Write Your Screenplay Podcast

Jake's latest Write Your Screenplay podcast on the film by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

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Part 2 - Captain America Civil War: How to Build the Superhero Movie

By Jacob Krueger

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In the last installment of this podcast, we discussed the engine that drives a superhero movie, and the challenges for writers of action and superhero spec scripts, of juggling the need to build that kind of engine, with the goal of organically introducing a new superhero into the world in a way that allows the audience to fall in love with them.

 

That begins with not only looking at the character’s superpowers, but also at their weaknesses. And it also means a real personal exploration of the beliefs in you that those superheroes represent: the way you, as a writer look at the world.

 

And of course, the same concept applies to character driven dramas, indie films, biopics, and true-life story adaptations as well. So often, we fall so deeply in love with our own characters that we’re not willing to look at their weaknesses.  We allow them to find themselves so quickly that we have no room to develop the structure of their story. We turn them into superheroes, and then can’t figure out why it’s so hard to construct a powerful structure for their change.

 

Oftentimes this is because we see a bit of ourselves in our main characters, and rather than looking deeply at ourselves, and our problems, as people who need to change, we instead inadvertently turn our characters into the infallible heroes we wish we could be. Rather than shaping their own stories through their flawed and painful choices, they become victims of circumstances, just like we often feel ourselves to be, puppeted around by the external maneuverings of our plot rather than the visceral emotional needs that drive them. Rather than driving the story, they end up being driven by it.

 

To write a movie that turns an unknown character into someone that feels like a real hero, you need to write a character that people are going to connect to on a primal, visceral, personal level. You have to create a structure that uncovers their flaws.  And you need to take that character on a journey that changes them, and hopefully that changes the audience that connects to them, forever.

 

To give shape to that journey, and make it more than just a bunch of plot wrangling and external manipulation, you need to think about theme. You need to think about truth: what this is really about. You need to be writing from your soul because you need to connect to other people’s souls. You need to make them fall in love with your character and you need to do it in a way that's going to deliver a specific genre experience, the genre experience that you want to see on screen.

 

You have to think about the feeling the movie delivers, the feeling that draws you to the story. What’s the specific nature and tone of your story, and how is that reflected in the action sequences? An action sequence in Deadpool should feel different than one in Spiderman or Batman. And the action sequences in your movie should feel so inextricably linked to character and theme that they couldn’t be switched out to any other movie.

 

If you think of Captain America: Civil War, there is a kick-ass action sequence every couple of pages. And you’ll need to deliver that too, feeding the main thing the audience is coming from in a way that delivers both spectacle and structure, outdoing yourself with each salvo, and building towards a climactic explosion like the culmination of a big fireworks show on the 4th of July.

 

And finally, you’ll need to deliver the engine, Your own unique formula,

Part 2 of the Captain America Civil War podcast dives into emotional vs. logical or political motives and how stronger emotional triggers could have made audiences feel fulfilled vs. entertained.

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Captain America Civil War: How to Build the Superhero Movie - Part 1

By Jacob Krueger

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This week we’ll be looking at Captain America: Civil War by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

 

It's interesting to talk about superhero movies because there’s been a big change in the way these movies are built. One of the things that we’re starting to see is that superhero movies, just like other big budget action movies, are actually being built more like TV Drama Series than they are like Feature Films.

 

Just like TV Dramas (and TV Comedies), rather than being built around a traditional character driven structure, these huge budget superhero and action movies are built around a concept called an engine.

 

In a TV Series, the engine is a kind of unique formula, developed by the writers, that guarantees that the series can run for a very long time, creating the same feeling in each episode in a slightly different way.

 

In these mega-budget franchises, the engine works similarly, allowing each “episode” to set up the next. A byproduct of this effect is that an individual action movie is no longer designed to create a cathartic effect that leaves the audience with a sense of completion. Rather, it is designed to leave the audience craving more, with untied strings in each installment setting up the next episode in the franchise, which will once again replicate the same engine in a different way.

 

As I’ve discussed in my TV Podcasts, this is exactly the way a TV drama series would be built. If you think of a series like Breaking Bad, for example, each episode is built around the same engine.

 

In each episode, we are going to watch the same kind of thing happen in a different way. In Breaking Bad, we’re going to watch Walter White grow just a little bit more corrupt. We’re going to watch Walter White manipulate his adoring former student Jamie into compromising his own morals. We’re going to watch Walter White get further estranged from his wife. We’re going to watch Walter White lie. We’re going to watch Walter White slowly move from the reluctant criminal to a man who has to recognize the fact that he loves crime.

