Screenwriting: What Are You Doing Here?

Just your friendly reminder that ‘Lilith’ is now available for download and DVD pre-order. You can order both the download and DVD (which has tons of cool stuff the download doesn’t have) directly from the distributor by clicking here, or by using the following link: http://store.nehst.com/lilithdvd.html

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This isn’t so much a lesson as it is an observation, but it’s also a call to arms to break out of old habits. Someone told me a long time ago that the most commonly used line in all of cinema and television was the question “What are you doing here?” I shook my head and offered the smarmy rebuttal that it would more likely be the word “Hi” or “What’s your name?

Many years have passed since that conversation and now I can’t watch a single television program or movie without hearing the phrase what are you doing here uttered. It’s so very true - the phrase is used everywhere - and I really started to wonder why. As I’ve been in the midst of these screenwriting posts and in the process of rewriting several scripts, I figured now was the best time to assess the usage of this question.

I started taking note of when the phrase was used and in what context, and at first its usage was quite obvious, which was to explain why some person who shouldn’t be there is all of a sudden there. Then there’s the inflections and emphasis used - what are you doing here, what are you doing here, and what are you doing here. The first variation is more of a misplacement, like a “Hey dickwad -you weren’t chosen to be on the team.” The second emphasis is a personal attack in the vein of “you’re a dickwad - this foosball tournament is for people with actual talent.” The third iteration is in relation to someone being in the wrong geography, sort of a “yeah, dickwad, this is the cool kids’ table, the fuck are you doing here” variety.

The binding factor is that it’s all about someone who’s in a place where they’re not supposed to be, and from a storytelling standpoint, it’s the driver of a narrative in the most random-yet-feasible way. I started to see the use of the phrase as an easy out. If a screenwriter is stuck in a situation and has no idea how to get their characters out of a predicament, then just have someone show up, and then have them explain why they showed up.

Guy is being chased by a bunch of goons, is chased into an alley. He comes upon a dead end. Guns are drawn. Our hero doesn’t have a weapon. He’s a goner. Head goon utters a witty one-liner, something to do with revenge and fucking someone’s mother. Our hero closes his eyes and awaits a shower of bullets, which rings out in a cacophony of violence. Our hero - still alive - opens his eyes and sees all the goons dead on the ground. Through the haze of gunsmoke walks a heavy-set woman carrying a submachine gun, wearing a floral print mu-mu and with curlers in her hair. Our hero looks at her and utters:

“Ma? What’re you doing here?”

Any kind of explanation can follow (“I just happened to be in the neighborhood” or “Mindy told me all about the fake diamonds and said you’d be here”) or it can be a lazy heat-of-the-moment excuse to delay the explanation (“We’ve got no time, I’ll explain later!”) or it can even be a rhetorical question (“I should ask you the same question, dickwad.”). Any which way, our hero is magically pried out of his seemingly impossible predicament, momma’s joined in the journey, and the situation just got a little bit more interesting.

So I can see why it’s used all the fucking time in movies and television. Even some of the greatest movies of all time use it. But I can’t help but think that it needs to be retired. For some reason it reeks of lazy writing to me, a quick patch for a tough situation. Sure there will always be the need for an element of surprise, but I think we need to figure out a different way to do it.

In both of my feature films - Lilith and 19 Revolutions - I purposely avoided using the phrase, and I’ll be honest, it was not easy. It became very apparent that “what are you doing here” has been programmed into our brains from a very young age, and I was forced to find new, fresher ways to introduce characters or get my characters out of predicaments. By getting rid of “what are you doing here,” I was put to the task of really fleshing out why someone would actually be in that place at that time, and it made my narratives that much stronger. The logic worked.

That’s not to say we can’t have random encounters in our stories. The terror and uneasiness of a character seeing her husband walking into a bar with another woman would naturally bring up the phrase of “what are you doing here,” but try not to use that phrase. Think of another way to do it. Say she sees him, and looks at her cell phone, which has a text message from her husband saying “Hanging out with Greg, gonna be late.” She walks up to him at the bar and surprises him by extending her hand to the other woman, saying “Hi. You must be Greg. I’m Esme, Steven’s wife.”

“Jesus H Christ - not this AGAIN.”

Steven’s reaction can also be a cliched “what are you doing here,” but again, think harder, and make it more creative. “Are you following me?” can be a much more interesting response than “Esme, what are you doing here?”

Things become cliches because they’ve worked over and over again for us, and they’re fail safe. But they’re tired, and they make things predicable. And when things get predictable, they get boring. And we don’t want to write boring stories. It’s time we as writers should draft a “Dogma 2012” manifesto of the cliches we need to avoid. When I was in film school we did such a thing, ruling out the top cliches for our student films. There would be no shy guys who didn’t know how to talk to the pretty girl. There would be no extended takes of people shaving or brushing their teeth. There would be no pictures of dead loved ones or exes on the piano. Suicide was never going to be an option for any characters - it’s just too easy an out. Girls being chased by axe murderers can’t trip and fall. Axe murderers - once they get a bullet in the head and are pronounced dead - cannot come back to life. Cats should not jump out of the dark. Men and women cannot orgasm at the same time. Shotguns need to be held with two hands. Luggage needs to be heavy (I’m amazed by people in movies hauling luggage that seems to weigh 10lbs). If our hero gets shot (in the shoulder, of course) - then he needs to dress that wound asap before he continues to fight.

Uh, you’re probably gonna want to have that treated.

