A direct copy and paste from the Shooters email list which is in itself a direct copy and paste from Creative Screenwriting Weekly, but this is great.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, writer of 'The Lives of Others' on the writing exercise from his first year at film school that gave rise to Das Leben Der Anderen...
"Our film professor had this creativity exercise he did with us. He said
creative imagination was like a muscle that you have to work out like Arnold
Schwarzenegger works out his pectorals. But you have to go for complete
overload, not gradually increase the weight load. So he set out this
assignment that in the first eight weeks we had to write 14 fully-fledged
treatments for new film stories. At the end, I found out he never actually
read these treatments, just threw them into the wastebasket. I never felt so
much pressure in my life because I wanted to get them just right, and it's
hard to invent something on command.
"I think The Lives of Others was treatment 13, and I was completely dried up.
I had a little tape recorder and was listening to some piano sonatas from
Beethoven and was really depressed, thinking maybe I should have become an
investment banker or something. I started listening to the music and not
thinking about the treatment, and suddenly I remembered this quote from Lenin
where he said to Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer, "The appassionato is my
favorite piece of music but I'm not going to listen to it anymore, because if
I listen to it, it makes me want to stroke people's heads and tell them
sweet, kind things. But I shouldn't be stroking heads, I have to bash in
heads without mercy in order to finish my revolution." I always thought that
was such a clear-cut case of someone being at war with his own humanity. And
maybe there was a story there: What if I could somehow force Lenin to listen
to the Appassionato? It was one of those 'flow' moments where I knew there
was a story there and it just came in a rush. I had this image of a man
listening to music he didn't want to, because he was trying to listen to
something else. Within an hour I had the whole story for the film. Within
another hour, I had written a two-page treatment for it. Then I was thrown
into a fit of despair over treatment number 14."
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