 

And over each season we’re going to watch Walter and Jamie confronted with a different aspect of building a business, starting with being a start-up dealing with a low level crazy street thug antagonist, and moving up to deal with the cartel and ultimately to deal with corporate America as their business grows to a different level in each season.

 

So the idea is, once you have an engine, you know what the audience is coming for. And all you have to do to generate ideas is to figure out how to reshuffle the same cards, so that the engine can be replicated in each installment.

 

And this is exactly what we see in Captain America: Civil War. A very simple engine, based on very simple formula that The Avengers actually came up with quite a while ago. A formula they came up with for a really good reason.

 

You see, writing superhero movies is really frickin’ hard. It’s nearly impossible. And the reason it’s nearly impossible to write a good superhero movie is that superheroes are, well, super. They are pretty much all powerful. And most of them, not all of them, but most of them, are pretty much all good.

 

So you’ve got good people with indestructible powers doing indestructible things. In the beginning of the Ironman franchise they figured out pretty quickly if you want to write Iron Man, you’ve got to get him out of his suit.

Building the franchise engine and finding the formula in comic book movies.

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Everybody Wants Some: Structure Without Structure - Part 2

By Jacob Krueger

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In Part 1 of this podcast, we discussed the structural elements that allow Everybody Wants Some to overcome the challenges of its meandering plot and nearly total subversion of every rule of screenwriting. But there are other reasons, beyond structure, Everybody Wants Some succeeds, in spite of its complete disregard for the rules. And whether you’re a traditional Hollywood writer, or a rule defying auteur like Richard Linklater, they’re concepts you can use to great effect in your own writing.

 

As we discussed, the first thing that makes Everybody Wants Some succeed is that the characters all want something: everybody wants some.

 

The second thing that makes Everybody Wants Some work is the specificity of the approach Linklater takes to every moment we spend with each of these characters. From the first moment we meet these characters, there is no detail unobserved in this film. There is no detail unobserved in who these characters are. Linklater locks in each character from the very first moment, using a powerful screenwriting technique called Vignettes. If you’ve taken my screenwriting classes, you know how vital Vignettes are when introducing characters, and how they can become the organic building blocks of structure as you discover your character’s journey. So as you watch Everybody Wants Some or reflect on it if you’ve already seen it, notice how each of these characters is introduced with a Vignette: an action, a choice, a decision, something they do that is so specifically them, that it locks them in our minds forever. And this is why Linklater is able to get away with this cast of dozens, and let us feel like we know each and every one of them.

 

If you listened to my podcast on Inside Out, you probably remember me talking about how a team of therapists had been consulted on the development of the script, and were upset that all the many, many, many different core emotions they had identified for the writers had been boiled down to only five. And this brilliant guy at Pixar pointed out that there is no way we can serve 21 or 17 or 30 different emotions. We’ve got to’ boil it down to five. We can serve about five characters well. And that is the rule; that's what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to boil it down to five main characters, one main character at the center of all that, because that's all we’re supposed to be able to do. And yet, here's a movie with at least a dozen major characters and we feel like we know every single one of them. In fact we could never confuse one for another, not even the little ones who barely have a role. And that all begins with Vignettes. That begins by letting your character do something in a way that demonstrates a unique “how,” something about them that is just different from everybody else. Once you create that first Vignette, it becomes so easy to write the character, because all you have to do the next time we meet them is ask yourself a very simple question:

 

Are they doing something similar, or something very different from what they did the last time we met them?

 

In this way, we start to reveal the patterns about the characters. We start to reveal the dominant trait of the characters, who they really are. And, we start to appreciate if and how the characters start to change.

 

And this is the next rule that Everybody Wants Some breaks. None of these characters seem to change at all. These characters are who they are from beginning to end. So why does it work?

 

Well,

A look at Richard Linklater's latest film and what screenwriters can learn from its unconventional story structure - Part 2!

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Everybody Wants Some: Structure Without Structure - Part 1

By Jacob Krueger

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This week we’re going to be looking at Richard Linklater's new film Everybody Wants Some. Richard Linklater has called this film a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused. He has also referred to it as a sequel to Boyhood, his brilliantly structured (although very unusually structured) film, which basically ends right before this film begins: at the end of boyhood and the beginning of college.

