I know. I know. You are all wondering where the hell I have been.
Sorry. Life has been crazy. Also, I feel my last post was off the cuff and, well, kind of shitty. I’d rather not do that again. In light of that, I’m pondering the subject matter of my next post.
It will be soon, I promise.
Until then, I leave you with this:
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I’m working on two scripts right now.
One, I’m trying to finish. I’m a few pages past the mid point, and while I know where I need to go I have fuckall to get me there. It’s pissing me the hell off. It’s all because of the invention of the goddamned automobile. It makes the whole premise so damned hard to execute. Screw you, Henry Ford!!!
The other, I’m starting my first rewrite of. Like that’s any relief from the stress of the other script… lol.
I came to a realization while reading through the screenplay I am rewriting, and it’s something I knew when I was writing my vomit-on-a-page first draft. My villains are barely there.
This is a pretty sad revelation, because the villains in this story are fucking awesome. They are some bad dudes. They might even be bad enough dudes to rescue the President, if they weren’t villains. As it is, they’re probably the ones who hired the ninjas. If you don’t get that reference, you’re dead to me.
Now, that’s not to say the script doesn’t have conflict. It has a shitload of conflict. My main problem in my first draft was that I had so much conflict I couldn’t fit it all. I felt like I had to scrunch and squeeze because there was so much conflict. See, the villains aren’t the only antagonistic forces in the screenplay. They are just cogs in a massive antagonistic-force-machine.
On sale at Wal-Mart for $49.95. In the “home goods” section.
Still, as huge as the antagonistic force coming against my protag is, those villains are getting the bitch end of the stick. A killer villain can make or break your screenplay.
I’m not kidding. Just look at The Dark Knight.
Hell, look at No Country for Old Men. Javier Bardem owned that film from the second he stepped on screen. Don’t believe me?
Nuff’ said.
Does the performance of the actor have an impact on how a villain resonates with the audience? Yes. Absolutely. Heath Ledger and Javier Bardem were born for those roles, and they are easily two of the greatest villains to grace the screen in this decade.
However, as screenwriters we don’t have actors at our disposal. We only have words. Ink and paper. So how do we make our villains resonate on the page the way they are going to resonate on the screen?
That’s a great question. I think some of you might know part of the answer.
For one thing, you flesh them out. You can’t treat the villain like some disposable character who doesn’t need a background because he doesn’t have to arc. That’s lazy and it will produce flat, boring villains on the page. Whether you have one villain or 10 (and I hope you don’t have 10), you need to flesh out each one as thoroughly as you flesh out your protag.
You are fleshing out your protag, right? Like, deeply fleshing out your protag. I really hope so. You should KNOW your protag by the time you are ready to write FADE IN. And I mean know in the Biblical sense.
You should know your villains like that too. Every great hero is defined by his villains. John McClane had Hans Gruber. Harry Potter had Lord Voldemort. Batman had The Joker. Wolverine had Sabertooth. Luke Skywalker had Darth Vader. The list goes on forever. If you want your protag to be great, you need a villain that is even greater.
Think I’m lying? Why is Superman such a lame hero? His arch-enemy is Lex Luthor. Yawn.
Does every screenplay have a villain? No. Many have an “antagonistic force”. But if your screenplay doesn’t have a flesh-and-bones villain for your audience to point their finger at, you’d better have one damn good antagonistic force. And, you should know it just as thoroughly as you would if it were a character.
I’m telling you, your antagonist(s) make or break your screenplay. There’s really no way around it. The greater the antagonist(s), the greater the conflict. The greater the conflict, the better your story. It’s just that simple.
There’s more to it than just fleshing the villain out, though. Their presence on the page has to be memorable. It has to be frightening. It has to be enigmatic.
Yes. Enigmatic.
The Joker, as portrayed in The Dark Knight, is a great example of this. The Nolans stated that they chose not to dive into The Joker’s past (or who he was, or why he was) within the context of the movie because they wanted him to simply “be”. They felt he would be the most frightening, the most powerful, the most chilling if there was no explanation. No reasoning. No justification. He. Just. Was.
I think they were right.
Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is another example of this. Many of the most chilling villains follow this archetype. For me, the moment Jigsaw stopped being intimidating was the moment we knew his motive. The end of the first Saw film, while a cool twist, robbed the villain of what made him so frightening in the first place - his mystery.
