Filip Kasperaszek

Screenwriter · Script consultant · Lecturer

I specialise in international stories -- from Japan, Singapore and India to Germany, Italy and Spain. Wherever a story comes from, I look for the same thing -- the emotional core that lets a stranger in.

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, “Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.” Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

I am not there to repair a script. I am there to find out, with the author, what the story actually is -- and to protect it while it becomes the best possible version of itself.

Working with a writer is like a journey for me. Every script I work on takes me somewhere I would not have gone on my own. That is one of the main reasons I keep consulting while writing my own work.

I read each story as an attentive stranger -- a first audience, in a way. On the first read I pay attention to what it does to me -- where the plot and its characters take me. Only after that comes the analytical part. But even then, it is not about coming up with solutions or fixes, and never about measuring the story against a template.

The theory is there -- years of it, from Aristotle and Frank Daniel to the countless films I took apart with students in film schools. But here is the paradox -- years of writing, teaching and consulting have left me with fewer rules than I started with, and more trust in my intuition, taste and experience.

Because all that theory works only as a compass. It is one of the tools, not the map. It shows where north is, but it does not choose the destination or the path. Those decisions belong to the author. What I do not bring to a script is a ready-made structure. Because every story already contains its own. Traces of it are there from the very first draft, though not always obvious to the person who wrote it. So we dig -- the author and I, together -- and we dig where the feeling is strongest. Because the true shape of a story is never buried far from its emotional core.

And yes, sometimes we get lost together. If we knew from the very beginning where the story was going, there would be nothing left to discover -- for the author, for me and, most importantly, for the audience. Not knowing is not a failure of preparation. It is the work.

My role is also to widen the field of possible choices, including the ones the author may have been avoiding, and then show the potential consequences of each.

None of this makes me neutral. I am not afraid to take positions. I speak up when a scene is costing the film something, even when it is the scene the author loves most.

There is no shortage of advice on story. There are the books, there are models that have read all of them, and much of the rest comes from people who know storytelling only from the outside. What none of them has done is sit where the author sits, lose a draft and find the way back. I have. What I bring into the room is not only what I know. It is what I have been through, what I sense before I can explain it, and what a story does to me when I read it for the first time.

As a consultant, lecturer or selection committee member I have worked with:
Netflix, Screens of Tomorrow, Grow Creative, Flanders Audiovisual Fund, Mazovia Film Commission, Krakow Film Commission, the Warsaw Film Festival and Wajda School. I have also been an expert for the Polish Film Institute.

Calendar

The pages above say what I have done. This is a little about who I am.

At the desk I mostly write standing, and in a workshop room I rarely sit down either. I have never stayed still in one landscape for long. I have lived in the mountains and by the sea, in cities and in the countryside. New York held me for seven years, Beijing for two, and a campervan crossing Europe for almost a year. Now, finally, I have settled back in Poland.

I am completing my training as a Gestalt psychotherapist, which turns out to be another way of learning to be present and listen. I am a certified saunameister and a passionate amateur cook. I wingfoil and surf whenever wind or waves allow, I practise tantra, and I dance whenever there is music -- and often when there isn't.

My life in six frames.