Past Lives: Genre and Premise

 Past Lives: Genre & Premise

This week, we are going to be analyzing the screenplay for Past Lives, written and directed by Celine Song. We'll use Past Lives to explore the intersection of two key concepts: Premise and Genre. 

We'll look at the places where premise and genre meet and how they come together. And we’ll use that intersection to help you understand how to develop ideas, how to develop premises, how to develop the thing that's going to differentiate your script from other movies within your genre. 

Further on in this transcript, there will be some spoilers for Past Lives. If you've seen the movie, you know that the whole thing builds to the ending, and you cannot understand the screenplay for Past Lives without understanding the ending. So I will warn you before I spoil it, but I am going to eventually spoil the ending of this movie if you have not yet seen it.

Let’s start our screenplay analysis of Past Lives by defining some terms: What is genre and what is premise? 

We’ll start with genre. 

If you're old enough to remember Blockbuster Video, then you know that genre is what you and your partner fight about when trying to pick a movie. 

One of you is in the Drama aisle, looking for a beautiful little drama. The other is in the Action aisle, looking for a really exciting action movie.  

“Let’s watch Die Hard,” you try to convince your partner, “it’s a… love story!”“How about Remains of the Day,” they try to convince you, “it’s a… war movie!”

You're trying to convince each other that your emotional needs, the feelings that you're coming to the movie for, are going to be met. That's actually what genre is.

Genre is a feeling.

Even back in the Blockbuster era, genre was very hard to categorize. 

It’s 1987. You’re looking for, say, First Blood. You look all through the Action shelves and you can’t find it. Finally, you ask at the desk and the dude says, “It’s in Drama.” 

Even back in the day, when genres used to be really simple, it was still hard to categorize things. There's always crossover. A movie is not just one thing. So, it has always been hard to label movies as one single genre. 

Today, Netflix has something like 270,000 tags that they use to try to define a movie’s genre. So we think we know what genre is, but we kindof… don’t. 

We're going to a western, so we expect to see Cowboys… but Star Wars is a western, right? Or is it a sci-fi?

We think we know what genre is, but it actually becomes really hard to define. As soon as you put a label on it, you realize you're not completely right

And today, we have movies that are a mix of genres, really interesting mixes of genres– in ways they weren’t mashed up back in the Blockbuster days. So that means, in today’s market, it's even more complicated to ask, “What genre is this film?” 

So I want to give you a way of thinking about genre that is going to simplify it for you. A way to get past the confusing labels. 

Genre is a mixture of the feeling that the audience wants when they go to see your movie and the expectations they have of what's going to give them that feeling.  

Those expectations are based on other movies that gave them that feeling. 

Feeling is the only reason anyone ever tunes into a TV show or goes to see a movie. We go to see movies because we want a specific feeling...