Treat your villains like you treat your protags. Hell, treat them better.
It’s easy to jump to a quick origin with your villains. Give them a few deep, dark secrets that haunt them and have twisted them into what they have become. I think that’s cheap.
Give those secrets to your protagonist. Have your protagonist wrestle with them, and let your villain manipulate them because of it. Let the villain use those secrets to their advantage. Give your villain as much cannon fodder against your protagonist as possible. Why?
Because if your villain does not seem insurmountable - unbeatable - your hero won’t have enough to overcome. They won’t have enough conflict. The odds won’t be stacked high enough against them. Remember - we love the underdog. That’s another reason why Superman sucks. We like John McClane in the first Die Hard. We like Luke Skywalker (when he’s not acting like a whiny bitch).
We. Love. Underdogs.
Give us an underdog to root for, and we will be hooked from page one. In other words, give us a villain that can’t be beat. Then watch your protagonist figure out a way to beat it. You will be surprised at what comes out as a result.
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Now, I’m not going to make it a regular practice of writing movie reviews on here. Everyone already does it, and many do it far better and far more diligently than I care to. You want reviews? Go to Rotten Tomatoes, MRQE or Filmcritic.com. I’m only writing this because I have no choice.
Seriously. This movie held me at gunpoint and forced me to tell everyone that it is fucking awesome.
Scratch that.
Amazing.
This film is first and foremost the Batman I always wanted on the big screen. This is the ferocious Batman I read about in novels as a kid, the Batman who beat the shit out of Superman in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight series, and - in many ways - this is the Batman who never was.
What Christopher Nolan did in this film eclipses anything and everything before it. Even Frank Miller’s Batman has some things to learn from this film.
And this isn’t just some comic book movie. This is a film. Christopher Nolan is batting 100 right now. He hasn’t made a movie I didn’t love. Despite my love for everything he has done, this movie makes them all look like shit. It’s that fucking good.
What truly amazed me (aside from everything about the goddamed film, because it’s just fucking incredible) was how incredible all of the actors were. Heath Ledger was, of course, un-fucking-believable. He was in-goddamn-human. It was easily one of the best performances I have ever seen from any actor ever. EVER!!! He wasn’t there on the screen. The Joker was, and he was larger than life.
Ledger wasn’t the only one, though. Seriously, I forgot Gary Oldman was Lt. Gordon until the credits rolled. Straight up FORGOT! He was just Lt. James Gordon up there. Gary Oldman didn’t exist for me either. Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Sir Michael Caine… forget about it. They were all incredible. There’s no way that many great performances could come out of one film, other than the influence of an incredible director and an incredible script.
Just go see this movie. See it this weekend. It deserves to topple Spiderman 3. Shit, it deserves to crush Titanic. This is easily one of the best movies I have seen in a very long time.
I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the script this week and reading it right before I go see it again on Sunday. lol.
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Wait - Inglorious Bastards?? Don’t you mean Inglourious Basterds?
Do you have a copy? Seriously? Is it PDF? Can you hook me up with a download?
To answer your questions:
Yes.
Yes and no.
Yes.
Yes, seriously.
Yes.
No.
Why am I bringing it up when I should be talking about characters?
Good question. To be honest, I was reading through it and I really felt like the first “chapter” lined up perfectly with what I’m going to be talking about.
It opens on a dairy farm in Nazi Occupied France, where the farmer and his family act like farmer-and-family. Then the Nazis roll up and act like Nazis. The farmer’s instinct is for his family. He makes sure they are safe, and does what he can, but he’s scared. They all are. The Nazis are fucking ruthless. Describing the farmer’s disposition, QT writes on page 2:
“After living for a year with the sword of Damocles suspended over his head, this may very well be the end.”
I’ll be damned if this whole sequence doesn’t resonate. You know why it resonates? Suspension of disbelief.
Wait… what the fuck am I talking about? Suspension of disbelief? This isn’t a horror flick. This isn’t Sc-Fi we’re talking about. It’s Nazi occupied France! It REALLY happened!!!
Right, but did this actually happen? Did these people actually exist? Did this moment between SS Colonel and French Dairy Farmer actually play out in the annals of History? Highly unlikely. However, at no point in the sequence do we question it. If this were a horror movie or a Sci-Fi epic, and this scene were with vampires and werewolves or aliens and human cyborgs, would we question this scene any more than we do now? It’s quite possible. Of course, if done right, it shouldn’t matter what genre this scene is. We should still buy it hook, line and sinker.
