Write Your Screenplay Podcast

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DUNKIRK PODCAST

Dunkirk vs. Saving Private Ryan: What is Your Screenplay About?

by Jacob Krueger

This week we are going to be looking at Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan.

On top of being an extraordinary cinematic experience, Dunkirk is a particularly interesting script to look at as screenwriters, because it breaks pretty much every rule that you’ve likely been told about screenwriting or about filmmaking in general, or certainly about the war movie genre.

When we think about big budget war movies, we generally think about movies like Saving Private Ryan, movies about great heroism and winning the battle against incredible odds.

And yet this is a war movie that (for the most part) isn't about winning but about losing. This is a war movie about a retreat, about a surrender, but also about the kinds of miracles that happen when people care about each other.

This isn’t a typical Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey about one great man, one great woman who saves the world.

This is a movie about a lot of little individuals.

Some of them are behaving bravely, and some of them are behaving cowardly. Some for their own survival, and some for the survival of others.

 

Dunkirk is a movie that flies in the face of every traditional notion of star-power and how it’s supposed to be used in a big budget feature.

This is a movie with an American budget with no American actors and no American characters.

In fact, it features an actor in a starring role that we have never seen in a major motion picture before-- who spends most of the movie, from the very first scene, simply running away!

He’s not “Saving the Cat” or behaving in any of the courageous ways we’ve been taught our main characters are supposed to behave. Not trying to help other people, but trying to save his own life in whatever manner is possible. He’s a guy who will pretend to be a Red Cross worker in order to try to sneak onto the boat that is evacuating the wounded.

And yet we are able to connect with this character, we are able to care about him; we are able to feel for him.

This is a movie that stars Tom Hardy and sticks him-- for most of the film-- in the cockpit of a plane and behind a mask that obscures so much of his face that we can’t even tell it is him! That takes its biggest name star and hides him from the audience that cloaks him in anonymity.

And though in some ways this is an inside joke-- a nod to the recurring trend of directors covering half the face of one of the best actors in the business in roles ranging from Bane to The Road Warrior-- it’s also a thematic decision -- one that captures the anonymity of real heroism. That evokes the memory of the thousands of forgotten heroes of World War II and countless other wars.

Dunkirk is also a movie that ignores most of the standard rules of the war movie genre.

This is a big budget war movie with firefights shot almost entirely from the point of view of the pilots.

It’s a war movie in which planes don’t explode in spectacular fashion but rather disappear silently into the ocean. A movie in which fighter pilots are more concerned with running out of fuel than with bad-ass lines of dialogue. A movie in which we watch not from the perspective of an audience being entertained by the fireworks, but from the perspective of exactly what it feels like to be a fighter pilot in the middle of battle.

It’s an action movie in which the “good guys” don’t always win, and in which the bad guys can actually shoot. Where there are no supervillains, but no super heroes either. Where the Nazi pilots are as anonymous, and as good at their jobs, as the British ones.

It’s a movie which assembled the largest naval unit in film history, not for a spectacular battle sequence, but for a simple journey against the waves of the English Channel. A movie in which Battleships don’t participate in spectacular action sequences, but sit helplessly loaded with frightened men, only to be sunk by a single bomb from the air or torpedo from the sea.

It’s a movie in which even the good guy British soldiers are tainted by nationalistic racism and selfishness, turning French allies away from British boats, and even sacrificing the lives of their own foot soldiers to protect their air force and battleships.

 

Dunkirk is a movie which completely rejects the idea of exposition, or the need to explain anything to the audience.

Not only does the film lack a single memorable quip or funny line-- it barely has any dialogue at all! It doesn’t tell the audience any more than the individual soldiers on the beach know, moment by moment, just as they’re learning it, and sometimes even a step or two behind.

And yet, it manages to create a compelling and convincing portrait of characters that all feel very different from each other.

It manages to tell a story about Tom Hardy’s fighter pilot character-- a guy who makes a life changing decision--  and to capture the feeling and the emotional import of that decision with barely a word—simply with a blown fuel gauge, a couple of chalk calculations on his fighter jet console-- and a big decision at the end of the film.

It’s a journey that is not structured around big speeches and feel good American values and huge heroic choices that lead to happy endings, but rather with a series of understated little choices that play out almost in real time, and add up to one big sacrifice that plays out nearly as quietly as the ones the tiny choices that preceded it.

Dunkirk is a movie in which good characters not only die for something but sometimes die for nothing.

It’s a movie filled with ethical confusion, and also profound empathy.

A movie in which you may just have to understand that the half drowned soldier you save on your boat may be so damaged from the war that he may never be the same again. Where you may just have to understand that he may hurt someone that you love, not out of hatred, but out of terror. A movie in which the bravest choice may not be to fight but to accept the ugly truth of war.

A movie not about justice, but about acceptance. And at the same time, a movie about holding onto the values that tie us together, and the risk we all face when, in the face of our fears for our own survival, we forget to hold onto those values.

Christopher Nolan’s approach to Dunkirk’s battle sequences is a total inversion of Steven Spielberg’s unforgettably gory battle at the beaches of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan.

