10 great films about screenwriters

Given that what we see in the movies often originates in the minds of screenwriters, it’s inevitable that screenwriters occasionally become the subjects of movies themselves; their practices, their inspirations, their relationship to filmmaking and place within the industry all put up on the screen. Cinema hardly knows of a more self-reflexive act. If your average film prefers to keep the process that went into its making invisible, a film with a screenwriter for a protagonist is more likely than most to draw attention to – and often deconstruct – its own creation.

The writing of a screenplay about a character who’s writing a screenplay is the tail-swallowing subject of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film. A bitingly frank examination of how artists often draw from life to make fiction, Bitter Christmas finds successful yet creatively blocked filmmaker Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) putting his life and the experiences of those around him into the script he’s writing for a new film. In the picture that Raúl imagines, Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) is, like Raúl, a frustrated filmmaker looking for inspiration for her new feature script – and in part finding it, like Raúl, in the misery of others.

Like so many of the best films about screenwriters, Bitter Christmas is not only a window into the agonising, joyful process of making art for the screen, but also a work of great play, the film’s structure bending and twisting as the author looks inward and stories within the story unfold. As Bitter Christmas readies for release on 28 August, below are 10 more films that put the screenwriter on the screen with flair.

Director: Nicholas Ray

It begins as a murder mystery: after leaving the apartment of Hollywood screenwriter Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) one night, a hat check girl is found killed, with Dix the prime suspect. As In a Lonely Place brings Dix into focus, however, the film becomes only more troubling. Dix may be totally innocent of murder, but that he’s a volatile man prone to violence towards strangers, colleagues and romantic partners alike is never in doubt.

In a brilliantly calibrated performance, Bogart gradually reveals the paranoia and hair-trigger temper that go along with Dix’s charm. What’s most disturbing about Nicholas Ray’s film – based on Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel – isn’t that Dix might be a murderous villain, but that he’s a complex human being whose unambiguous abuse is routinely excused by the world around him. Gloria Grahame’s Laurel falls for Dix so completely that she dismisses early warning signs of his brutishness and coercion, while such is Dix’s supposed brilliance as a writer that his rage is brushed off by his peers – even the ones he beats up – as an excusable component of the artist’s nature.

Director: Billy Wilder

The same year as Nicholas Ray suggested some cracked personalities might be involved in the making of the popular American cinema, Billy Wilder took an even more jaundiced view of Hollywood in Sunset Blvd. Unable to interest studios in his scripts and dodging creditors, screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) is forced to become a personal writer for – and, eventually, paid companion to – silent-age film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who dreams hopelessly of a comeback in a Cecil B DeMille-directed film about Salome.

If Wilder frames Tinseltown as cutthroat towards out-of-work creatives like Joe, the director suggests an arguably even worse fate awaits Hollywood’s stars. In Sunset Blvd, ageing and forgotten talent rattle around the fading Desmond mansion like ghosts (silent-era titans Erich Von Stroheim and Buster Keaton also appear in the film alongside Oscar-nominated silents actress Swanson). Norma herself, meanwhile, is played so outlandishly, grotesquely big by Swanson as to suggest that Norma has been warped by the screen, and by the fame that she knew and then lost.

Director: Julien Duvivier

Romance, farce, murder, a heist – Holiday for Henrietta has it all. That’s because the film within Julien Duvivier’s film is still being written, brainstormed onto the screen by two screenwriters wrestling a story into shape. Where one of the film’s writers (Louis Seigner) wants Holiday for Henrietta to be a Parisian trifle, in which innocent young Henriette (Dany Robin) and photographer Robert (Michel Roux) struggle to find their way back together in the City of Love, the other (Henri Crémieux) envisions something closer to a thriller, one that tests the characters (and the censors) with sexual temptation and violence.

As elements from the oppositional takes on the film bleed into one another – a bit-part character in one version becomes a dangerous criminal in the other, before both writers settle on the character as a roguish suitor to Henriette – Holiday for Henrietta begins to take more harmonious form. The final result is lighter than air, a playfully metatextual romantic comedy with a postcard-ideal 1950s Paris as the backdrop.

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Hired to write new scenes for a Fritz Lang-directed adaptation of The Odyssey, playwright Paul (Michel Piccoli) grapples with bulldog American producer Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) over the artistic direction of the film. Lang’s Odyssey must be Homer’s Odyssey, and not a film influenced by modern thought, insists Paul, as he simultaneously argues for a take on the story – wherein neither Odysseus nor Penelope really wish to be reunited – that’s undoubtedly inspired by his own collapsing marriage.

Shooting in the empty spaces of a declining Cinecittà and at Casa Malaparte, a modernist Capri villa with an endless view of the Mediterranean, Godard shows a strong Antonioni influence in Le Mépris. There’s a gorgeous desolation to every frame and ennui for every character, whether it’s Lang or Prokosch not getting what they want from their Odyssey, Paul lamenting his decision to write cinema when he could be writing plays, or Paul’s wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot) realising that her love for her self-involved husband has suddenly evaporated.

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen

Inspired by frustrations they felt while trying to crack the script for their knotty, verbose noir Miller’s Crossing (1990), the Coen brothers with their next film chose to depict the screenwriting process as a descent into what may literally be hell. In Barton Fink, John Turturro plays the eponymous Barton, a feted 1940s New York playwright who’s lured to Hollywood by the promise of riches, only to land there with paralysing writer’s block and take residence in a hotel of the damned.

