How One Line Of Dialogue Can Inspire A Movie — Ryan Harriss
Film Courage: Where do these ideas come from?
Ryan Harris, Filmmaker: A lot of them just stem from stories that I would love to see as a filmmaker, that I would love to go to the movies and watch and a lot of it comes from movies that I’ve watched over and over and over again or a lot of the inspiration comes from movies in general.
You watch a scene and you think to yourself that would be really interesting to…even a line of dialogue that the character could say, that in and of itself could be a story. That is something that would be interesting to explore so we just try to find things that we would love to see as filmmakers and writers and stories that we would love to be told.
There is actually a really interesting old Canadian movie. I say old, the late 90’s at it was called When Good Ghouls Go Bad and it stars Christopher Lloyd who is one of the most amazing actors. Everybody knows him as Doc Brown in BACK TO THE FUTURE but a lot of his stuff is serious work and his comedic work is just fantastic. So he has a line where he is speaking to his son and his son basically says You know you used to be this go-getter. The town is dealing with passing of this person who got stuck in this kiln overnight and the town sort of deals with that heavy weight and he says You know you used to be happy, you used to be a go-getter, you used to build things and make things and help people and Christoper Lloyd says Yeah and I built the kiln that that person died in. It’s one of those moments in that movie where he didn’t need to say that, that didn’t need to be a part of the movie, but it was and that right there you go man that in and of itself dealing with the trauma of doing something you love and then that thing you love hurts somebody, that in and of itself could be an incredible story. There are a lot of things in movies and I try my best to write them down when I feel them…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