Dunkirk presents an equally horrifying beach battle with virtually no blood at all. Rather than capturing the horror of war through gory violence and chaos, Nolan captures the same madness through the bloodless lens of orderly bureaucracy-- lining his soldiers up in orderly bureaucratic rows on the beach-- silently ducking them en masse as they are bombed, slaughtered and attacked.  A horror of war in which most people simply get in line-- and which even the moments of individuality and self preservation which occur within that orderly slaughter are no more likely to lead to salvation than simply following the rules.

This is a movie where characters make real decisions that aren’t Hollywood at all, real decisions under pressure drawn from research about the real events-- such as the character who at one point just gets up from the beach and walks into the water as if he could somehow swim the English Channel.

This is a movie about plans for escape that don’t work out. Where risky acts of inspiration, like sneaking into a beached boat and waiting for the tide to rise, only lead to another way to die.

So what is this screenplay built around that lets it break all of these rules and still succeed?

On the simplest level, it’s because audiences don’t come to movies for the things that so many screenwriting teachers, so many producers, and so many writers spend so much time obsessing over.

They don’t come for exposition. They don’t come for plot. They don’t come for nice “likeable” characters and memorable dialogue. They don’t come for formulaic structure or wrapping up everything with a bow.

Audiences come to movies to go on a journey. To experience something that moves them emotionally, and transports them into a different kind of world.

And to create that kind of experience for your audience, you only need two things.

The first is a strong sense of your own intention in making the film-- the question you’re genuinely wrestling with, and the emotional journey you want to create for yourself by writing it.

And the second is a character who wants something as badly as you do-- who wants something so badly they’re willing to do almost anything to get it. Who’s going to pursue that intention even in face of the biggest obstacles and most challenging consequences.

Nolan is a big fan of Hitchcock, and one of the things that Hitchcock demonstrates so clearly in his films-- something forgotten by so many Hollywood filmmakers-- is that you don’t have to explain very much for an audience to feel suspense or to feel connection for a character.

Simply rooting a character in their action, in their attempts to get the things they want-- simply rooting the character in their physical world and letting them try to do things that are really hard-- creates a feeling of connection and suspense for the audience, even if we don’t know exactly what is happening and even if we don’t agree with what the characters are doing.

And what is really cool is that Christopher Nolan, by working in this way, drops you into the feeling of the war.

Not just through the kinds of actions that the characters are taking, but also by the way that he shoots them. By creating a feeling of confusion that just washes over you.

He drops you into the experience of the war, the experience not of having a clear objective and a clear plan,...

... in addition to being an extraordinary cinematic experience, Dunkirk is a particularly interesting script to look at as screenwriters, because it breaks pretty much every rule that you’ve likely been told about screenwriting or about filmmaking in general, or certainly about the war movie genre…”

"...and you can see, if you look at the structure of Spider-Man: Homecoming, that this isn't just the formula for creating a great bad guy, it is actually a way of creating an entire cast of unforgettable characters, and shaping the journeys they all go on in the script.

Because every single one of these characters is really just a person with a really strong want and a really strong obstacle that forces them to reveal their really strong “how”—the way that they pursue the things that they want differently from everybody else..."

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Spider Man Homecoming

Part 2 - Creating Unforgettable Characters & The Game of Screenplay Structure

 

In last week’s podcast we talked about writing a great antagonist by letting go of our need to see them as the bad-guy, who “antagonizes” the main character, and instead stepping into our antagonists as real human beings.

 

Because every character in your script believes that they are the hero of the story (just like every human being sees themselves as the hero of their story), to write a great character of any kind-- a character that actually lives and breathes--we need to see world through their eyes. And this begins by connecting to what our characters want.

 

And what’s exciting is that when we start to think about our scripts in this way, we not only find unforgettable characters, we also start to organically discover the exact structure we need to tell our stories.

 

In Spider-Man, Homecoming, what makes the character of the Vulture, Adrian Toomes (played by Michael Keaton) so compelling is that everything he does grows directly out of his simple human desire to provide for his family.

 

And you can see, if you look at the structure of Spider-Man: Homecoming, that this isn't just the formula for creating a great bad guy, it is actually a way of creating an entire cast of unforgettable characters, and shaping the journeys they all go on in the script.

 

Because every single one of these characters is really just a person with a really strong want and a really strong obstacle that forces them to reveal their really strong “how”—the way that they pursue the things that they want differently from everybody else.

 

And when we understand a character’s want in this way, it allows us not only to enjoy the drama, but also to feel like we are in on a joke. It allows us to laugh at these characters even as we feel for them-- not because the characters are begging for a laugh, but because they are being themselves in a funny way.

 

So let’s talk about Peter Parker.

 

Just like Adrian Toomes, Peter Parker starts the movie with his own clear priority. His own clear superobjective.

 

Peter Parker only wants one thing. Having returned from his adventure with the Avengers, the only thing he wants in the universe is to join the Avengers.

 

He wants to wear that Spider-Man outfit that Tony Stark has given him. He wants to tap into the full power of that Spider-Man outfit that Tony Stark has given him.

