Céline Sciamma’s writing through desire: A new approach to writing women’s stories

The hero’s journey and the conflict model of storytelling have had a strong hold on western screenwriting since the mid-twentieth century. Increasingly, this is being questioned, especially by feminist scholars and storytellers, who find the hero’s journey exclusive of women’s stories and narrow in storytelling possibility. Maureen Murdock, Kim Hudson and others have all developed models of the heroine’s journey, but do these go far enough? Are they still too closely related to the conflict-based model entrenched by the hero’s journey and not bold enough in their scope of change? In her 2019 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Screenwriting Guru talk, French writer/director Céline Sciamma proposed a new model of screenwriting emerging from her own practice that might more widely offer new possibilities for telling stories on-screen. Sciamma calls it writing through desire and argues for driving screenplays through desire, not conflict, especially when telling the stories of women and gender-diverse characters. Her three-step approach involves identifying the desires of the writer, working at the scene level and mapping the scenario. Sciamma used this method to develop and write the screenplay of her breakthrough film, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) (2019), which won the ‘Best Screenplay’ at Cannes in 2019.