When you rule out the cliches, you’re forced to find new ways to tell your stories. Sometimes you’ll find that you just have to have cliche happen - mathematically, a man and a woman could very well orgasm at the same time - but then make sure that it has purpose and a narrative meaning. Make it happen for an interesting reason - a guy’s having sex with an android that’s programmed to climax when he does, because the manufacturer of the droid knows the importance of customer satisfaction and to not assault the ego of the buyer. Corporate sex, at your command.

Aaaand that’s just creepy.

And don’t cheat. You can’t have someone ask “where did you come from” and have it replace “what are you doing here.” That’s like messing with the margins and font to meet the requirements of a one-page essay. Have fun with it - defying a cliche can make for the most seemingly random of dialogue and actions. How we react to something can be fascinating, and reacting in a manner that is not of the norm can be exhilarating. After an evil mastermind kills a dude, you can either make her laugh menacingly, or you can have her pick her nose until it bleeds. I ask you - which one is more interesting?

Screenwriting: How to Get an A-list Actor

Another friendly reminder that ‘Lilith’ is now available for download and DVD pre-order. You can order both the download and DVD (which has tons of cool stuff the download doesn’t have) directly from the distributor by clicking here, or by using the following link: http://store.nehst.com/lilithdvd.html

Back to business of the blog - it’s a good one, very important for screenwriters! :)

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Waitaminute. What does getting an a-list actor have to do with screenwriting? Technically, it doesn’t. But we have to look at our greater goals. The entire purpose of going on the endeavor of writing a screenplay is to eventually get it made into a film. A screenplay is essentially a proposal for a completed film, it’s a blueprint to a vision that needs a lot of people to come together on and make happen. And in order to get a lot of people, we need to have money. And in today’s financing environment, we need a marketable actor to champion our script.

This was an actual movie. That had a screenplay. And got financed.

Of course this is not gospel. We can make movies on shoestring budgets with unknown actors, and what is marketable is our high concept. We can find really talented young actors and help make them into the superstars of the future. This is my personal belief, and I’ve done it so far. But I’ve also found that my budgets under this model have been extremely limited, and it takes a long, long LONG fucking time to raise those funds. The fastest and quickest way to get a healthy budget - and by healthy I mean a budget that affords you the time to exercise your craft - you’re going to need to get a marketable actor attached to your screenplay. That will get you through the door faster than anything, and it will get you money faster than you can imagine. It’s not a foriegn concept - I just finished reading Christine Vachon’s brilliant memoir A Killer Life and the key to the success of her production company Killer Films was to uphold the director’s vision and get the right people attached to the project to get financiers to pony up cash. It’s because financiers are wanting to hedge their bets - a high concept is not a sure thing, but a high concept with a marketable actor (see movies like Source Code, Moon or Looper) - then we have a fighting chance to recoup that money. It’s worth a shot, and if that doesn’t work, just journey on and raise that money.

The main key in getting an A-list actor is to write a powerful, impressionistic opening sequence that introduces the lead character in an unforgettable manner. You want to imagine an actor reading your script and within the first five minutes saying “I need to play this part.” It’s because actors are also artists, and they have a desire to do meaningful work. Likewise, we have to imagine if we present our script to a producer, they can immediately in their mind cast for that part and help you pursue that actor.

So what goes into a powerful introduction? There are four elements, listed here in the order of importance:

The Situation.

The Initial Action.

The Initial Dialogue.

The Description.

The Situation. The key to a strong situation is to challenge the character. Challenging a character allows us to be emotionally engaged with them. We have to put our characters in a specific circumstance, and challenge them with it. The most basic challenge is to have the character be in a predicament where they either lose or maintain their values.

In There Will Be Blood the opening situation - Daniel Plainview mining for gold on his own in a desolate location - is extremely challenging. He is charged with the immense task of doing the work of ten men on his own. Plainview injures his leg, and he’s faced with something that will challenge his core values - stay for the money (someone else will take his gold), or tend to his well being. He chooses the former, and it says a lot about him as a man. If we study how P.T. Anderson built this opening, we see that he is engaging us by throwing us into the pit with Plainview, and he keeps making it interesting by throwing in suspense (the burning fuse of dynamite) and twists (literally - the injury of Plainview) that give us opportunities to field the choices that Plainview makes. One of the overriding feelings when watching that sequence is that most men would have died in that situation, either by pain or simply giving up, but Plainview is not an ordinary man. His tenacity in the face of his situation is what makes him unforgettable.

There Will be Blood Opening from Media Clips on Vimeo.

The Initial Action.

There are essentially two types of action: meaningful and meaningless. Meaningful action is something that delivers the essence of the scene. It explains it through action, and not dialogue. Meaningless action is simply an action, and we have to always ask ourselves if it is not contributing to the meaning of a scene, then is it at least visually compelling. The ideal, of course, is to have meaningful action that is also visually compelling.

When creating a powerful opening scene, we ask ourselves first what the meaning of the scene is, and then we have to devise a way to deliver that meaning through action. The exercise for this is to write a scene completely devoid of dialogue. We do this because dialogue, as much as it is a vital part of a modern screenplay, exists not to tell a story, but rather to entertain, deliver character, point to subtext, and create anticipation. It should never, ever deliver the meaning of a scene.

