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Furious 7: Feeding The Genre Monster

By Jacob Krueger

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Hello I’m Jacob Krueger and this is the Write Your Screenplay Podcast. As you know, on this podcast, rather than looking at movies in terms of two thumbs up or two thumbs down, we look at movies and we look at screenplays in terms of what we can learn from them as screenwriters. We look at good movies and we look at bad movies, we look at movies that we loved and movies that we hated.

Today we are going to be talking about the genre of movies that I affectionately like to call “The Big Dumb Action Movie,” with the latest installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise, Furious 7.

And, hopefully, we’re going to be looking at Furious 7 in a way that's valuable not only if you’re a big action movie writer, but also if you are a writer in any other genre: if you are writing a thriller, if you are writing a comedy, if you are writing a drama, if you are writing an independent film or even if you are writing an art film.

In an odd way, “big dumb action movies” and super experimental art films actually have a lot in common. That’s because they both exist in a world of expressionism.

Oftentimes, when young writers sit down to write a movie, they think that most movies take place in the world of realism. But this is simply not true.

There are very, very few movies that take place in the world of realism.

Most movies actually don’t take place in the world of realism. They take place in a world of naturalism, which is a slightly heightened version of reality.

In naturalism, we never order our meal, the waiter just knows what we want. We never pay for our order. The cashier always seem to have the exact change.

In realism, your friend says something really funny, and three hours later, on the ride home, you think of the perfect response. In naturalism, your friend says the funniest thing ever, and you immediately respond with the funniest possible answer and then your friend responds with an answer that tops that.

In realism, we make the same mistake again and again and again until finally one day we turn around and say, “you know what? I think I want to do this differently.” In naturalism, we go to the worst possible version of that mistake in the very first scene, and start changing immediately in profound ways.

Naturalism is a lot like realism but it’s slightly heightened so that your movie can happen faster, your character can change faster and, most importantly, so that your movie can be more compelling or interesting for your audience.

You know those conversations that you have with your girlfriend, boyfriend, husband or wife that take place in realism? When you go around in the same repetitive circle for 6 hours, until neither of you can even remember what you were arguing about. Imagine if you captured that in a movie exactly the way it happened, how boring and redundant it would be to watch. You don’t even want to be in that scene when you’re living it!

So, one of the reasons why we move to naturalism is because naturalism helps us distill those real emotions (those real moments, those real journeys that we really go through in our real life) down to their essence, down to that one line that made you cry or made you smile, rather than the ten lines that surrounded it. Naturalism helps us distill it all down to that one action, which can really reveal who you are as a characte...