She was there when Tarantino made Reservoir Dogs, and has taught award-winning scriptwriters the art of storytelling. David Schembri meets Bobette Buster, the story guru.
Meet Bobette Buster. Her life story revolves around stories. Growing up in small-town Kentucky, she was surrounded by people who were brilliant storytellers.
“That’s what I thought the world was. When I grew up, you’d walk down the street and my grandparents, my father, my mother, everybody had a story. That’s how I learnt to listen. When I grew up and went away, I found out this was a dying national art,” Buster says.
At the time, the Library of Congress issued a call for people to collect and document the oral history of the region and collect the way people told stories. “I had no idea that I’d had the great fortune to grow up immersed in that. I guess it would be as if you grew up in Italy and you grew up surrounded by everyone singing opera… and you just think that’s what the world is like,” Buster says. She went on to research the oral history of the region she grew up in, the recordings of which were enshrined in the Kentucky museum.
“It wasn’t the stories they told, but how they told them which was really the art that was dying,” Buster says. That crucial distinction was to form the basis of her present career. Her next step at the time: Hollywood. Her problem: “I didn’t have a single contact.”
She needed an entry point, and her chosen key was a programme at the University of Southern California (USC) , which not only was very hard to get into in general, but only accepted three women. She got in. Her next step was to find a job; keeping it was the next one, and Buster spent the next seven years working with British film director Tony Scott.
“That was a great point of entry into the business, and I was with him when we discovered this totally unknown named Quentin Tarantino and helped him with completing financing for Reservoir Dogs,” Buster recounts.
Every time I listen to the Maltese they all have excuses. Everything about the film industry is about daring, and nobody has it easy
She was then approached to lecture on her job as a creative producer – the business side of things, really – but she discovered that students were after something else. “I’d started asking students in the room about their stories and then I could observe they could develop their stories for me, as an executive, to take them more seriously – and it was electric, and they asked me, wow, can you teach us this?” Buster says.
After starting to teach cinematic storytelling officially, her students started selling their scripts – some even for seven figures. Buster reports that in every programme she’s taught in worldwide, one of the participants has gone on to become a major player and win a major award, “whether it’s a Bafta, or even a Jury Prize at Cannes, or a Cesar, or an Academy Award.
“I don’t claim those stories, I’m just proud of the fact that I taught those students.”
Thousands of scripts later, Buster is now known as a “story guru – for lack of a better term”, and an adjunct professor at USC and a consultant to Disney and Pixar. Buster is extremely sensitive to cinematic storytelling, which, because of the audience’s total immersion in the big screen experiences is “closer to your dreams” than any other medium. Unlike dreams, incoherence is not an option, and for Buster the bottom line is this: “Audiences want a great story, well told.”
Her ideas transcend film; her book Do Story: How to Tell Your Story So the World Listens is aimed at anyone who needs to tell their story – and in her experience, everyone has a story to tell.
A common feature of great films is that they have a sense of a “greater story behind the story”, Buster says. Whether it’s Star Wars, The Godfather or Iron Man, we may think we’re on a fun ride,” but if it’s a film that works on a global level they have this profound inner journey of the central character, and we’re following that journey, and that’s what you have to discover and develop – it’s that journey.”
This is at the heart of Buster’s story development programmes, which have been adopted in Europe too as the film industry this side of the Atlantic tries to regain the audiences it lost to America. European film lost its audience, Buster argues, by ignoring it, and focusing instead on the director’s worldview.
Among the European countries calling on Buster’s expertise is Malta, which she has visited twice – her last visit being last month – on the Malta Film Commission’s invitation. Peter Busuttil, the Film Commissioner, says engaging people like Buster is important to develop the local film industry in as far as development and production go.
What she teaches here is what she teaches elsewhere. “The real important thing is that if you give the journey of the character’s story a universal theme, then anybody in the world will watch that movie. I’ll watch a French, Czech, Maltese movie. I don’t care where it is; I just want to go on the journey of that character. In fact it’s better if it’s in a foreign country, because I get the added advantage of living in that world for two hours and seeing how people live in that world and that’s fascinating.”
Buster believes Maltese filmmakers have what it takes to cross into other markets – as long as they are prepared to work hard for it.
“I was impressed that these people have the level of work they’ve already put into the stories, there were some stories that, if well developed, could become major films,” Buster says of the local filmmakers she’s met.
She is not deterred by the local industry still being barely in its diapers – and compares our situation to Denmark, where a strong film school produced filmmakers like Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, whose success in turn generated interest – and investment – in Danish film. She believes Malta’s small size should not be an excuse.
“You know, you just put the operative word there – it’s an excuse. Every time I listen to the Maltese they all have excuses. Everything about the film industry is about daring, and nobody has it easy. Nobody,” the girl who left the Midwest for Hollywood says.
“You have to work on your assets – you have this amazing location industry, you have this amazing variety of locations here, so make them work for you. You have this extraordinary support industry for movies, so again, make everybody believe that all boats will rise together if we all join in and support these movies. But what you really need are some very committed storytellers who are willing to do the hard work of getting the scripts right.”
She knocks down another common misconception – that everyone else is on multi-million-dollar budgets. Apart from the $200 million films being made by six studios, Buster says “the rest of the world is trying to make films for under $5 million and a lot of them for under $500,000. And there have been some great films that have been made for €100,000. People don’t care what your budget is – what they care about is: do you have a great story?”