This can be seen in the introduction of one of the truly great iconic characters of recent film - Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men played by Javier Bardem. Our introduction of Chigurh by the Coen Brothers is absolutely unforgettable - he is apprehended by the police and he proceeds to murder a police officer by strangulation, and then continues on by calmly killing an innocent bystander by means of a cattle gun. The situation is odd - we don’t know who, when or why this is all happening, but it is arcane and gruesome, and it’s entirely delivered through action. The dialogue in the scenes - the officer talking on the radio and the banter between Chigurh and the innocent passerby - never deliver the scene’s meaning, which is essentially to define Chigurh as a complete and utter homicidal sociopath. We understand this through Chigurh’s actions - the look on his face as he strangles, the fact that he injures himself as much as his victim in killing them - than his dialogue, which is simple, stripped and bare. It is Chigurh’s actions that make him unforgettable, not his haircut, his dressing, or the way he speaks.

The Initial Dialogue. I know, I just poo-pooed dialogue and now I’m telling you that a character must have great dialogue to be memorable. But there’s a difference - it’s initial dialogue, something that reveals something of the character for the future and creates anticipation. This can be a clever one-liner or a deadpan delivery of something spectacular. Take a look at AFI’s ‘Top 100 Movie Quotes’ and you’ll see that many of them, on their own, are pretty unspectacular. But when placed in context of the situation, action and character, they become cultural milestones.

Returning to Anton Chigurh, his spare dialogue in his intro speaks to his cool, demented demeanor. He places the cattle gun to the stranger’s head and utters a single line: ‘Would you hold still, please.. It’s a rare admission - a sociopath saying the word ‘please’ but in the context of ‘please stay still so I can kill you.’ It lends meaning to the scene and to the character, and it’s a brilliant and unforgettable line.

It’s not a steadfast rule that the character intro have a great line, but it helps. And it should not be forced, it should organically stem from all that has transpired. But give a great line and it becomes a great sell of that character to an actor - there is no actor on the planet who wouldn’t want that “Frankly my dear I don’t give a damn” moment. If not in the intro, your script should have a line that rings out, found in the emotional peaks of the screenplay.

The Description. No A-list actor ever took a role because of the type of pants they were wearing, unless, of course those pants were on fire and they were running through a paint factory. So many screenplays get bogged down in describing how a character looks - some going to the point of describing a specific actor in want of wooing them - and this is time and space wasted. If we are going to describe a character, pick the elements of them that make them distinguishing and speaks to their motives and meaning. Anton Chigurh’s haircut is interesting, but in the reading of a screenplay it has nothing to do with his character, and the Coens make no mention at all to Chigurh’s physical traits other than “his dark hair disappearing into the seat of the squad car.”

P.T. Anderson’s script for There Will Be Blood doesn’t contain any description of Plainview either. Reading the script we don’t really have an idea of what this man looks like, but by the end of the opening we know who he is and the type of man he might be. That’s far more powerful. There are no physical descriptions of him that would help me understand that better - does mentioning that he wears Jodhpur boots say anything about him? Probably not. But imagine if P.T. Anderson, in an alternate universe, described Plainview as wearing beaten denim overalls, with a peek of women’s underwear showing above Plainview’s beltline. Now we’re getting into memorable and meaningful description. That detail says something about the character, about something to expect in the future. Use these descriptive elements wisely and sparingly, and in doing so they become incredibly powerful.

In researching this post I did read the screenplays for There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, and if I were an actor I’d be beating down the filmmaker’s doors to play these characters. They are interesting, powerful, and they command our attention from the very first frame they are there. They challenge us and themselves.

Also apparent is that neither Anderson or the Coens held anything back in introducing their characters. They went all out and gave us their very best upfront, and sustained it throughout. Your character introduction is not the place to show restraint - it’s said that an audience decides whether or not to emotionally invest into a film within the first ten minutes, so make those ten minutes count and give them a character / situation that will punch them in the gut. A character looking out the window and contemplating life in the opening scene is boring and unengaging. A character looking out the window and contemplating life - sitting naked, covered in blood and listening to Phil Collins is something I won’t forget.

And equally important is how your main characters end. The ending of each character should express exactly who they are, and it should take them to the next level. Again with Plainview - he clubs Eli to death with a bowling pin, throws his hands in the air, and utters “I’m finished” with sardonic satisfaction. He is his own worst enemy, but always in control. He’s taken himself to the next level of depravity. Anton Chigurh walks away from a heinous car accident - bone protruding from his arm - still ready to carry on with his business. It takes Chigurh from being a mortal killer to an immortal killing god. He’s almost indestructible, and he might not be of this planet.

In doing these exercises you not only put the best possible advertisement for an A-list actor to love your script, but you also make your script so much better overall. Screenplays are extremely complex mechanisms that have correlating parts that feed into one another, and a script is only as strong as its weakest element. Improve one element and it will expose the weakness in another. Correct that element and an imbalance is revealed elsewhere. Keep doing this until your screenplay achieves harmony, and when it reaches harmony, it will simply sing off the page. It will read briskly. And that’s exactly what we want - not only for a great screenplay, but for an amazing film!

Screenwriting: Character Relationships

A friendly reminder that ‘Lilith’ is now available for download and DVD pre-order. The initial response has been tremendous, so thank you for your support and let’s keep it up! You can order both the download and DVD (which has tons of cool stuff the download doesn’t have) directly from the distributor by clicking here, or by using the following link: http://store.nehst.com/lilithdvd.html

I’ll stop annoying you now. For today. :)

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Continuing in my screenwriting series, today we’re going to look at one of the key building blocks in any story, which is relationships. So you’ve constructed your story and made memorable characters, now we need to hone in on how these characters interact with one another. Easier said than done, but there is a method to it.

