“I like you British, but you have caused a lot of suffering,” says Robert McKee, the world’s most successful screenwriting guru. He’s addressing several hundred men and women, a mix of diligent professionals, aspiring writers and frustrated artists, at one of his celebrated three-day scriptwriting courses.

After 19 years teaching the art of writing, story structure and screen narrative, McKee, now 62, is a man enjoying a sudden surge in his powers. He is no longer a mere academic but a confirmed member of the Hollywood glitterati. Confirmation came in the form of Adaptation, the Oscar-winning film starring Nicolas Cage as a struggling screenwriter, with Brian Cox in a cameo as McKee.

Since then the Detroit-born former actor has continued his fearsome schedule of seminars while broadening his thoughts on persuasive narratives to include audiences of office managers, advertising executives and even churches (“The language got toned down,” admits McKee).

The course itself is an intriguing mix of meticulous narrative analysis, trenchant film critique and righteous anger. To hear McKee tell it — in an Irish-American growl that gives menace even to the phrase “filing cabinet” — story structure seems disarmingly logical.

It is about working expectations, creating sub-plots, “set-ups” and “hooks”, and building to a climax. Conflict, on any level, appears at the core of narrative as the trigger to decision and action: “To be alive is to be seemingly in perpetual and unrelenting conflict.”

“I am always struggling against two forces,” he explains over lunch. “There is the banal spectacle of commercial Hollywood, and there is the over-intellectualised and meaningless decorative photography of much current European cinema, which has come from a reaction to Hollywood.”

He believes that these blights on storytelling have got “much worse” in recent years. “If things do not change, if the trend continues, I think cinema is a dying art form. I think by the year 2050 cinema will have no more cultural importance than ballet does today.”

He is unequivocal about the sinners. Critically acclaimed Oscar winners such as The Piano (“truly awful”) and The English Patient (“that biplane-flying-endlessly-over-sand-dunes s***”), are among many movies to raise his ire.

McKee, whose own screenwriting highlights include Columbo and a few TV movies, is not without the odd critic himself. The film director John Boorman recently berated the “countercreative” formula to his work, while even Adaptation appears to satirise McKee’s methodology for encouraging the film’s glib crash-bang-wallop climax.

McKee is sensitive to such criticism, swatting away his detractors and underlining how Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Adaptation, “knows my teaching and knows it is about insight and truth”.

“You go to painting school to learn style, perspective, some rules,” he says. “With me it’s the same. Knowledge is not dangerous. It empowers people to be free.”

Be it freedom, discipline or formula that people are after, more than 40,000 students have taken his course, including John Cleese, Kirk Douglas, Diane Keaton, Julia Roberts and David Bowie. His alumni have collected 19 Academy Awards and 112 Emmys.

McKee’s ideas may have generated the interest, but they are complemented by his delivery. He is a hugely engaging speaker and highly perceptive academic, offering some lasting insights into the art of narrative while cross-referencing everyone from Sartre to Rambo. And with a going rate of £350 for the three-day seminars, he is also a very rich man.

But while the perks — such as a Beverly Hills home and sleek black Mercedes — are welcome rewards, narratives underscored by human experience are what consume him. Casablanca remains the work he rates above all others, with its beautiful economy of script and five sub-plots.

He sounds warnings to his students of the demands of writing, a profession, ironically, of little structure. “They are never going to give you enough money for the s*** you are going to go through. It’s just the pleasure of self-expression.”

For many students this is the haunting reality. But they are here for help, not hindrance, and McKee knows it. Within moments, he is off again, plunging into a new realm of thoughts, fears and theorising. And once more, as befits the man and the mentor, the sermon is uncompromising: “Let me tell you something about death.Your death is like a freight train from the future. And you’ve got to get up off your asses and do something before the train arrives.”

McKEE'S WISDOM

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules; rebellious, unschooled writers break rules; an artist masters the form

With enough coffee you can do anything

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today

Dialogue is not conversation

We can turn scenes in only one of two ways: on action or on revelation. There are no other means

It seems to me that the civilised human being is a sceptic, someone who believes nothing at face value

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