 

He wants to stop being treated like a kid and start being treated like an adult. He wants to stop solving little crimes and start solving the big ones. He wants to stop being the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and become what he sees as a real superhero.

 

In fact he wants it so badly that he consistently makes really strong choices in relation to all the other things that he wants-- in relation to the way the other kids at school see him, in relation to his secret identity, in relation to his Aunt May, in relation to The Academic Decathlon Competition and even in relation to The Homecoming after which the movie is named, and his desperate desire to date the coolest, richest, most perfect girl in school, Liz.

 

Despite his desire to be with Liz, despite his desire to win The Academic Decathlon, despite the desire to be admired by his friends, despite his best friend Ned’s desperate desire for him to reveal his identity so he can stop being treated like a loser— even when Peter Parker wavers in his resolution in the face of the pressures of his daily life as a regular kid-- ultimately Peter Parker always chooses to be a superhero.

 

 

Even if it means that none of the other kids will ever take him seriously. Even if it means that he is going to have to ditch his friends for The Academic Decathlon, even if it means he is going to have to ditch Liz at The Homecoming Dance, even if it means he is going to lose everything else that he wants—Peter always chooses the thing that he wants most.

 

And because of that, it makes his inevitable choice at the end of the film-- which I am not going to spoil for you here but what you probably are already imagining if you understand structure-- it makes his ultimate choice and his ultimate journey so successful.

 

In Improv this concept is called The Game of the Scene. But here we’re going to think about it as the Game of Structure.

 

During an Improv, just like on the first blank page of a script, you’ve got two characters and you don’t know much about them. You don’t know who you are playing, and your scene partner doesn’t know who they are playing. Just like when you start out writing, even if you have some ideas, you really don’t know who your characters are, or how your characters are, or what they really want, or what they are really going to do, until they start interacting with each other.

 

And as you play together, you learn who the other person is, and who you are, by telling each other things about each other and about yourselves.

 

And ultimately what happens is, you find something that is funny, something that is fun.

 

And once you find that thing all you have to do is keep doing it. And the audience will laugh their asses off every damn time.

 

They will connect to your characters, because they understand your characters’ game. They understand what your character wants, and how they’re trying to get it, and what keeps going wrong. And that is why it’s called The Game of the Scene.

 

 

You keep outdoing it and outdoing it and outdoing it-- and suddenly from that game, a structure emerges.

 

If you’ve ever watched a sitcom, you’ve seen this technique used over and over again. But the same technique-- often without the humor--is used in character driven dramas, in psychological thrillers, and yes, even in big silly action movies.

 

And you can see that it’s this simple Game of the Scene technique that provides the entire structure of Peter Parker’s journey.

 

In movies, the-game-of-the scene can be found pretty easily. All you have to know is what the character wants, and then all you have to do is keep making it harder and harder and harder and harder, harder and harder and harder and harder.

 

All that Peter Parker wants is to be part of the Avengers.

 

So all you have to do is make it hard--  because Happy won’t take him seriously, because Tony Stark won’t take him seriously, because his friends at school won’t take him seriously, because he has to keep on disappointing the girl that he is madly in love with in order to run off and do superhero stuff...

 

All you have to do is take that one want and make it harder and harder and harder and suddenly The Game of the Scene will emerge-- so long as the character keeps on going for what they want.

 

In fact, you can see that this same technique is used to build the journeys of all the characters in Spider-Man: Homecoming.  

 

The same simple Game of the Scene. Finding the one thing the character wants more than anything, and then making it harder and harder and harder for them to get it, so that they have to make bigger and bigger choices that reveal more and more of who they really are, and who they really can be.

 

One of the reasons Iron Man is so wonderful-- one of the reasons Tony Stark is so wonderful-- in Spider-Man: Homecoming is that Tony Stark, in this movie, decides he wants to be a father. And of course what makes it hard is that Tony Stark is terrible at being a father.

 

 

What makes it hard is that all of his lessons go wrong, what makes it wrong is that all of his instincts take him to the wrong place. There is even a wonderful moment where he realizes, “Oh my god, I sound like my father!”

 

And you can see that even though Tony Stark is a big rich powerful superhero, The Game of the Scene is actually rooted in his mundane world, in a world that we understand-- the grueling real life desire to be a dad and not being sure if you are good at it.

 

And this is what makes the resolution of the story-- when Peter makes his choice-- so satisfying!

 

Because we can feel Tony Stark’s journey as well.

 

Similarly with Peter Parker’s unforgettable best friend and sidekick, Ned-- we know exactly what Ned wants.

 

All Ned wants is to be the guy in the chair, to be the backend support for Spider-Man the superhero.

 

And sure, he has some really messed up ideas about how Peter should deal with being a superhero. (Ned is absolutely convinced that Peter should tell everybody who he really is so that they will finally think he is cool and so he can finally get the girl. And that conflict creates a ton of fun but also creates a ton of conflict for Peter.)

 

But the real structure of Ned’s story is just a simple desire to be the guy in the chair.