Everyone has relationships to everyone else. Even if you don’t know them, you have a relationship to them because you share space on this planet. There’s a connection there, no matter how obtuse or convoluted. When we look at our key players, the protagonist and antagonist, let’s go through the specific relationships that they will have.

With each other. The protagonist and antagonist have a bond, a common interest, maybe even a bloodline. It is what may keep them from killing each other, or likewise be the fuel for taking each others’ lives.

Love interests. Each of them will have a love interest. It may even be with themselves. Or a fantasy. Love is one of those things that can make rational people make irrational choices. There may also be characters who are simply in love with the idea of being in love, or who may mistake lust for love. Either way, these relationships determine how far one is willing to go, and provides something for those characters to both lose and gain.

Supporting characters. These relationships are generally ones that help aid the protagonist and antagonist in the accomplishment of their central goal. Is there trust in these relationships? Is it purely transactional, for money, or the repayment of a debt?

When assessing these relationships, there are three questions you have to ask to ensure that these are relationships that work:

Are there similarities that allow for a mutual connection to be made? Do these characters have something in common that allows them to make an alliance?

Are there differences that cause a rift? Do they have something that will cause them to fight each other? Answering this question will determine whether or not these characters will stay together, or if their relationship will fully deteriorate and fall apart.

Do they have agendas that are at odds with one another? This is especially pertinent for love interests and supporting characters. What one person wants, another might want something else altogether. Many times these agendas will lay far beneath the surface, and a plot point is generally a time when these agendas come to the surface. An ulterior motive is something that motivates a relationship throughout, and when it becomes exposed, it is generally a major turning point in that relationship.

Answering these questions will be fundamental in determining the individual journey that your protagonist and antagonist must take. And it is very, very important to know that your protagonist and antagonist will have different journeys, but they share the same story. A perfect example of this is a movie like The Karate Kid (both the original and the insipid remake). Each story features a protagonist (Daniel / Dre) and antagonist (Johnny / Cheng) who each has a very different journey to the final endgame. The relationships that they have with their supporting characters each helps them towards their causes, but the nature of the relationships is very different.

Ultimately these exercises will amount to character journeys that we legitimately care about, because they are rooted in the fundamental cornerstones of our own relationships, things we can relate to and identify with. In conjunction with the memorable traits of each character and the story that sets them on their way, we’re on the path towards creating a truly memorable, textured and marketable screenplay. My next installment will focus entirely on the latter aspect, which is the key elements in your screenplay that will grab the attention of those who will give you money. It’s a big one.

Screenwriting: Functional Stories

In terms of importance, crafting a story always comes before creating memorable characters. Memorable characters are meaningless unless they have something to do, and a reason to do it. This is the base foundation of our screenplay, and everything we do thereafter is built upon it. If we construct a screenplay on a shaky or weak foundation, then the entire enterprise threatens to collapse. It will be a failure.

It’s a pretty bold statement to blankly declare something a failure - after all, you may have amazing characters, dialogue, and action that you feel take your project to the next level. But dialogue and action are just means of expressing a story, and if that story is flawed, then so too will your snappy dialogue and amazing action be completely out of place and lacking conviction. We also have to hold ourselves to the absolute highest standard when it comes to our writing - never think that things can be fixed later, on the set, when in the hands of a capable director and talented cast. No. Your screenplay is the starting block, it must shine without the help of any extraneous factors. If you know there is a problem with your screenplay, then keep revising it until you get it right. You absolutely cannot submit it to any companies, financiers, etc. until it is in the absolute best place it can possibly be.

And when I say rewrite, I mean rewrite. There is a grand distinction between what is rewriting and what is simply editing. Many writers consider editing - which is essentially paring text down, proofreading, and shifting the sequence of events - as a rewrite. It is not. Editing is simply manipulating what already exists. Rewriting, on the other hand, is the active creation, reconstruction and redesigning of your screenplay. Editing will be the very last step of your screenwriting journey. Until then, put your brutally honest cap on and eat a slice of humble pie - it’s time to be relentless with your own work.

We all have stories - they have a beginning, middle and end. We can write stories with our eyes closed, and if they are true to our experiences and perspectives, they will be interesting. But a story is not the sole part of a screenplay. We have to think of a screenplay as a timeline, a charting of events. For the story to be functional as a screenplay, it must have a structure.

Of course there are a myriad of structures that can be employed - Steven Zallian’s script for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo employed an unusual five-act structure so as to accommodate the two very different worlds that the film inhabits. I wrote about my own personal structure of choice last year, the Kurosawa Sonata-Form, which you read all about by clicking here.

In our writing process, we want to make absolutely sure that the structure is clear, very clear. This is not the time to be ‘maverick writer’ and break all the rules of conventional screenwriting. Irrespective if your film works on a series of flashbacks or is told in reverse chronology, you will still have to adhere to these basic structural elements. This is very easy to check. On a blank piece of paper, write out the following:

Opening

Inciting Incident

Act 1 Turning Point

Mid Point

Act 2 Turning Point

Dilemma

Climax

Denouement

Ending

These are the basic parts of a three-act structure, broken down into screenwriting parlance. They are the beats of your structure, and every screenplay should have these elements. You might say that your film is open-ended, but that’s still an ending. If your screenplay is missing one of these beats, then you don’t have a screenplay. And if you do have all of these beats, then we need to make sure that they are clear. This is a very simple task but it requires a little bit of elbow grease.

