

A: The moral is be true to yourself, be true to your characters, be true to your story. In the last few years, one of the two best films I've seen is the East German film "The Lives of Others" and the other--one of the most dramatic films I've seen--is a documentary, which by coincidence won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature this year. Called "Man on Wire," it is an astounding dramatic story about someone who is obsessed with a form of art which is dangerous, for which he must risk his life. So, it is about someone who risks his life to do something he believes in. Even though the film takes place in the past and documents a historical incident, which anybody who sees the movie knows the outcome of already, did the guy live or did he die? We know that. But, when you watch the movie, it takes you up to the moment when he risks his life and you're just sitting breathless on the edge of your seat. So it does it in a compelling fashion, even though it's not a drama. It's a documentary, but it uses dramatic storytelling techniques. So, we should learn from everything.

Q: What's different in the way you create now as opposed to when you started out in the business?

A: I think I have made one fundamental evolutionary change as a writer, which has to do with the internal battle between two ways to write scripts or to tell stories. One way is you have to have a great story. If you have a great story, everything else will take care of itself. The other way is, you have to have a great character or characters. And if you have a great character or characters, the story will take care of itself. The internal dichotomy is plot versus character--which is more important and which should I focus on more? For a long time, I came from the point of view that I wanted a great story and it helped that storytelling came easily to me. So, I have facility for spinning yarns. And if I struggled with anything, it was my characters. When we got into production, good directors would say to me, "Miguel, this is a really cool script, but we have some problems, because now, I actually have to deal with the actors that are going to be playing these roles and they're going to ask me questions like, 'Why am I doing this?' And although this script is great, it hasn't answered those questions so we have to do some brutal and intense soul searching and rewriting where we answer every one of those questions." After years of having beleaguered directors take me to the mat and say, "Miguel, why are they doing this?" you have to ask other questions. If you understand why a character is doing something then you probably also have to ask yourself, who is this character? What do they need? What do they want? Where did they come from? What has their life been like? And if we're just looking at a small portion of them in the overall time frame of their life, what's the rest of their life like? What led them to this moment? What will happen to them after the movie is over?

I still struggle as many writers do with the big questions and the small questions. Now, I struggle much more with questions such as, "Who is this character? Why are they doing what they are doing?" which really is the essence of everything else. As a producer, an executive or a teacher, I can teach a huge amount to many writers by simply reading five or ten pages of the script, or the whole script, and start by saying, "Okay, why are they doing this?" It's really astounding how many otherwise excellent writers don't have a clue why their characters do things. Those writers are committing the same sin I've committed many times, which is they have characters do things to get to the next cool moment of action or plot point. If you do that, eventually you run into problems and your problems mean that your script isn't good, the film will not be good, you will be rewritten, your actors will have problems, or your film will never see the light of day.

Those problems are true not just of serious dramas, but they're also true of horror stories, science fiction pieces and broad comedies. They're true with every kind of storytelling. It's a challenge for writers. Why do our characters do things? If you can answer those in detail and in dramatic fashion, then you have a chance that your script will do what we want all scripts to do--to become movies. And we all know what that is, don't we? The script should do to the people who read it what the Russian behavioral scientist Pavlov did to dogs. It should make them drool on command when you ring a bell. If your script doesn't do that, then sooner or later the executive or the producer or the financier you are giving it to will send it back to you. If they're polite, they might say "Thanks for letting us see this, but it doesn't really work for me." And you go, "Well, that sucks. Why don't they tell me why it doesn't work for them?" Their job is not to tell you, but if they were to tell you, they would say, "Well, I was going along with your script totally and then I reached a moment when the character did something which was so stupid or so weird or so incomprehensible that the reality of who that person was stopped me dead in my tracks. Up until then I was with you because I believed in the reality of your character and your world and, therefore, your story. But at that moment, when you left the reality of that, I didn't want to read anymore, because I knew you weren't taking it seriously. And if you weren't taking it seriously, why should I?"

Q: Is developing a character an actor loves the ticket to film financing?

A: That's a ticket in one sense, but certain genre scripts are not actor-dependent. Horror, thriller and sci-fi to name a few. The other issue for many writers is that while they're writing the piece more as an attempt to create a great role, they may write a longer and slower and more complex piece, which the actor may like more, but the director or the producer or the suit may not like as much. They go, "Yeah, I got all this character stuff, but where the fuck is the story? Let's get going. We're on page ten. Let's have something happening. This script is too long and too slow." So, that's an issue too. You can't make everybody happy all the time.

Q: That's one of those hard choices for writers.

A: Right. In general, there's a compromise. And the compromise is, the roles, the characters, have to be compelling and have to grip both the producer or suit and the actor, but the story also has to move so that it doesn't take 50 pages before you figure out what the story is about. So all those old tried and true rules which writers resent that say I have to know what the story is about by page ten, I have to be moving by this point, I have to reach this point, they are conventions. They are crutches. You shouldn't always live by them, but they're incredibly useful for a discipline of storytelling.

Q: Do you have anything else you'd like to add?

A: Yes. It has to do with psychological and emotional stability for writers. Everyone gets rejected. Not only do you get judged by other people and yourself for failing, but in a weird way, people also get judged for succeeding, because when they have success, after a while people say, "That is so great," then they also say, "Oh, and by the way, that's never going to happen to you again. You've done your best work." Artists and musicians and writers often judge themselves, have emotional, psychological imbalance, go crazy, or become suicidal or drink too much.

I think I recall [a famous Hollywood icon] saying something like, "In the film business, incredibly successful people are only rejected 80% of the time." So, unless you're already an incredibly successful writer (which means that actually you have an 80% rejection rate and maybe a 20% success rate) you may have a 98, 99, or 100% rejection rate. What does that do to you as a person? How are you going to survive that? Those are issues as well.

Why are you writing? What does writing mean to you? Do you have the resiliency and balance to be able to weather the darker periods as well as the sunshine, which come to all of us who labor in these fields? There is no one prescription for that, but it really helps to have a good inner survival strategy. That's why people do yoga and meditate and practice Tai Chi (which I do). A friend recently told me that there was a great semi-inspirational CD about the creative process and how to get through it in the film business which is written and spoken by David Lynch, creator of "Twin Peaks" and "Blue Velvet" and many other weird movies, and David Lynch, in spite of his dark side, is someone who is mellow and spiritual and meditates for a half hour every day and searches for inner meaning. And then he does all these weird dark cool images of places that scare people.

So how are you going to survive if you are on this strange path? It's good to be able to survive. It's bad if you let it get to you in ways which destroy your ability to be creative. You need to find your own space and balance and way to keep living.

Would you like to have your question answered by pros working in the industry? If there's a topic you'd like to see addressed in this column, please send me an e-mail (CindyRinaldi@visionization.com) with "WBW" in the subject line.