 

And that is what makes the moment when he gets to be the guy in the chair so much darn fun!

 

May—all that May wants is for Peter to talk to her.

 

And she is going to try every strategy that she’s got because she knows something is going on. She knows he is sneaking out of the house, she knows he is not sharing things with her, she knows something is wrong, she knows that he is ditching the things that are important to him in school.

 

 

She is trying patience, she is trying jokes, she is trying confrontation, she is trying everything she knows to find out what’s really going on-- which is what makes May’s final moment in the movie so much fun for the audience.

 

We can feel her journey.

Liz, the love interest, also has a very clear want. And what is so much fun about her want is that, if only Peter knew, it would make his whole life so much easier! Because all Liz wants... is Peter.

 

...

"...one of the cool things about movies and one of the cool things about life is that pretty much everybody in the world thinks that they are the hero and that other people are the bad guys.

And that means that if we want to learn to write bad guys, we need to learn to step into their shoes, and see the world through their eyes-- to empathize with the people that we hate the most, the people that we don’t understand, the people that we think are horrible.

There are people who I might feel exist only to antagonize me; there are people who might drive me crazy. But the truth of the matter is, if I stepped in and saw the universe through their eyes, they don’t think of themselves as the antagonist. They think of themselves as the hero...”

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By, Jacob Krueger

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 Spider-Man Homecoming: How To Write a Great Antagonist

 

Hello, I am Jacob Krueger and this is The Write Your Screenplay Podcast. On this podcast, rather than looking at movies in terms of “two thumbs up, two thumbs down, loved it or hated it,” we look at them in terms of what we can learn from them as screenwriters. We look at good movies and bad movies, movies that we loved and movies that we hated.

 

This week, we are going to be talking about Spider-Man: Homecoming which is a surprisingly successful film compared to the others in this franchise. And what is nice is that this film doesn’t just succeed based on its fabulous action sequences or the wonderful actors involved in the production. This movie also succeeds because of its script.

 

So, let’s talk about what makes this script so darn successful. And to do that we have to begin with a discussion about Antagonists.

How do you write a great Antagonist?

 

If you’ve studied screenwriting with me, you know that I don’t actually like the word Antagonist. The reason I don’t like the word Antagonist is because it suggests something that isn't true in the universe: the idea that there is supposed to be a character in your screenplay that exists only to antagonize the main character.

 

 

 

Whenever I am thinking about film, I like to look at my life and think, “Okay, if it happens in my life, it can happen in a movie. And if it doesn’t happen in my life it can’t happen in a movie.”

 

And that doesn’t mean that my movies all have to be naturalistic films, Spider-Man: Homecoming certainly isn't a naturalistic film in any way and it is hugely successful.

 

What it means is that emotionally it needs to be true-- it means that what happens in the movie needs to grow out of an exaggeration of, or a reaction to, or a metaphor for, or an expression of something that is true about the universe.

 

Because, once we get into the world where we aren’t writing an expression of something that is true about our universe-- once we are in that kind of fiction, the fiction that doesn’t come out of our life experience-- it is only natural that our movies are going to ring false.

 

And if you’ve seen some of the other films in the Spider-Man franchise, and other big budget action movie franchise films, you can feel the effects of that untruth, when the events of the story and the reality—the emotional reality-- of life stop matching up.

 

Despite all of its wild, high-stakes action and magic, what really makes Spider-Man: Homecoming succeed is its more grounded elements.

Even its title, Spider-Man: Homecoming, is a pun that recognizes this truth on many levels.

 

In part, it is about Peter Parker returning home after his foray with the Avengers and trying to go back to a real life.

 

In a nudge-nudge, wink-wink way, it’s about a Homecoming for Spider-Man, back to his Marvel universe roots after his lonely sojourn with Sony.

 

But it is also a movie about the homecoming dance which is really the most important thing in Spider-Man’s real world life at this time.

 

It takes a lot of courage as a writer to write an action movie that is really set around a homecoming dance. It takes a lot of courage as a writer to realize that the real source of the story isn't going to grow from the big, larger than life relationships, but from the mundane ones—the ones that look like our own lives.

So, how does this relate to Antagonists?

 

I don’t like the word antagonist because antagonist makes us think that there is someone whose job is to antagonize you.

 

And if I look at my own life, here’s the truth: there is nobody in my life whose job is to antagonize me!

 

There are people who I might feel exist only to antagonize me; there are people who might drive me crazy. But the truth of the matter is, if I stepped in and saw the universe through their eyes, they don’t think of themselves as the antagonist. They think of themselves as the hero.”

 

One of the cool things about movies and one of the cool things about life is that pretty much everybody in the world thinks that they are the hero and that other people are the bad guys.

 

And that means that if we want to learn to write bad guys, we need to learn to step into their shoes, and see the world through their eyes-- to empathize with the people that we hate the most, the people that we don’t understand, the people that we think are horrible.

 

 

There is a wonderful moment in which Peter Parker talks about the Antagonist in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Adrian Toomes (which is so wonderfully played by Michael Keaton) as a psychopath in a Vulture costume.