There’s none of the affection for the studio system seen in the Coens’ later Hollywood farce Hail, Caesar! (2016); in Barton Fink, the Dream Factory is a machine into which writers are fed, with Barton urged to temper his artistic instincts by cynical executives who just want him to write a moneymaker. The brothers don’t have much more love for Barton, who feeds creatively off the ‘common man’ – the subject of Barton’s plays, but who Barton has little patience for in life – the way that those execs, and the mosquitoes in Barton’s nightmarish hotel room, feed on him.

Director: Spike Jonze

Seven years after he played a suicidally alcoholic screenwriter to Oscar-winning effect in Leaving Las Vegas (1996), Nicolas Cage received another Academy Award nomination for a more playful portrait of a Hollywood scribe. More accurately, it’s a double portrait: in Adaptation, Cage is Charlie Kaufman, a fictionalised version of the screenwriter of Adaptation, as well as Charlie’s twin brother Donald, who’s credited as the co-writer of Adaptation despite him being entirely an invention of the film.

Antic self-reflexivity was the real Kaufman’s answer to his assignment of adapting Susan Orlean’s nonfiction bestseller The Orchid Thief for the screen. So, Adaptation weaves scenes of an imagined tasteful, Miramax-style movie of Thief (featuring Meryl Streep as Orlean) through a story which primarily concerns Cage’s increasingly panicked Charlie failing to nail the script. Having struggled to write something that’s altogether reflective of his own concerns, respectful to the author, and commercial like Donald’s script for a nonsensical multiple-personality thriller, in the end Charlie writes a Charlie Kaufman film, as his and Orlean’s stories mix into something wholly unpredictable.

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Time and again, Pedro Almodóvar has returned to making films about filmmakers – apt figures for the director to build his nesting-doll stories about acts of seeing, remembering and storytelling around. Before Almodóvar had a screenwriter fashion a story within a story in Bitter Christmas, there was Broken Embraces’ Mateo (Lluís Homar), a blind screenwriter and former film director who tells the telenovela-worthy tale of how he lost his sight and retreated into a life of near-hermitude.

Flashing back to 14 years earlier, Broken Embraces recounts the making of Mateo’s final film as a director: a comedy starring his lover, Lena (Penélope Cruz), and produced by Lena’s wealthy older husband, Ernesto (José Luis Gómez). As Ernesto’s son (Rubén Ochandiano) surreptitiously films Mateo and Lena’s affair for his father to watch and plot his revenge to, Broken Embraces stirs sex, obsession, violence, voyeurism and musings on the essence of art all into the pot. It’s one of Almodóvar’s many-tiered confections – part erotic thriller, part examination of the filmmaking process, all delectable melodrama.

Director: Terrence Malick

An in-demand Hollywood screenwriter (Christian Bale) reflects sombrely on his past and drowns in the decadence of his present as he drifts endlessly from party to party, bed to bed, finding only temporary solace with any of the parade of women who float in and out of his life. Knight of Cups is Terrence Malick’s 8½, with the existential crisis of its gilded filmmaker character realised in Malick’s late style as an ever-freeflowing symphony of music, voiceover, and images both gorgeous and strange.

Only occasionally does Bale’s Rick find a way out of Knight of Cups’ by turns sterile and gaudy modern US, and into the tranquility of Malick’s beloved nature. The director’s images never looked so beautifully empty. Supermodels, movie stars, concrete highways, polished skyscrapers, new-age gadgets – all pass by, magnificent and vacant, as Rick wanders hopelessly through the lost paradise that is Terrence Malick’s America.

Director: Mia Hansen-Løve

Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island appropriately feels like a film that’s still in the process of being worked out. Filmmaker couple Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) are on Sweden’s Fårö island, home of Ingmar Bergman, as each works on the screenplay for their next project. Though Tony is inspired to quickly hammer out a script, Chris can only produce a half-finished outline, unsettled both by Bergman’s complicated legacy and with her position as a mother and wife to an apparently more celebrated husband.

The trip throws up questions about the Great Man myth, division of domestic labour, and what to do about errant feelings of desire in a loving but familiar relationship. After she spurns her husband to spend the day with a local man, Chris imagines a scenario in which two former lovers (Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie) reunite on Fårö and have a fleeting affair. By the end of Bergman Island, Chris still doesn’t have an ending for that story – and Hansen-Løve’s film, too, would seem to stop rather than end. The film’s profundity lies in the fact that it remains unresolved – like Chris’ draft, like life – as Chris and Tony continue on.

Director: Andrew Haigh

Holed up in a near-empty London apartment block, screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) breaks ground on a script about his childhood when his long-dead parents suddenly reappear. Are they spirits, or products of Adam’s creatively firing imagination? Either way, Mum (Claire Foy) and Dad (Jamie Bell) – along with Adam’s lonely neighbour, Harry (Paul Mescal) – crack Adam’s protective shell of numb solitude and force him to start processing some fundamental issues.

An adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s supernatural novel Strangers fused with writer-director Andrew Haigh’s personal concerns, All of Us Strangers is a ghost story ruminating on grief, modern urban alienation and the enormous shift in attitudes both within and towards Britain’s gay community in recent decades. Fortysomething Adam, still haunted by the Aids crisis and memories of everyday homophobia, is confronted by the open queerness of the younger Harry. The return of Adam’s parents, meanwhile, gives Adam the chance to address marrow-deep insecurities with the two great formative figures of his life, neither of whom he’s seen since he was a boy. You’d have to be made of stone not to well up.

Bitter Christmas is in cinemas from 28 August.