For each beat, I want you to write out one sentence that describes the very essence of that beat. One simple sentence only. If it is longer than one sentence, then you’re not making it clear. For example, in Citizen Kane, the beat of the Opening is one simple sentence: Charles Foster Kane dies, rich and alone, uttering ‘Rosebud’ as his final word. Everything surrounding that beat is contained in that one sentence - we meet Kane, we see his surroundings, we see him die, and he utters the word ‘Rosebud.’ In the opening we are introduced to the protagonist, and we understand basic things about him: he is rich, he is isolated, he is brooding, he is defined by his possessions, he has everything and yet his final word is the desire for something else.

Like this, do a sentence for each of your beats. (NOTE: For the sake of brevity I won’t go into the basic definitions of each category, but a good starting point is in my Kurosawa Sonata-Form post.) If your beats are unclear, then you know they must be rewritten.

After doing this exercise and determining the weak points of your structure, you must next assess the strength of your overall conflict in your story. Your conflict should be present throughout the story, and an audience watching the film must never forget it. It must be omnipresent, even when it is not being talked about onscreen. The paramount element to a strong conflict is your main character’s emotional dilemma: essentially, it is the key choice that a protagonist must make. But most importantly, either way they choose, the character stands to lose something. This makes for a strong dilemma. Think of a film like Avatar - the central conflict is Jake Sully’s choice - destroy the Na’vi and lose his lover and in the process regaining his legs and honoring the legacy of his brother, or fight alongside the Na’vi and risk both never being able to walk again, and losing his life in the battle. This is a compelling conflict, because so much is at stake on his decision, and the conflict he faces is consistent throughout the film.

Having refined the conflict of the story and addressing the weak points of the structure, it’s time to put your story to the test. Your next task is to write a one-page summary of your entire screenplay. Your summary should just be a straight up summation, more like a book report. I want you to write two versions of this summary:

The first summary is the aforementioned book report. Present the beats and the conflict, and make sure it all fits on one page. Trim and simplify your language/ sentences so that it all fits on one page. Don’t mess with font sizes and spacing like we did in school. Choose Courier, 12-point size and write it all out. Make sure to highlight the high points of your story, and most importantly, try to isolate what your overall vision for the story is. Keep writing it until your story makes you feel inspired. Once you’re finished, put it away for a few hours, even a day. Do something else, something non-screenplay / story oriented. Go shopping. Play a game of tennis. Flirt with that cute barista at the coffee shop.

Oh just go up there and talk to her, you big ol’ wuss.

Now come back to your one-page summary and read it a few times. Don’t make corrections or revisions - put that pen away - and just read it. Think about things for a little, and then I want you to write your second summary. With this one-page summary I want you to describe why you love this story, and specifically what is it that you love about it. No room for negativity here, this is the very core of why you’re writing in the first place. This will become the most important document in your writing process. You’re putting on paper the overall vision of your story, and you will have to refer back to this document always to make sure you’re staying on point, that you’re focused.

These two documents should always inspire you. If they don’t then go back to step one in refining your conflict and structure. And be honest about inspiration - there’s no such thing as ‘good enough’ when it comes to love. You either are or you aren’t. Keep working on your story until it’s all you can think about, you dream about it, and you can’t wait to see it turn into something real. Sort of like that cute barista.

Screenwriting: Creating Memorable Characters and Character Profiles

The best characters in cinema are almost always extraordinary. Even the most seemingly mundane - think of Paul Giamatti’s portrayal of Harvey Pekar in American Splendor - can be extraordinarily mundane or ineffectual, to the point that they become special.

Of course great characters aren’t the bread and butter of a screenplay - that honor belongs to the story itself - but without memorable characters, the story, irrespective of how creative or solidly plotted, becomes uninteresting. Our stories must have an unforgettable conflict that runs from page one to end, but without memorable characters, we won’t be able to invest ourselves into the conflict, and we tend not to care.

So let’s assume that we’ve got a story plotted out (which is a big assumption, I’ll write more about story in a later post), and our goal is to create memorable characters to inhabit that story. Believe it or not, there is a method to this. One way is to base your characters off of real life people that you’ve met - those people who, when they enter a room, have a definite way about them. You now who I’m talking about; if we look at our friends, each of them brings something to the party. There’s the funny guy, the intense girl, the analytic killjoy, the bohemian hippie. But these are archetypes, and not character traits. Character traits are what takes people out of being archetypes and makes them truly unique, and in order to create unique characters, we have have to define their character traits and create a much bigger character profile. These profiles are going to be your reference throughout your writing process. This is a very powerful tool, so take this work seriously.

Take out a sheet of paper and write down the name of the lead character in your story, and write the following four categories under the name:

TRAITS

MOTIVATION

FLAW

SUBTEXT

We’ll now break down each of these categories.

TRAITS: A character trait is, as aforementioned, what makes someone who they are, every time they show up. I’ve got a pretty dry sense of humor, and people have come to associate me with that. I consider myself a good listener, and I genuinely care about other people, and that’s a trait I’ve come to be associated with. I’m also a bit flaky, and tend to take on too many things, and as a result suffer from diminishing returns. That’s an unfortunate trait of mine, but it’s still a trait. But those traits are also generalizations. There are millions of people who can be identified by those same traits, and if we have characters with those traits in our stories, they’re definitely people we can relate to, but they’re not memorable.

Here’s how you fix that. When thinking of the traits of a character, pick three familiar / generalized traits, and then pick one final trait that is completely out of left field. This is what will make your character absolutely memorable.

