Brett Davies

Lawrence Kasdan on Storytelling: Excerpts and observations from an interview with Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter

Meiji University, Japan

Lawrence Kasdan has been called a “legend” of Hollywood screenwriting, whose four-decade career included popular classics and critically acclaimed contemporary dramas. He wrote screenplays for genre-shaping hits such as The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Bodyguard (1992), and The Force Awakens (2015); simultaneously, he established himself as a writer-director of adult-oriented character studies that reported and commented upon America’s largest ever demographic, through eleven pictures including Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1988), and Grand Canyon (1991). It is perhaps due to this very versatility that Kasdan’s body of work had never been analysed as a cohesive whole, which led to my research project examining his output holistically. The study culminated in an interview with Lawrence Kasdan himself, in which he revealed for the very first time that he will not write any further feature scripts. Our conversation, then, acts as a retrospective on a career in screenwriting, in which Kasdan’s reflections on storytelling will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of the screenplay. Utilising excerpts from the 150-minute interview, this presentation will contextualise and critique Kasdan’s rationales when creating narratives, interrogate his proclivity for favouring character over plot, and examine how his upbringing impacted upon what he calls the “duality” present in so many of his protagonists. Additionally, the interview reveals how Kasdan’s recent move into documentaries (notably, as writer-director of Light & Magic [2022]) dovetails with his work on features – both storytelling forms demonstrating Kasdan’s preference for character revelation via subtext rather than declamatory speeches. Through the examination of this primary source, then, the presentation will provide an analytical overview of Lawrence Kasdan’s writing career, as well as offer firsthand insights into the creation of some of the most influential films in the history of Hollywood cinema.

Brett Davies is Associate Professor of English in the School of Global Japanese Studies at Meiji University in Tokyo. He has published extensively in both cinema studies and linguistics, with his Master’s dissertation demonstrating how a corpus of film screenplays could be utilised to improve conversational language use among Japanese students of English. His doctorate thesis analysed the career of writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, and his book, ReFocus: The Films of Lawrence Kasdan, was published by Edinburgh University Press in March 2024. His areas of research include the use of homage and pastiche in modern Hollywood cinema, intertextuality, and thematic relationships between Japanese and American films.