SNAPlab

In the last few weeks – while waiting for the ethics committee’s approval – I have been finishing a book about the Czech screenwriter Meir Lubor Dohnal. An unknown filmmaker to most people, but one who had an incredibly interesting and colourful life. Just to name a few – a Holocaust survivor, a member of the new wave of Czechoslovak cinema, politically persecuted, a signatory of Charter 77, he made it as a screenwriter even in German exile, films based on his screenplays have competed at major festivals around the world. 

The book I am finishing is partly a collection of essays and partly a collection of interviews. Togga will be the publisher and the book will be released during the summer of 2025.

Talking to my colleagues at Royal Holloway, I realised that none of them will probably be able to read the book because it will be published in Czech. So I thought I’d take a bit of theour conversation and translate it as a sample.

So below are two excerpts that relate to videos on smartphones and artificial intelligence. But through these topics, Meir Lubor Dohnal gives an insight into how he thinks about writing for film, and where he sees the power of cinema.

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Aren’t you worried that you are training filmmakers for a time when cinemas will function more like museums?

I don’t think that’s going to happen. I believe that people will still go to see new films and filmmakers will discover innovative techniques suitable for the big screen. I recently saw Corsage, which is the type of film that people won’t want to watch on their mobile phones.

How important are technological developments for screenwriting students? Do you address with them the difference in writing for cinema or for TV and streaming platforms?

We distinguish between the internet, TV, or cinema. As a viewer, though, I’m increasingly aware that technological advances are blurring the distinctions between ways of presenting film. After seven years, I’m buying a new computer, and the visual quality is such that it almost doesn’t matter if I’m sitting in the back row of the theater or at the computer. The biggest difference is in the sound. That’s where computers and televisions still lag behind cinemas, and without good sound, the film is amputated.

Do your students watch movies more in the cinema or on the computer or even on a smartphone? 

They prefer the cinema, but more often on the smartphone. I wouldn’t watch a movie that way myself, but it’s a way for them to see the classics. And if they have a guide to what to look out for, they’ll get it. For them, these are movies for old-timers anyway. They wouldn’t find Bergman and Pasolini as interesting today as we did 60 years ago. They don’t marvel half a century later at formal innovation. It’s enough for them to understand that in Pasolini, communist and Catholic thought, conservative desire and radical subversion, were at odds. As a document of important works of cinematic history, the phone can work just fine. But not as a tool for discovering things. Students go to the cinema to see contemporary films, just as we do.

Could you imagine writing a film for a smartphone?

Well, yes, I could, but I wouldn’t do it in the same way as I would for the wide screen. I saw my former student Zdeněk Jiráský at work on I Don’t Love You Anymore. It’s about two teenagers who run away from home all the way to Romania and film each other on their smartphones. I know, it’s a different case, but I want to use it to show that smartphones can be conceived as something that filmmakers use in the construction of the story and that individualizes the film. Phones make it possible to connect different environments by jumping quickly into another space. The smartphone has become almost an organic part of the body of our contemporaries. A character without a phone would be strange. Life without it is like the life of a hermit. Thanks to technology, young people will perceive the world around them differently than I did. Their experience shaped by technology will allow new ways of identifying with the character. In spite of this, I think the experience of cinema screening is unmistakable. We’re stacked up in the dark like we’re in a spaceship, staring together at something from another world. I would have missed that magical atmosphere, and I’m sure it’s not just me. I don’t think the cinema is in danger of disappearing. At most it will be seen as just one possible way of showing films.

(…)

Do you think AI will help writers with their work or take it away?

Of course I’m thinking about it. It will certainly change the work of screenwriters, but I don’t think writers won’t be needed. I can’t imagine AI being able to make art. I believe it can write a script, I believe a film based on such a script can be not only consumable but interesting or even attractive. But it would probably be far from what I understand as the art of filmmaking. The individuality of the filmmaker, which is strange and unique, can break the rules. Whereas artificial intelligence will always follow the rules. Even if we program it to break the rules, it will do so according to the rules. Of course, such work is also needed in screenwriting, say in advertising. I can imagine that AI can even produce a commercial film better than a human, which will have a high audience. If you want to hit the audience’s taste, thanks to AI you can have a script ready in an hour.

But it will be a script that follows the rules.

Of course it will. To write a good script, you have to know the rules. You have to know the craft. That’s how you deal with writing problems. The AI will give you, say, ten options to choose from. But when we talk about film as art, we’re mostly talking about uniqueness and originality. And the only originality is in us and in our consciousness. Of course, we can look at people through statistics and see that we all have the same problems. But the solution to those problems is completely individual. A good screenwriter can identify with a character based on his or her own experience and thus make his or her work original. At the same time, it gives the viewer a chance to identify with the character as well. If this is done, the writer gets into a direct dialogue with the viewer because the character connects them. When the viewer then leaves the cinema, something is going on in their head that they would not otherwise have had the chance to experience. That’s what’s exciting about it, and there’s no substitute for the artist.

The originality has to come from the screenwriter?

It can be the director’s. I see the writer and director as such a complex personality. If someone has a director’s vision, they can make art out of a phone book. So theoretically, a robot could replace a screenwriter if the director is dominant enough.

But you’re obviously not worried about that.

We can speculate all sorts of things. Like artificial intelligence destroying us. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, which is why I don’t think AI is dangerous. I’m going to digress. I think there is a system of information exchange and correction in the universe. Man is not alone in this. Scientists today can observe the post-big bang state and subatomic particles. Something happens according to rules and something seemingly erratic, but even the chaotic is subject to harmony. I deliberately don’t say goal because I’m not a fatalist and I don’t think it happens over time. Harmony – the unity of everything – is just the basic rule within which we are free to move. Everything from elementary particles to human beings has some degree of freedom, where to move, what to bump into. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, it’s random. Sometimes we hit harmony and sometimes we don’t. When we don’t, it falls off. And when it does, it cleans everything up, lights everything up. But I don’t want to get into religious matters. What I’m trying to say is that just as our bodies are changing, our consciousness is evolving. Just as the evolution of our species is changing the importance of certain organs, like the appendix, so too is the way we think about the world transforming. And the question is whether this will take place over tens of thousands of years, or faster.

And how does artificial intelligence relate to this?

Humans have the gift of awareness and reflection. I think art is a form of cognition, like science. They have a similar meaning for humans. They make us more insightful, more rational, more aware of our limits and possibilities. When you know the limits of your own consciousness, you think about how to overcome them, which is related to the human desire for knowledge. Artificial intelligence can be an aid in this, just as the computer and other inventions have been in the past. It will speed up some of the thought processes, calculations, become our collaborator, and we will think together. I see it as an opportunity rather than a threat. If anything is a danger to mankind, it is man.