 

But even Peter Parker is making the mistake of dismissing the real psychology of the antagonist. And when we do that, we, just like Peter Parker, lose track of what our own stories are really about.

 

We not only miss out on writing antagonists who are fully formed and real, we also end up losing out on the political side-- the socio-political side of our story-- we lose out on telling a story that actually says something about our society and our world.

 

If you compare Spider-Man: Homecoming to the Captain America: Civil War movie from which it’s spawned (here’s a link to my Captain America: Civil War Podcast), you can see the difference between rooting characters in real actions based on their real views of the world, and manipulating characters into fight sequences based on psychology that doesn’t really exist in the world.

 

So, it is important to examine how we think about antagonists. How we think about the people we might perceive as antagonists in our own lives, and how we think about the antagonists in our movies.

It is important that we remember that every antagonist thinks that he is the good guy.

 

If you look at Star Wars through Darth Vader’s perspective, Star Wars isn’t the story of Luke Skywalker saving the galaxy.

 

Star Wars is the story of a good man who lost 90% of his body trying to fight the good fight and do his job, whose only desire is to peacefully rule the galaxy with his son.

 

For Darth Vader, the antagonist is Obi-Wan Kenobi, this terrorist outlaw who has kidnapped his kids, corrupted them with religious indoctrination, turned them against their own father and now recruited them to the same radical terrorist rebel movement that threatens to destroy everything Darth Vader and the Emperor have built.

 

Do you know how much money, and time and effort it costs to build a Death Star? Do you know how many people die when you blow up a Death Star?

From Darth Vader’s perspective, he is the good guy and the rebels are the terrorists.

 

Just as from the rebel’s perspective they are the good guys and Darth Vader is the terrorist.

 

To write any character well, what we really need isn't judgment but empathy.

 

And this is important when we write our good guy characters too.

 

If you’ve ever adapted a true-life story, or if you’ve ever spent a lot of time with a character, one of the things that starts to happen is you start to fall out of love with them.

 

Just like in any relationship, you start to see the bad sides of their personality, their contradictions, their mundane qualities, the things that don’t fit your vision of them.

 

And one of the tricks that you need to develop as a writer is learn how to step back inside of their point of view. Because, as we talked about in last week’s podcast, really all we are trying to do as writers is to see, hear and feel everything.

 

We’re not just trying to see, hear and feel them in our own heads but to see, hear and feel everything through the point of view of our characters. And not just our main characters, but also our secondary characters, even our tiny little characters!

 

We want to understand the world through their point of view.

We want to understand that in Spider-Man: Homecoming when Zendaya’s character, Michelle, is in a scene, she thinks that scene is about her!

 

When the nasty bully Flash is in a scene, he thinks that scene is about him. Just as Tony Stark thinks the scene is about him. Just as Happy Hogan thinks the scene is about him. Just as Marisa Tomei’s character May Parker thinks the story is about Aunt May.

 

Every character thinks that they are the hero!

 

And what that means is that every character enters the scene with a really strong desire.

 

So in this Spider-Man podcast, let’s start not breaking down the structure with Peter Parker. Let’s not start with the main character like we usually do when we’re building a movie.

Let’s start with the Antagonist. Let’s start with Michael Keaton. Let’s start with Adrian Toome. Let’s start with the Vulture.

 

Like any great character, Adrian starts the film with a really simple desire. A really clear priority. Or to use acting terms, a really clear super-objective that governs all of his actions.

 

There is here is only one thing Adrian Toomes wants in the universe: he wants to provide for his family.

 

Michael Keaton is working to clean up the mess left from the end of the Avengers movie when all the alien weaponry was left in the wreckage of New York City. He is trying to do a good job. He is trying to build a good life for his family. He is trying to build a good life for the families of the people who work for him.

 

And yeah, he is a tough guy with a tough temper. But mostly, he is just a man trying to do the right thing.

 

Tony Stark, when he creates the Department of Damage Control,...

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By, Jacob Krueger

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The Craft of Screenwriting: See, Hear and Feel Everything

 

In last week’s podcast, we discussed the many differences between playwriting and screenwriting. So this week we’re going to be getting deeper into the craft of screenwriting: what it takes to write a script that succeeds on the page.

 

As we discussed last week, writing a screenplay often takes more rewriting time than writing a play.

 

And a big reason is that while most of a play exists in dialogue and develops over rehearsals and workshops, successful screenplays must exist in a far more more finished form on the page.

 

Technically, so much of rewriting for playwrights takes place during production in the rehearsal process. Whereas most of rewriting a screenplay is going to take place before your movie is even sold or greenlit.

 

And unlike literary managers at theatres, who are often MFA or PhD graduates with a love of literature, degrees in theatre and a deep understanding of how plays funcion on the page, most screenplays are read by coverage readers, or interns, who not only often have no training at all in how to read a screenplay, but at best are probably skimming your work for $50 bucks a script.

 

Which means that to succeed as a screenwriter, you must do more than create a blueprint for success. You must in fact create a screenplay that fully demonstrates the experience of your movie for even the least trained reader-- that transports them from reading to seeing, and plays effortlessly in the little movie screen in their mind, so that they can see, feel and hear everything, just like if they were watching the film.

