We all know a great film when we see one don’t we? Well not always. What is a great film to someone may be awful to someone else. Films are very subjective. Citizen Kane leaves film critics in raptures but today’s teenager will wonder what all the fuss is about (and probably hate it to boot).

We all have our own ideas about what makes a great film. Are popular films great? You would think that something that draws in audiences in their thousands and millions must be great. Not so. Look at Rush Hour 2 and Pearl Harbour. It could be just that the latest hot film star is appearing in their next movie. Bankable stars in mediocre movies. What about Harrison Ford in Sabrina and Six Days, Seven Nights. Your favourite auteur film director’s latest offering should be great based on past performance. Not necessarily. Even Spielberg slips up occasionally – look at 1942 and Amistad. Conversely, some great films have inauspicious beginnings. What film did little business at the box office but became one of the most successful DVDs of all time and in the process became re-evaluated as a great film? The Shawshank Redemption.

All I’ve tried to do is to show that there is no simple way to forecast what will make a great film. As usual it is a combination of factors that, mixed together and cooked at the right temperature with loving care, produce a great film. I believe that no one factor on its own can produce greatness. Not just the director, not just the star, not just the subject. Not just the story or script.

However, two or usually three or more factors working together can do it. Here is my list of ingredients for greatness.

• Story/ Script – This is the most important ingredient for me. You need a story that grabs the audience and takes them with it on a journey. It must affect the audience’s emotions. You need a script that does justice to the story and provides colour and originality to the action. If you don’t have a good story or script you rely too heavily on other factors and the probability of producing a great film plummets. Watch The Godfather I and II. Great stories from an average book but even better scripts. You are drawn into another world with very different codes of conduct and behaviour and morals. The Shawshank Redemption’s story is gripping even though the script came out of a short story by Steven King. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven provides an unusual raw and downbeat view of the old west with no heroes riding off into the sunset.
• Acting – good actors telling a good story gives the basis for greatness. One example of greatness that involves just a good story and great acting is Salvador. James Woods gives a career high performance as the thoroughly unlikeable war photographer who goes to El Salvador to make money and retrieve his reputation and in the process gets caught up in the civil war. Good supporting cast performances particularly by James Belushi as his unwitting sidekick drive the film with a nervous energy that has you wincing and squirming. It could be the film that disproves my previous hypothesis where the acting alone could make this film great. A more recent example might be Forest Whittaker’s portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.
• Cinematography – By this I mean that what you see on the screen makes you go wow. Not just the CGI although that has to be taken into consideration e.g. The Lord of The Rings. But just consider David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia. Beautiful sweeping cinematography conveys the epic feel of the film, the vastness of the desert, the scale of the battles. However, you can equally be impressed by the edgy quality of the cinematography in something like Traffic or Heat. You can also marvel at the beauty, colour and technical artistry in some of the recent Chinese films such as The House of Flying Daggers and In the Mood for Love. 
• Editing – Editing conveys the pace of the film and splices the narrative together. Poor editing can leave an audience confused or bored. A well edited film will enhance the story telling and adjust the pace of the story to the action. Well edited films will have an internal rhythm to them.
• Direction – You may wonder why I’ve taken so long to get to direction. The director is the ringmaster and as such needs to juggle all the above (and more such as art direction, sound, costume etc.) to come up with a great film. The great ones can coax new meanings and nuances out of formulaic stories and scripts. Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket could have been just another Vietnam war movie but he turned it into a psychological study that showed the dehumanisation of young recruits to help them face the horrors of war. They provoke exciting performances from average actors. Just watch the incredible performance of Sharon Stone coaxed out by Martin Scorcese in Casino. They can inject beauty, originality and controversy into what could have been mundane films.  Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven uses beautiful photography of the American mid west plains to reflect the ebb and flow of the story. They can tap into the issues in society today and make films relevant to the audience. Spielberg does a great job of raising discussion of crime detection and the legal system by projecting a future where crimes can be detected before they happen in Minority Report. Even historical films can touch a nerve by reflecting issues that are important in today’s society. Kurosawa’s medieval Japanese masterpiece – Rashomon – is all about deception and the search for truth played out as a whodunit in the case of an alleged rape in the woods. And directors can put their own individual stamp on films which has lead to the cult of auteurism or authorship.

There you are. Only five factors but great films will have at least two and usually more of these factors present. Just think of films you believe are great films and assess them against these factors. It is fairly simple to do. Do they stand up?