For example. Think of a police officer or detective. What are three familiar traits of a cop? Principled. Trustworthy. Analytical. That’s off the top of my head, and that can describe a litany of cops that have showed up in literature and film. But what if I add to this as a final character trait: sex addict. This pulls our blah cop into really interesting, memorable territory. Immediately I can think of interesting conflicts and dilemmas that my character would face. How does he / she treat sex workers? Their own spouse? What does power mean to them? Is the gun an extension of that power? That final character trait is what takes someone we can relate to and makes them extraordinary and memorable. This will work for you every single time, and will be one of the most powerful tools you will ever have in your writing. Seriously.

Play with expectations.

MOTIVATION: A character’s motivation is their goal in your story, what they want to accomplish. There are two kinds of motivation for each character: internal and external, and your character must have both. The external motivation is the goal of the story, basically what your character is fighting for. Frodo in Lord of the Rings needs to deliver his ring to Mordor and dispose of it. Luke Skywalker must rescue Princess Leia. Batman must capture the Joker. It’s pretty simple, and should be able to be delivered in one, concise sentence.

The internal motivation, however, is something a little more complex. It’s something deep inside a character that they’re trying to satisfy, and it’s generally never explicitly stated in a screenplay, it always remains under the skin. Frodo’s internal motivation could be to prove his worth, living in the shadow of Bilbo Baggins. Luke Skywalker wants to demonstrate his manhood, and slay the meek demon of self-doubt and insecurity. Batman will forever be trying to avenge the death of his parents, to fill the loneliness of being an orphan. While complex in nature, the internal motivation too must be able to be written in a single sentence. Go too long in your description of internal motivation and you’ll burden your characters.

FLAW: This is pretty basic. A flaw is not necessarily something that is disagreeable, rather it is something that is sabotaging the success of the character, something that impeding their ability to reach their goal. A flaw can also be a positive trait: think of a person who cannot tell a lie, who is put into a situation where if they tell the truth, then someone dies. A memorable character is someone who rises to the occasion despite their flaw; they needn’t necessarily lose that flaw but they can, at least temporarily, rise above it or conversely succumb to it.

SUBTEXT: Subtext is a complex category that can easily be simplified. It is essentially a secret that the character has. To give your character subtext is to provide them with something that they are hiding from the world, something that they do not wish to share with the other characters. The key to subtext in a story, however, is that the secret must be always, always be under the threat of being exposed.

For example, think of Daniel Plainview fromThere Will Be Blood. Let’s do his complete character profile before we get into the subtext. His traits: he is ambitious, he is shrewd, he is convincing as a speaker, and he’s a complete sociopath. His external motivation is to own all the oil fields all the way to the Pacific Ocean, his internal motivation is to destroy anyone that stands in his way. His flaw is that he has a complete inability to form intimate human relationships.

Now we get to the subtext. P.T. Anderson gives us several moments in Plainview that give us insight into the character’s subtext, and it all revolves around family. Plainview makes several references to abandonment and lonliness, and we have to glean a subtext that he himself had been abandoned at some point, and anyone that threatens to expose that raw wound will die at his hand. Eli tries to become his friend and is killed. Henry claims to be his brother and when he gets too close, Plainview kills him off. In my assessment, the subtext of the character is that he was abandoned, and he doesn’t want anyone to know that.

Now make these character profiles for each and every single character in your story. Even the smaller parts. It’s a hell of a lot of work, but then nobody ever said that writing a screenplay was never a hell of a lot of work. It’s why the best screenwriters get paid a fortune. Once your profiles are complete, copy them to a set of notecards and keep them at the ready when you write. Every time you are stuck in your writing, refer back to these profiles and think of how your character would genuinely react to that situation. See if you’re being consistent to the character throughout. In your rewrite, if you find a scene to be boring, then refer to their traits and bring in that leftfield element, and see what happens. The story will always drive the characters, but it is compelling characters that will always bring the story to life, give it richness, and ultimately give it meaning.

Note too that this is a vital exercise for both actors and directors, as these can be the core tools with which to craft performance beats and important beneath-the-skin adjustments.

So I’m going to give you homework. I want you to practice making character profiles. Watch one movie a night or every other night and make character profiles of the characters in the film. Practice this until it becomes easier, and always, always be creative. That’s the reason we got into this line of work in the first place!

Screenwriting: Rewrites

So last week, Julia Voth and I spent a long eight hours together and hammered out our commentary track for the Lilith DVD. It was absolutely wonderful seeing her after almost a year-and-a-half. She looked as beautiful as ever and was brimming with confidence over her recently completed work. We spent a few hours jogging our memories of our experiences from the shoot and recorded the commentary pretty much off the cuff. It’s a wonderfully informal recording, we cracked a lot of jokes and laughed a lot, and we still managed to cram in a ton of insight and filmmaking ideas into it. I think you’ll really, really enjoy it.

Julia’s a pretty funny gal.

As I was editing the commentary together, so many allegories and questions came into my mind, things I should have asked Julia at that moment and stories that would have been really fun to tell. These things always come in hindsight, and I would love to go back in time and insert them into our conversation. It’s not a regret, simply a desire to keep refining a narrative. We don’t get many opportunities to do that in life, but this is one of the true blessings of being a writer - the ability to rewrite.

