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Swiss Army Man: The 'Bad Screenplay' Experiment

By Jacob Krueger

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This week, we're going to be talking about Swiss Army Man by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. This is an extraordinary script, and one of the great examples of just how far outside of the rule box you can actually go as a screenwriter or director. It’s also a prime example of how a really out-there script can sometimes attract the biggest talent in Hollywood, in this case, Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano.

 

There's an exercise that I often do with my Write Your Screenplay students that I call the “Bad Screenplay” exercise. We put a list up on the board of all the students’ greatest fears about their writing. We hear all kinds of things: “bad dialogue,” “cliché,” “redundancy,” “no structure…” the list goes on and on, as the white board fills up with increasingly egregious fears.

 

And then I give my students a challenge: to write a scene that embodies every one of the fears about their writing that we’ve put up on the board. To strive not for good writing, but for bad writing. In fact, I tell them that if their writing starts to get good, they should look up at the board, find the idea they find most horrifying, and strive to integrate it into their script.

 

In many ways this is exactly what the Daniels did in the creation of this screenplay. Daniel Kwan has spoken about the fact that he hates fart jokes, hates buddy movies, hates a cappella music, and many of the other fundamental elements of Swiss Army Man.

 

He built Swiss Army Man out of the things that he hated most in screenplays.

 

So why would somebody do that?

 

Well, there are couple reasons. The first is that, oftentimes, it’s our fears that actually get in the way of our greatest creativity. We are so afraid of doing the things that bring us shame that we just end up not doing them at all, for fear that we might fall short of our own expectations, or societal expectations.

 

And of course, if you’ve seen Swiss Army Man, you know that this is exactly what the movie is about. The movie is about shame. The kind of shame that cuts us off from one another, and from ourselves, and leaves us feeling like we’re on a desert island unable to actually reach anyone.

 

Now, just a warning, there are some spoilers ahead!

 

 

In a lot of ways, you could say the arc of Paul Dano's character, Hank, is simply a journey from hiding his farts from others, to farting in public. And this is probably the worst premise ever for the structure of a film. And if you're Daniel Kwan, and you hate fart jokes in movies, and body humor, and the thought of building a movie based around a giant fart joke fills you with shame, this is an especially horrifying premise for a film.

 

For the Daniels, this was the whole point of the movie. It started as a joke. it was for them, the most ridiculous thing that they could imagine filming. And they actually built the entire script simply to serve that joke, to give themselves the opportunity to do the thing that they feared, and in doing so to get some of their own shame on the page.

 

And you can see what happened when these writers moved towards their shame rather than away from it. When they put the things on the page that they were most scared of and most embarrassed about, all that silliness ultimately led them to a very profound theme about shame and the nature of shame.

 

It led them to a shockingly moving (and funny) exploration about how the things that are actually natural about us, things like farts and erections and masturbation and sexual ...