In conclusion. Why is Citizen Kane a great film? Well, it has at least three of the above factors. The story is good although a little dated now as it is about the rise of a press baron (loosely based on the life of Randolph Hearst) and shows the arc of his life and the effect on people around him. However, it does not engage the emotions of the audience and is quite cold. Where it scores highly is in the cinematography, the editing and the direction. The cinematography and editing are ground-breaking and extremely well executed and were way ahead of their time. They actually helped to form a new grammar for films. The direction was excellent in that the telling of the story and the use of new cinematography techniques add nuances and layers to the film beyond the story and script. One could argue that the acting was first rate as well from Orson Welles as the eponymous lead and Joseph Cotton. So, 3or 4 out of 5 is pretty good. Whether it is the best film of all time………

£29.99 (0 Bid) End Date: Sunday Sep-14-2008 13:19:39 BST Bid now | Add to watch list

£29.99 (0 Bid) End Date: Sunday Sep-14-2008 13:05:35 BST Bid now | Add to watch list

£45.00 End Date: Sunday Sep-14-2008 19:48:13 BST Buy It Now for only: £45.00 Buy it now | Add to watch list

£29.99 (0 Bid) End Date: Sunday Sep-14-2008 13:19:46 BST Bid now | Add to watch list

£17.99 (0 Bid) End Date: Sunday Sep-14-2008 13:19:46 BST Bid now | Add to watch list

In the last couple of weeks I have been musing again about maybe starting some screenplays. Being the person I am, I do like to prepare everything beforehand and have everything I need before I start. (This is also a convenient excuse when I don’t start or finish something - “I haven’t got the right tools for the job”. My problem)

Anyway, before I engage in too much limiting and negative self talk, I did do some interesting research on screenwriting software to ease the production of a marvelous screenplay. Word processors are all very well but they are not designed for the specific job of producing a screenplay to industry standards. And whilst outliners are useful they do not give you the tools to develop interesting and coherent stories and plots.

So I trawled the net for software that would do the job. Free software preferably. What I did find is that there is an industry (small though it may be) in software packages that purport to make it easy for you to create the next blockbuster screenplay. All slightly different with different strengths and weaknesses.

I suppose the first question to ask is why can’t a word processing package do the job for you. Packages like Microsoft Word or the open source word processing component of Open Office (free) have so many facilities inside them that surely these would be adequate? Well, yes and no. No doubt, if you are very familiar with these packages and have a good level of expertise in these packages you could design the industry standard formats and program macros that imitated some of the better screenplay software packages. But it is all a bit like hard work for a writer who is more bothered about getting on with the writing and having some help in making it easy.

Here are some of the better packages that I have come across in my research:

• Cinergy -  this is provided free and as such deserves an immense amount of respect as it makes writing and editing a draft screen play in industry standard form relatively easy. Creating scenes, dialogue, description, rearranging, editing is all made simple though the use of a few intuitive key depressions. Great for most purposes
• Final Draft - This is the package that most professionals use nowadays for developing and submitting their work to the industry. Slick and easy to use, it also goes that bit further with organization and production tools as part of the package. Costs around $230 at present or £115.
• Sophocles - worth a look at nearly half the price of Final Draft with similar features. You can try before you buy which is always good. Its PR says that it lets you concentrate on the story creation rather than on the format. $120 or £60 at the moment.
• Writer’s Cafe - This is more of a story development package rather than a screenwriting package. By that I mean that it has a number of useful features built into it that help you to research your story, save and bookmark information, to plot your storylines in an easy graphical manner and to inspire you when the going gets tough or the words dry up. A very useful complement to a screenwriting package. This software can be used for writing other than screenwriting and help you organize your work, your drafts, your rough ideas. The really neat part of this package is StoryLines - “The heart of Writer’s Café is StoryLines, a powerful but simple to use story development tool that dramatically accelerates the creation and structuring of your novel or screenplay” - a lovely visual way of plotting your stories from whatever point of view you like. At $66 or £33, it looks to be a worthwhile investment.
• There are other more expensive packages, both screenwriting and story development, that provide similar functions and features but the above list in my opinion are the ones that seem to be most writer-friendly and are understandable.

I have included links to the appropriate sites for these packages to help you assess them for yourself. Before you ask, “no” I am not promoting any of them or getting money for recommending them (what a shame - I could do with the money). I am thinking of buying Writer’s Cafe for my research and story development -  I am checking out the free trial download at the moment. And I think Cinergy will be adequate for my purposes for the time being unless I decide to market a script in Hollywood!

£70.00 (12 Bids) End Date: Monday Sep-08-2008 14:59:34 BST Bid now | Add to watch list