The “re” in rewrite is a daunting proposition - it sounds a lot like starting anew, or reinventing the wheel. Sometimes this is indeed the case. But if we start our drafts from unfiltered honesty and stay true to our original plotting and ideas, the core of the work will represent the direction we wanted to go in. From here on out, rewrites are more a matter of perspective - I tend to look at them as repairing momentary lapses of judgement. Most of my rewrites tend to be ideas I felt very strongly about but then proceeded to over think its usage, and either I omitted it altogether, put it in the wrong place, or lessened/ overemphasized its impact. When we reread our first drafts, if we allow ourselves to be brutally honest with our work, we know well in advance what is working and what is not working.

The pitfall with many writers is that when we encounter something that is not working, we tend to make excuses for it. If we receive notes from an outside reader, we tend to justify our choices. And this is something we have to do - defending your choices allows you to process your logic, and the danger here is that we will tailor logic to our convenience.

But here’s the test to whether or not your logic is sound. The logic you profess may very well work in life, but ask yourself if it is sound in the world of the script. The script will have its own rules, parameters and physics (established in your research prior to writing) and ask yourself if these choices in question abide by those rules. More importantly, does it abide by the rules and is it seen onscreen. This is huge. If your defense of a choice is relegated to something that is in a character’s head and not displayed outright in language, action or mise-en-scene, then your logic is cinematically flawed. If for the simple fact that we can’t show internal logic on film.

I take that back - we can show internal logic - but in the most horrible, uninspiring way possible, which is the inclusion of a clunky voice-over or dialogue that describes what a character is thinking. This is not a slam on voice overs in screenplays - there are many films that employ it beautifully (think Fight Club or The Shawshank Redemption) - but it does highlight that voice overs tend to act as narrative bandages to cover gaping holes in a script. Be brutally honest if you’re trying to convey emotion as opposed to covering up.

If your logic fails, then you have no choice but to rewrite. The life of your idea depends upon it. Trust your gut in a rewrite, and the key is to not over think it. You’ve already done the really hard part, which is to create a world of characters and setting, now just let them roam a bit. Delete the troublesome part and close your eyes. Let your mind wander. Think of the situation and just let events unfold according to the rules of the world you created. Think of it as rolling a pair of dice and not knowing what’s going to come up. Sometimes the most profound moment is born from the most elegant and simple solution.

As aforementioned, don’t over think things. Simplify. Our first inclination is to add layers of complexity to patch things up, but the solution might be just to take things away. Replace a line of dialogue with an action that tells more. Take things out and leave them to mystery, and solve that mystery later in the narrative. If you’re stuck, then have your characters do something completely random (but plausible within that world) and see where it takes you. If it leads you to a dead end, then backtrack to the point where you felt the idea was sound, and take a different path.

It’s an apt image because rewrites are very much like navigating a maze. You’re in a constant battle of what your heart tells you and what your mind computes, and the balance of the two is the key to success. Your heart tells you to make three left turns because it feels right, but your mind will negate it because logic dictates that three lefts make a right. That is unless it was your goal to go in a circle, then it works. But my advice is to always follow your heart first, and make sure it works with your mind thereafter. I think if we let our minds be the guide to our creative endeavors, then what we end up with will often be clinical and sterile. The root of good writing is love, and love is housed in the heart.

Rewrites can be immensely frustrating, but I think this is in large part because of our impatience - we simply want to be done. But no one ever said writing was a quick and easy process. It is a journey, and anything that is meant to have the level of quality and excellence that we demand of ourselves will take time to refine and polish. A fine Swiss watch isn’t hammered out in a few hours by a machine - it is hand crafted and bears the insignia and blood of the watchmaker who built it from scratch. And every screenplay is built from scratch - even adaptations - and it bears our signature at the end. If we think for once that an incomplete or insufficient script is ready to be made into a film, then we are either too lazy to be proper screenwriters or we are burdened by hubris and lack humility. Honesty is the best way to determine whether or not a screenplay is ready. Do not make excuses for your work, and do not fall on things such as “actors will flesh it out” or “it will make more sense onscreen.” If it doesn’t work on paper, it doesn’t work period. A screenplay is a film at its most absolute bare, and as a foundation it must be rock solid. To build anything upon a flawed base is compromising the years of work that lay ahead in making your film a reality. Put in the effort towards rewrites now so that you don’t regret it later, and take advantage that we have the ability to rewrite. Sometimes things pass us by and we can’t get them back. In the case of writers our pencils are time machines, let us not put such a brilliant technology to the wayside in serving our hubris!

Yes, I still use pencils.

Producing: Business Plan as Storytelling.

It’s been almost three weeks since I completed the first draft of my Paul Pope screenplay, and since that time I’ve sent it out to Paul and other trusted confidants for initial reactions and notes. To my great joy the response has been overwhelmingly positive. For a first draft, it’s actually pretty darn good.

Nine months in the making. Kinda like giving birth.

Of course I always take praise with a grain of salt, but these are also people who who would tell me if something is wrong to my face. I trust them implicitly. In the three weeks I’ve been away from the script I’ve come up with my own notes and revisions, and by next week i should be ready to take another look at the script.

But it’s very important that I do this with a clean slate. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks trying to distance myself from the screenplay by taking on the film’s business plan, which engages an entirely different part of my brain.

Not to say that creating a business plan is not creative work - in fact it is just as creative as writing a full screenplay, only just that it invovles a very different skillset, and there’s a significantly different story to be told. Where the screenplay is the tale of the characters within a film, the business plan is the tale of your film as it makes its way through the world.