 

So that is just something you need to accept; in order to bring your screenplay to that level you are going to need to do more rewrites.

 

 

 

The good news is that the same rigor that you must bring to your craft in order to have commercial success as a screenwriter will also build you creatively as an artist.

 

In order for your reader to see, hear and feel everything, you are going to have to see, hear and feel everything yourself!

 

That means developing both your art and your craft as a screenwriter. First learning to step into each character and fully visualize each scene as an artist, and then developing the craft you need to translate what you see, hear and feel into a form that others can easily understand.

 

There is a different balance that all writers need to strike, about how slowly you’re going to work through your script, or how quickly, how much time you’re going to spend writing and how much rewriting.

 

Last week we discussed the example of a line of screenplay action like “Mary is writing… ”

 

We discussed how that might seem like proper screenplay action, but in fact, is not. Because it reveals nothing about Mary’s character, or what we’re actually seeing on the screen.

 

Rather than forcing us to get creative as screenwriters, a line like “Mary is writing” lets us of the hook creatively, and instead asks our reader to do our job- the creative act of making it look cool in their own head-- a creative act that they are little prepared to do.

 

For screenplay action to function properly, you have to capture it in a way that allows the reader to visualize it instantly in the movie screen in their mind, and tell themselves the story of your movie, your character, your character’s journey.

 

 

As we discussed last week, you might see “Mary’s cracked fingernails click the keyboard.” Or you might see “Mary’s bejeweled hand signs a letter with a golden fountain pen.” Completely different versions of “Mary is Writing.” And each version reveals a completely different version of who Mary is, and what Mary wants, and what direction Mary’s journey will take.

 

So this is different for every writer. But the most important thing whenever you are writing is this:

 

As a screenwriter, you need to see, hear and feel everything.

 

And this is really the hardest part, because we have this urge to finish. And that urge to finish makes it really hard to actually see, hear and feel everything.

 

We want to put a band aid on it.

 

If you’ve ever had a fight with a loved one, you have probably had the same urge, “I want the fight to end.” And the desire for the fight to end doesn’t allow you to actually see, hear and feel what is actually going on. So you just keep glossing over it.

 

And what happens is our little A.D.D. minds want us to escape, “okay over here…no, no, look over here, no, no, no look over here.” Because the other thing about seeing, hearing and feeling everything is it is scary. It is hard and it is scary.

 

It is hard because it requires a tremendous amount of focus, and it isn't a tool that we are used to using, especially our A.D.D world, where we are used to stimuli coming from all over the place and constantly multitasking. It takes certain stillness in the mind, a certain kind of meditation practice to actually do this: to see, hear and feel everything.

 

But the other thing is that when you start to pay attention, emotional stuff comes up.

 

So there is a first part that is just the practice, building the practice of being able to maintain your attention. And then there is the other part which is, eventually your characters are going to show you everything you don’t like about yourself.

 

 

They will also show you everything that you love about yourself, everything that is beautiful about you; they will show you things that are beautiful about you that you don’t even know yet.

 

But they are also going to show you all the stuff that you don’t like.

 

And when you see that stuff that you don’t like about yourself, it is tough. It is emotional and those emotions are going to come up in intense ways.

 

And then there is another thing that comes up when you try to do this, which is a feeling of frustration: “I can’t see it! I can’t see it clearly enough yet, I don’t know it yet...”

 

And another type of frustration which is: “I see it clearly but I can’t get it onto the page in the way that is the way I see it!”

 

And then there is another level of frustration: “I got it on the page the way I see it, but what if it isn't good? What if nobody else likes it? What if it isn't specific enough? What if it is cliché? What if it is boring?”

 

There are all these of roadblocks in our way around this practice. So, how do you approach it?

 

There are a couple of different ways, and like with anything in screenwriting, or in life, finding the path that you should take begins with your goal.

 

If you don’t know what your goal is, it is going to be very hard to know how to handle these obstacles. But these obstacles are only important in relation to your goal.

 

So, for example, if your goal is to finish, for most people this is the wrong goal. For most people it is the wrong goal in life, and the wrong goal in screenwriting. And I say for most people; it isn't for all people.

 

If your deadline is tomorrow, your goal should be to finish. If you are a person who never finishes anything, your goal should be to finish. It is more important to be finished than good if you have trouble finishing.

 

For most people the urge to finish is not because they never finish anything and it is not because they have a deadline; it is because they don’t want to do the hard work of seeing, feeling, hearing everything-the emotional work of actually dealing with the problems in their script.

 

If you went to see Yo-Yo Ma at Carnegie Hall and Yo-Yo was just like, “I just got to get to the end of this performance” as he played, it probably wouldn’t give you a very good experience. You’d probably feel a little ripped off.

 

And yet so many writers hope that they can rush to the end of their screenplay and somehow get that big financial payoff, that big Academy Award, that big boost in their career or change in their life. Somehow imagining that no one is going to notice their rushed performance because the idea is good or the talent is there.