Sink her? I hardly even know her!
See, without the suspension of disbelief, no one would watch movies. Most of the movies that suck ass - the ones you roll your eyes and groan over whenever someone mentions them - failed miserably at this. It’s one of the main reasons why the horror genre is hanging on by a thread. Nobody gets this fucking principle any more.
I don’t know when, where or why it got thrown to the wayside, but for the love of God people, pick that shit back up!!! Please! I can’t handle much more of the derivative, shock-and-awe bullshit. I won’t buy it, and no one else will, either. If you don’t sneak attack me with some semblance of truth and trick me into the suspension of my disbelief, I’m going to turn around and think your script is GARBAGE!!
And you know what?
I will be right.
You’re about to go to school here, so take lost of notes. There will be a test.
Right now I feel the need to do more than just tell you to utilize suspension of disbelief. That has been said a million times, and it really doesn’t help anyone. You have to understand something first before you can utilize it. I have found a number of writers, instructors, and bloggers who have thrown their two cents into the idea of the suspension of disbelief. What I find most interesting about a majority of the “information” out there is how cryptic or downright shallow it is. It’s not until you dive into the writings of philosophers and early poets and play writes that you begin to get an idea for what this expression is really conveying to us.
I already used the phrase “semblance of truth” like, three times between my last post and this one. Okay, four. If you know what I’m talking about, gg. We should chat sometime. If you don’t, read on.
The concept behind the expression “suspension of disbelief” has its origins in the very beginnings of man’s creative impulse. From the first cave drawings to the early cults and religions to the films, dogmas, and various art forms of today, none would have held any water with its audience if the ideas were not presented with a necessary degree of believability and consumable appeal. Something within the story, concept, or art form held a gem of intrigue and value high enough to cause the viewer to disregard suspicions of the idea’s possible falsehood. It also presented a true enough concept to outweigh any such suspicion. While writing about his contribution to the collection Lyrical Ballads, Samuel Taylor Coleridge stated, “… it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” This is the first time the use of the actual expression “suspension of disbelief” was known to be used.
The concept being conveyed is essentially that whatever form of artistic expression you may utilize, it is most important to reach within yourself and deposit a piece of who you are into your work. I know this sounds like an absurd analysis of this statement, but take a second look at what Coleridge said. He attempted to “transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth”. “Human interest”, of course, refers to our interest in humanity and the human condition. It is referring to the one thing that interests and intrigues us more than anything else - relationships. Love relationships, hate relationships, thriving relationships, failing relationships… they are what make us tick.
As for the “semblance of truth”, it’s a slightly more complicated matter. But only slightly. When a work of art is executed so poignantly, so flawlessly that people are truly taken aback by its marvelous presence, it is almost always described as “genuine”. It may be said that it “struck a chord” with the audience - that it reached out to them or to their very human nature. This is what Coleridge is referring to. How does one make art genuine? Coleridge is suggesting, and I agree with him, that we do so by depositing a piece of ourselves into our art. There is nothing more true than what you have experienced, or what you are. What is the first rule of writing? Write what you know. It has been said “live, live, live, then write, write, write.” Why? I suggest it is because only by living life and experiencing the world that we gain the bumps and bruises of life that give our existence meaning, depth, and truth. When it comes to art, it is only by reaching into those experiences and depositing them into our work that we can create “a human interest and a semblance of truth”.
From Coleridge we can learn that an audience will enter that willing suspension of disbelief if the art is first and foremost genuine, possessing a “human interest and a semblance of truth”. To dive deeper, in her study of the topic Eva Schaper observed that “…some belief conditions must surely be fulfilled for emotional engagement to be possible.”
What she is referring to here is essentially the principles of epistemology. The idea is that the universe is full of truths, and that every cognitive being holds both a set of truths that have been proven to them and a set of concepts or ideas that they hold to be true despite the existence of evidence with which to prove the concept or idea to others. In other words, we all hold a set of truths and a set of beliefs. Within our minds, the summation of what we know is found when our beliefs are backed up by truths. Plato introduced this concept when he concluded that knowledge is a subset of that which is both true and believed.