I find that most producers don’t approach business plans this way, and it strikes me as odd. Maybe it’s simply the nomenclature of the item - “business” is generally a poisonous word for creative types, as it tends to involve restrictions and limitations that serve only to hinder an artist’s vision.

Well I’m here to say that as artists, we have to abolish this kind of thinking. Art is a business like any other profession, and if you’re doing art for free then you’re not a working artist. There’s money involved, investments to be made, and bills that have to be paid. We have to make a living doing our art, lest it is just a hobby supplemented by another career. We want to be working filmmakers, and so we have to include business considerations into our work.

Of course you should never think of business when writing your screenplay. It should be a pure expression of what you want your characters to experience and journey through. You should not be thinking of budget feasibility or production days when writing your script. And you shouldn’t think about casting unless you’re writing for one particular actor - doing so lends an authenticity to the words which can prove quite useful. You may not get that actor, but in the end you’ll have created something authentic intended for a real person with real capabilities.

Once you’ve completed the screenplay, the business plan becomes just like writing a new screenplay, but the protagonist of your story is your film, venturing out into the big bad world and trying to save the day. Think of the challenges that your hero will face, the obstacles it must overcome, the people it will meet and allies that it will need to succeed. Think of the tools and weapons it must be armed with to slay the dragon, the training it must undergo to use those tools, and the weaknesses in the armor that it cannot afford to expose.

If my film is the naked hero, then I must build a world around it that guarantees its successful completion of its journey. It will take resources to train a hero - like Obi Wan and Yoda investing their time into Luke, and in the world of filmmaking, time isn’t free. It takes money and people, and this is the foundation of your budget. Who is going to make your film, how much do those people cost, and how long will it take them to finish the project as it was envisioned.

So we’ve built and trained our warrior, and now it’s time to send him off into the world. Even the most highly trained soldiers are never sent into battle blind - we need to come up with a strategy for them. We need to identify the terrain, the people of the region who are our targets, who is a bystander, what is precious and what is expendable, and where both trouble spots and points of most advantage are. We do this by either reconnaissance or by studying previous battles. In the preparation of a business plan, this is our comparables, our target audience, and our distribution strategy. We need to spare no detail in prepping this strategy, because we never want to intentionally put our hero in harm’s way. We want to give them every opportunity to succeed.

I’ll go into individual aspects of the business plans in later posts, but it’s important to know of these elements and use them to build the narrative of the journey of your film. Do a character analysis of your film as you would a protagonist or antagonist. What are their weaknesses, strengths, talents? What makes them different from the Average Joe, what makes them similar? Put them in a jam, and what can they use to get out of it? For example, if I’ve got an esoteric French film and I want to show it in small town middle America, what resources and characteristics do I have to make that happen? Well if my French film has copious amounts of nudity that the French do so very well, then I know I can create a campaign to sell the sex angle of the movie, because middle America, despite their adherence to the Bible Belt, loves its sex just like any other part of the world. But I also have to consider that there just aren’t that many people to see my sexy French film, so I have to consider releasing it on VOD in these territories, on DVD, or releasing an edited version through Wal-Mart. If none of these ideas work and ends up compromising the integrity of the product and the prospects of success, then middle America may not be the wisest path for my film to travel down. I’ll take it to the big city, but just like any kid landing up on the doorstep of the metropolis, there are a million other kids that are chasing that same dream. But my erotic French movie has something others don’t - whatever that may be - and it’s up to me to find those differences and use them as tools to navigate the waters. First I have to see how other similar films did it, plus also the mistakes they made (comparables), and then I have to see what makes my film different and build upon those trends.

Still from ‘Secret Things,’ one of the truly great modern erotic French films. Read Roger Ebert’s outstanding review of it here.

And then, as with any story, there is the intangible factor. Every hero needs a leap of faith, and that leap of faith requires a little bit of fortune telling. We take our best educated guess on the outcome, and take a gamble to make something even better happen. This is the risk of any business venture, but better to take a calculated risk than a blind one. A blind risk goes all-for-nothing, and you might as well play the lottery if you want to play that game. A movie like Steve McQueen’s Shame took and immense risk by wearing its NC-17 rating with pride, and the film succeeded despite its difficult and painful subject matter. The people who needed to see it saw it. Its strategy was to simply be honest about what it was, which in this age of duplicitous marketing is a huge risk.

Business plans need this kind of thinking, and I don’t think major studios are doing this kind of work. Oh they’re doing a lot of work - a business plan for a film like MIB:3 will be as thick as a phone book with numbers on foreign markets and merchandising, but in the end it rests solely upon three factors: the built-in audience of the franchise, a $100m saturation marketing budget, and the star power of Will Smith. I can sum that up on ten pages. It’s conservative logic at its best. But if we want to make films with original scripts, up-and-coming actors, and lower budgets then we have to really think of every possible scenario and challenge, every advantageous partnership and most importantly what it is about our film that can appeal to many different kinds of people. If we find that our film appeals to only one kind of person, then we need to scale back our distribution plan and therefore scale back our overall budget, because we know only and handful of people will watch this film. With a smaller budget and focused distribution strategy, our film has that much greater chance of being a financial success and to be seen by the people who will most benefit from it.

I love writing business plans. It’s like putting a puzzle together, like playing a video game, like looking into a crystal ball. It’s almost autobiographical in nature, as a business plan is the tale of my life for the next five to six years. It’s daunting, exciting and a little bit scary. The same adjectives can be used for the very best fiction stories as well!