 

 

When the truth is, we work in an incredibly competitive industry, and there are a lot of writers out there who are actually doing that Carnegie Hall level work. And the difference between reading their writing, and the writing of a writer who is rushing to finish is completely unmistakeable.

 

If you want to get to where you’re going, you’ve got to concentrate on being where you are.

 

If you rush your early stuff to get to the finish, here’s what is going to happen: No one is going to read to the finish.

 

You are going to have this great ending that nobody gets to, because your early stuff wasn’t really working.

 

If your beginning doesn’t grab the reader from the very first page and make them see, feel and hear the story in your head, for all intents and purposes, your ending doesn’t exist.

 

Because nobody is going to read it.

 

They’re going to stop reading in the first 10 pages, during all your boring setup.

 

So, if your goal is to finish, you want to ask yourself, why is my goal to finish? If you goal is to finish, you want to ask yourself, am I rushing or is this a real need?

 

One of the ways that I deal with this for myself is to set deadlines for everything.

 

I love deadlines. Because deadlines let me know when I have time and when I need to rush.

 

But for these deadlines to work they have to be reasonable d

"... As a screenwriter, you need to see, hear and feel everything.

And this is really the hardest part, because we have this urge to finish. And that urge to finish makes it really hard to actually see, hear and feel everything.

We want to put a band aid on it.

If you’ve ever had a fight with a loved one, you have probably had the same urge, “I want the fight to end.” And the desire for the fight to end doesn’t allow you to actually see, hear and feel what is actually going on. So you just keep glossing over it.

And what happens is our little A.D.D. minds want us to escape, “okay over here…no, no, look over here, no, no, no look over here.” Because the other thing about seeing, hearing and feeling everything is it is scary. It is hard and it is scary..."

"...The process of writing a screenplay is different from writing a play in many essential ways. The first is the difference in the use of action.

For screenwriters, action is the primary tool of structure. But for playwrights, the primary tool is dialogue.

Don’t get me wrong. As a playwright, you need to visualize to some degree what is happening on the stage in order to really create your dialogue, in order to create the piece. But you don’t have to communicate that to anybody else. People don’t need to see your play in their mind like they do when reading a screenplay; they need to hear it, and they need to see the big elements.

You get to rely on the director, because plays have this thing called rehearsals.

It is crazy that rehearsals, for the most part, don’t exist in filmmaking. Even though some of the really great film directors do rehearse-- for example Francis Ford Coppola had a history of bringing the cast up to his estate to rehearse-- most film directors don’t rehearse at all.

That’s for a very simple reason: stars cost about $20 million bucks..."

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By, Jacob Krueger

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What makes writing a screenplay so much different from writing a play?

Transcript From Podcast:

 

The process of writing a screenplay is different from writing a play in many essential ways. The first is the difference in the use of action.

 

For screenwriters, action is the primary tool of structure. But for playwrights, the primary tool is dialogue.

 

Don’t get me wrong. As a playwright, you need to visualize to some degree what is happening on the stage in order to really create your dialogue, in order to create the piece. But you don’t have to communicate that to anybody else. People don’t need to see your play in their mind like they do when reading a screenplay; they need to hear it, and they need to see the big elements.

 

You get to rely on the director, because plays have this thing called rehearsals.

 

It is crazy that rehearsals, for the most part, don’t exist in filmmaking. Even though some of the really great film directors do rehearse-- for example Francis Ford Coppola had a history of bringing the cast up to his estate to rehearse-- most film directors don’t rehearse at all.

 

That’s for a very simple reason: stars cost about $20 million bucks, and who has that kind of money to spend on rehearsal?

 

So you end up in this very weird process where not only you are going to have no rehearsal, but also you are going to shoot all your scenes out of order. So you aren’t even going to have a continuity of knowing “this, leads to this and then this leads to this and then this leads to this…” as you shoot your film. So it becomes much harder to track the structure from scene to scene as you shoot, as you could if you were rehearsing a play.

 

Writing a play can take place on a much more intuitive level, because you don’t have to communicate what you’re seeing to anybody else beyond just the very basics. But for a screenplay you need a much more substantial infrastructure.

 

The second element that makes playwriting so different from screenwriting is that plays have fewer moving pieces than screenplays.

 

Screenplays have way too many moving pieces! And this is actually part of what led me to create Seven Act Structure for myself.

 

When I was a playwright, I didn’t need any way of consciously dealing with structure, because intuitively I am pretty good at structure. So, when I was a playwright I didn’t think about things like “Okay what is going to be the big turn or the big structural choice here?” I just got to dig in.

 

As a playwright, I always thought of writing like peeling the layers of an onion. I want to meet some people who want some stuff, and as they try to get the stuff that they want, slowly I am going to get to know who they really are and what they really want. Slowly they are going to reveal themselves to me, and to themselves, and to each other over the course of the play. And that is a very intuitive process; it is like getting to know someone. It’s the same thing that you do every day when you connect with someone… You meet somebody you think, “Oh they are cool!” So, you hang out.

