Top Hollywood screenwriting guru to set up institute in Malta

McKee is famous for his ‘Story Seminar', an influential screenwriting workshop previously attended by film industry luminaries like Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby, Crash), John Cleese, Geoffrey Rush and Joan Rivers amongst others.

According to Jesmond Pace, a former student of McKee's and the driving force behind the initiative to set up the Institute on our shores, the Institute will be officially launched in Malta on 29 November, while Robert McKee will deliver a one-day ‘Business Story Seminar' the following day.

An ongoing programme is currently being devised for the Institute, which Pace says has the full support of Education Minister Evarist Bartolo. The initiative has been in the works over the past couple of years, but Pace however said that the March elections of this year stalled the whole process.

"I was very glad that both Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia [whose ministry is now responsible for the local film industry] and Minister Bartolo helped reinvigorate the project, because by that point I had become very frustrated, and somewhat embarrassed, with the way the project kept stalling," Pace said.

According to Pace, Robert McKee was ultimately swayed to set up the Institute in Malta because he saw plenty of "potential" here.

"During my conversations with McKee, we agreed that Malta's own ‘story' is yet to be told in the way it deserves - there's a very rich cultural and historical background that could be exploited for stories," Pace said.

Unsurprisingly, Malta's geographical location was also a determining factor, the idea being that the Institute would serve as a bridge between North African and European markets.

"We're not just looking at this as being beneficial to Malta, because let's face it, the audiences in Malta are quite small. But while also empowering local writers, the Institute will enable access to other more lucrative international markets," Pace said, adding that one of the issues McKee pointed out about Malta is that we tend to look "inwards" rather than "outwards", and that the Institute could work towards helping Maltese writers, producers and businessmen polish up their product and make it more accessible to the wider world.

The Institute will indeed look to cater to writers of all kinds, be they aspiring film scriptwriters, prose fiction writers, journalists or anyone working in any kind of field which requires writing.

Pace says that the initial idea was for the Institute to specialise in writing for film, however the limitations of the local film industry proved to be too big a deterrent.

"The local film industry just moves too slowly - that's the problem. But instead on giving up on the idea, McKee then suggested that we can focus on the writing for business angle to start with," Pace said.

In fact, the inaugural seminar, taking place at the Mediterranean Conference Centre in Valletta on 29 November, will delve into ways ‘business leaders and executives of all fields' can apply McKee's storytelling approach to better sell their product.

Robert McKee gained further popularity after his approach to screenwriting was affectionately satirised in the 2002 film Adaptation, starring Nicolas Cage as a pair of screenwriting twins with diametrically opposed approaches to the craft - with Donald, the more ‘commercial' of the pair, adhering to McKee's teachings while Charlie, a struggling and artistically inclined screenwriter, rejecting what he sees to be a contrived and formulaic way of approaching filmmaking.

Commenting on a pivotal scene in the film, in which McKee himself appears as a character, portrayed by award-winning British actor Brian Cox, McKee said that after several meetings with the production team of Adaptation, he was satisfied with the end result, particularly with Cox's performance - whom he had the hand-picked for the role as he trusted him not to "sentimentalise" his character.

"I couldn't be sure about other actors, because actors love to be loved. I don't want to be loved, I want my students to love the art," McKee said in an interview for the YouTube channel Big Think.