Now, if we take Coleridge’s concept of “a semblance of truth” and marry it with Schaper’s observation that “some belief conditions must surely be fulfilled”, we can, within our piece of artistic expression, create for the audience a kind of “knowledge within the moment”. What I mean by this is that if we create a believable and genuine enough world with a human enough character, we will build for the audience an apparent truth. If that apparent truth can then be married with pre-existing beliefs of the audience, the audience will in that moment be presented with the knowledge that those pre-existing beliefs are indeed true.
Taking it back to Inglorious Bastards, it breaks down like this:
* It is true that the Nazi party occupied France.
* It is true some French people were farmers, and that there were a lot of farmers in the 1940s.* We believe that Nazis were a bunch of evil assholes, and that they were pretty damn scary.
* We believe a French peasant milk farmer in Nazi occupied France would be pretty damn fearful of Nazis, and that they would do everything they could to keep their family safe.* It seems to be true in this sequence that there was a French farmer who was a good man and loved his family (relationships). It also seems true that he cared for his neighbors.
* It seems to be true that the Nazi Colonel is known as The Jew Hunter, and has come to the French farmer’s house because he knows the farmer his hiding his Jewish neighbors.
As a writer, Tarantino hammered on truths that we all subscribe to, and laid our pre-existing beliefs over to of them. He didn’t make the Nazis fun or silly or nice. He fulfilled our belief conditions in this situation. He then took his expertly developed characters and used their relationships to paint us a seemingly true scenario that we would be caught up in. At that point, there is not a single person in the audience who will stop to question whether or not this is a historically accurate event. I would put money on it.
The nuts and bolts of this concept lie in a combination of what has already been discussed about Coleridge’s statement and the exploration of Schaper’s analysis of the suspension of disbelief from a physiological perspective. She explains that a well-constructed artistic expression holds a strong enough analogy to true life and points of reference within reality that the work can make declarative statements that will be accepted by the audience. She expands, “…[beliefs] are true or false according to whether they are correctly or incorrectly identified within the analogue.
In other words, if you have created a work of art that holds both human interest and apparent truth, and you tap into the pre-existing beliefs of the audience, not only will a temporary knowledge be created within the minds of the audience members, but also a new set of temporary or secondary beliefs dependent entirely on the context of your creation. Therefore, as long as your work remains cohesive within itself and you do not betray the semblance of truth that has been built and accepted, your audience will not only accept the entirety of your work, but also build their own set of beliefs around your creation.
Those beliefs, triggered and perpetuated by your integral, unfaltering semblance of truth, will then trigger the audience’s expectations and consequent emotions. If your work of art has effectively tapped into your audience’s pre-existing beliefs, this will all combine to form the moment that all artists strive for - that moment in a work of art when something within its semblance of truth and human interest resonate with experiences in the audience member’s life, creating an overwhelming moment where the emotional response to the subject gets swept up in the viewer’s emotional response to the corresponding real-life incident and they are uncontrollably shaken. That is the moment when art transcends suspension of disbelief and reaches deep within the viewer, becoming as real to them as any prior belief they have held.
Of course, it is impossible to do that without real, deep, tangible characters. Seriously, they are the bread and butter of your screenplay. If your characters are shit, or if they are derivative - hell, even if they just aren’t quite as deeply developed as they could have been - your script will fall flat. Unk has a great post about this topic that’s probably a lot easier to read (ie: less verbose) than mine. It should be required reading.
Have writer’s block? Blame your characters. Or, really, blame yourself for not developing your characters thoroughly.
What am I talking about? You developed your characters. Hell, you even wrote a two paragraph backstory!
lol.
Seriously, if you haven’t been reading Unk’s writing for very long, go read his posts on Depth Charging your characters - parts 1, 1.5 and 2. That is some seriously required reading.
Hell, just read everything the guy’s ever written on characters. He’s a genius. Seriously.
I’d go into detail about how to develop your characters, but Unk’s said damn near everything there is to say on the topic. I’m probably going to go into more detail about your character’s relationships and why they are so damned important next time. Hopefully I didn’t lose you with this post.
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So this is the start of what I promised I would write about. When talking about characters, You may as well start off by talking about character introductions, right?
Right.
I posted the following as a thread over at Done Deal, and thought it was worth putting up here. Comment with your thoughts, disagreements, or YOUR favorite character intros.
Newbies, take notes!