You think you know who they are, then you start to learn things as you both pursue what you want in the relationship-- you start to learn who they really are, and who you really are with them, and who you both really are in relation to each other. And changes start to happen; sometimes they are beautiful changes, and sometimes they are catastrophic changes and usually they are both.

 

So that is a very intuitive process and it is one of the reasons we are able to channel it faster as playwrights.

The third thing about plays that is very different from screenplays is that playwriting audiences, theatre audiences, are much more comfortable with metaphor than filmmaking audiences.

 

And this is changing a little bit. For example, we saw magical realism in Narcos, we have real world human beings with surrealistic animal elements in Bojack Horseman, and even the new Wonder Woman, which most people certainly wouldn’t consider expressionistic in any way, has a character who exists for metaphorical, rather than plot driven reasons: a Native American character who randomly shows up at the German Front during World War 2.

 

 

He is there for a metaphorical reason. The metaphorical reason is, as we discussed fully in last week’s Wonder Woman Podcast, that the film is really an exploration of war, a look underneath the fundamental assumptions of most action movies: a movie that raises the question are people actually good?

 

Wonder Woman’s love interest in the film is an American spy, Steve. And, of course, as an American in a Hollywood movie, in relation to this theme, of course this character is the most fundamentally good among all the wacky good guy sidekicks.

 

And so they show up at the German front, and there’s a random Native American that joins the team. And one of the characters asks him the same damn thing that we’re asking-- “Why the hell are you here?”

 

And here’s his answer: “Well somebody took my land.” “Who took your land?” “That guy - the good guy? His people.” Which, is pretty impressive for a mainstream action movie-- and starts to deepen the theme, and deepen the question at the center of the movie-- that fundamental assumption of all action movies that we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys-- and that all we have to do to make a better world is find a way for the good guys to win.

 

In a play you just have the Native American show up. You just let him serve his metaphorical purpose. You don’t have to explain “Well I am also here for the money…. you see... well, there is nothing left for me in the United States…,” you don’t have to explain him, he is just there.

 

So this is the other difference-- the different level of tolerance for metaphor versus pragmatic content in plays and screenplays.

 

And this is just because screenwriting is a newer art form; playwriting has been around forever, and when it started off, it wasn’t all that metaphorical.

 

When they started off it wasn’t Theatre of the Absurd, it wasn’t Expressionism, it was- “all right let’s tell a bunch of stories-- and it is always going to be the same formula; there is going to be a good person, they are going to commit an act of hubris, and eventually through that act of hubris they are going to try to escape their fate, and eventually that hubris is going to lead everyone to die or suffer horribly.”

 

 

No matter what, the fate is going to happen. Like a Three Act Structure or Save The Cat! it is just a formula. Back from when theatre was young.

 

And then what happened was, over time, people saw play after play after play... and they started to realize, “this is frickin’ boring!”

 

It isn't that the plays are boring, but the same thing again and again is boring. And over time, new movements came up and theatre evolved, just as we’re seeing film-- even big action movies-- start to evolve now.

 

And as a result, people who see theatre are much more comfortable with the idea that weird stuff is going to happen on stage. In filmmaking, in the middle of a giant fight scene, you can have like a really funny quip, or you can kill somebody’s father, and they are sad for two seconds, and then we are on to the next scene and it is a love scene. Or you can jump off a building and land by catching with your pinky and we are comfortable with that.

 

We are used to that kind of expressionistic stuff in action movies-- “this is what it feels like to be an awesome action hero” versus, “this is what it actually looks like to be an action hero.”

 

So, most audiences are comfortable with that level of expressionism, but most audiences aren’t that comfortable yet with metaphor.

 

What this means is that in theatre, you can translate your instincts in a different way from the way you translate them in film.

In theatre, the line between dreams-- your interior world, your impulse, what it feels like to you, the random image that popped up into your mind-- and what makes it into the final draft is a much thinner line.

 

And that means, plain and simple, that screenplays often require more rewriting than plays do.

 

Part of the reason for that is, to some degree, theatre always looks fake, whereas most movies-- with the exception of art films like Where the Wild Things Are-- the adaptation of the children’s book that was actually purposely made to look fake-- that was made to look the way a child might imagine the place where the Wild Things are, as opposed to how a brilliant CGI artist would imagine it…

 

 

But with the exception of films like these, especially in the non-animated world, we haven't really seen a lot of movies that purposely try to look fake. Even our animation is moving more towards looking real.

 

In theatre, you can’t look real.

 

In theatre, people are very, very, very aware that there is a stage and there are actors up there. And if you do accomplish something that looks real, you will get applause, because people are so consciously aware of what it took! “Oh my god, how did they do that?”

 

A couple of years ago I took my niece Mia to see Mary Poppins on Broadway, which is one of the worst adaptation of a great film that has ever, ever, ever occurred.

But it was one of my proudest moments as an Uncle. She was so young; this is her first play, she was maybe five years old. And halfway through the play she looks at me and she says, “This is boring to Mia.”

 

The reason it was boring to Mia-- well first off, structurally, they took the story out! So,...