I have noticed, as I have been reading a number of scripts from newer writers (and writers new to the boards), that there seems to be this strange unspoken pattern of moving away from character intros. Not in sold scripts, or by successful writers, but by the masses trying to break in. Many don’t even write them, and others write intros that tell us absolutely nothing.
I believe the character intro is one of our greatest tools as screenwriters. We should utilize the hell out of it - especially for our protagonists!
Here are a few character intros that stuck out to me. I believe these are excellent examples of what we should be doing in our scripts.
from Entourage:
ERIC MURPHY. Hight impaired. Off-beat looks. Kinetic. A JACK RUSSELL TERRIER in a man’s body.
MIKE “TURTLE” QUINN, a former high-school lineman, still wears his championship ring. He’s a guy who talks and eats with is hands. He wears an XXL vintage “Clyde” Frazier jersey.
JOHNNY “DRAMA” CHASE, thinning hair and zero body fat, the elder statesman here, drinks low-carb beer, dresses impeccably. Drama’s half as good-looking and twice as neurotic as his younger brother…
VINCENT CHASE who wears a Yankees cap pulled low and a black tee. Vince is old school cool; McQueen smooth.
from Y the Last Man:
YORICK BROWN, an oddly attractive 20-something white guy who looks all wrong in a tie. He’s wearing one anyway.
from The Zookeeper:
This is ANDREW BRECKMAN, late thirties, lovable and sweet.
from The Low Dweller:
…and there’s a pie-eyed man at the base, late twenties, sturdy and thick-wristed. His eyes are dark brown, but the liquor’s in him and they’re barely open now.
This is the low dweller, CHARLIE ‘SLIM’ HENDRICK.
from The Monster Squad:
For the record: VLAD THE IMPALER was a Romanian prince whose hobby was violent murder… but that was hundreds of years ago. NOW he’s your basic, run-of-the-mill, undead personification of evil. No blood in his face. Pleanty in his eyes.
MR. METZGER, a stern, silly-looking man, sits at his desk across from one PATRICK RHODES: sincere, impetuous, soon to be a hero, only right now he’s in TROUBLE…
from Roundtable:
SIR LANCELOT, a handsome blonde knight in shimmering gold armor riding a majestic white steed bravely leads THREE OTHER KNIGHTS into mounted battle.
from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang:
AN ALMOST HANDSOME MAN enters, dressed a tad shabby, sports the only tie he owns; welcome HARRY, our narrator.
from Hot For Teacher:
Tight on DREW. He’s 17, decent enough looking, if slightly nerdy. All skin and bones poking through his pajamas. At the moment he’s quite distressed.
from Galahad:
SIR GALAHAD OF AVALON (30s) wears a silver-black beard over his weather-worn face. Wavy black hair hangs over his broad shoulders. His gray eyes survey the tremendous estate.
from Arena:
CPL. KARL JENNER (27), a heavy-set black man with a sniper rifle slung across his back, turns to the guy next to him.
PFC. MATT DEACON’s a 24 year-old redneck who joined up as soon as he was old enough to leave the family farm.
SGT. LEON PETROVSKY (38), the tough, grizzled bastard who’s seen it all before, rolls his eyes.
PFC. SHAWN RAWLINS (19), chimes in. The baby of the group, his not good at hiding his hero worship for Jenner.
***
These are pretty much all from recent specs/sales, with the exception of Shane Blacks intros from Monster Squad (and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang which is only 3 years old). I did that for a reason. I don’t want to pull out a ton of archaic examples and have people tell me they “have no bearing on the current market”. This is a snapshot of the current market.
Notice, they are all different. They all have their own style. Still, they all do the same thing. They introduce us to the character. As John August said, “the best character introductions tend to include both a sense of what you see (the character’s physical appearance) and an intriguing tidbit about their personality and/or situation.”
Funny concept, huh? A character introduction actually introducing us to the character. It is amazing how often I see writers NOT doing this.
Don’t just tell us what they look like. Use what they look like to tell us WHO THEY ARE! Give us a little more depth. Be poetic. Let your prose run a little. It’s the only chance in screenwriting you get to actually DO that! Take advantage of it, and paint us a picture of a character that will sweep us off our feet and carry us swooning all the way through his or her story.
So how do you do that? You start with amazing characters. More on that in my next post, where we talk about the suspension of disbelief and “a semblance of truth”!
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