 

Everybody Wants Some picks up the baton where Boyhood left off, and centers around a freshman baseball player who is just starting college in the days leading up to the first day of classes. And though the main character may be different from the character in Boyhood, and though the structure may be different than the structure of Boyhood, confined to a few days, rather than evolving over many years, Linklater is once again building a sprawling, multi-character journey around young kid in a different kind of family, at defining point of discovering his identity and what gives meaning in his life.

 

But the question remains: does Everybody Wants Some actually work?

 

Because Everybody Wants Some basically does nothing that a movie is supposed to do. It has virtually no plot. In fact, most of the film is simply spent watching a bunch of bros hang out. It’s built mostly around dialogue, much like a play, rather than the action and images we’re used to seeing as the primary building blocks of structure in movies. It kind-of has a discernible main character (it certainly seems to center around Jake) but the truth of the matter is, Jake doesn't really drive most of the action.

 

In fact, most of the structure isn't really driven at all in the way we traditionally expect, with one character chasing a particularly challenging goal against increasingly difficult obstacles. Instead, it's driven by random events like, “Let's go dancing,” “Let's go to baseball practice,” “Let's pick up some chicks.” Which feels a hell of a lot like the free-flowing structure of any respectable drunken freshman’s introduction to college, but not much like the version of that story we’re used to seeing in a movie.

 

The overall effect is that we’re watching (and for many people, enjoying) a film that seems to have very little structure at all. And this is not because Richard Linklater can't do structure. Because if you've seen Boyhood, you've seen a film that survives upon its rock solid structure as it jumps from year to year to year in a young boy’s life.

 

It's because Richard Linklater is doing a different kind of structure: he's doing a movie that feels like its area of exploration: a meditation on what it means to find meaning.

 

The traditional engines of structure are powered by characters pursuing strong wants against huge obstacles, conflicts that build through hot relationships, tightening the vice on your characters until things get harder and harder and harder and finally things explode.

 

Well this movie just doesn't do that. Instead what this movie does is this: it looks at a bunch of kids, and not the kids we want to look at: not the amazingly sweet and innocent boy of Boyhood, and not the cool hippies of Dazed and Confused, but a bunch of bros. A bunch of overly cocksure, baseball playing, chauvinistic jocks. We’re hanging out with a bunch of frat bros. And as we follow these frat bros, we’re gonna go on a journey that is not driven by plot and not dr...

A look at Richard Linklater's latest film and what screenwriters can learn from its unconventional story structure.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: WTF is Wrong with WTF?

By Jacob Krueger

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If you go to see Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, you’re going to have a very mixed experience. There are elements of this movie that are truly beautiful, and then there are elements that are just so incredibly dissatisfying. So WTF is wrong with WTF? Why did a movie with such a stellar cast and compelling concept fall so flat both critically and at the box office? And what can you learn from Whiskey Tango Foxtrot about your own writing?

 

Every movie makes a promise to its audience.  If you deliver on that promise, you can get away with almost anything. But if you make that promise and you fail to deliver, the audience is going to eat you alive. And that's very much what happened with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

 

 

When you see the trailer for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and you see Tina Fey, the first thing you assume is you’re going to laugh your ass off for an hour and a half. As you know if you’ve seen the trailer, there’s a reason for this. The trailer excerpts only the very funniest moments of this film. But the truth of the matter is, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is barely a comedy. It's primarily a character-driven story about a copy editor who becomes an in-front-of-the-camera embedded journalist in Afghanistan.

 

Now, the idea of doing a funny Tina Fey movie about the war in Afghanistan is a brilliant premise, and once you bring that premise to the table, it is really hard to back away from it. It’s like giving kids a bunch of ice cream and then trying to get them to eat their vegetables. And, to some degree, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is certainly trying to deliver on that premise; there is an Alfred Molina character who's trying just as hard as he can to be funny, and there are some really funny moments in the piece. But the things that actually work best in the screenplay are not the comedic elements; they’re the dramatic ones.

 

At its core, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is actually a romance. And it's a very beautifully drawn romance. The script is just not fully cooked yet. As happens all too often, both in Hollywood and in indie film and even in student films, they shot it one draft too soon.

 

So what would a finished version of this script look like? To understand that, we need to look at the screenplay as if we were considering it for a rewrite...

 

At the center of the script, and at the center of the romance is a relationship between Tina Fey's character, Kim, and her Afghani translator, Fahim, who’s played by Christopher Abbott. And the scenes between Kim and Fahim are actually some of the most well written in the movie.

 

Fahim is Kim’s translator, an Afghani man who is engaged to be married to an Afghani woman, and whose culture does not even permit him to touch a woman like Kim. And, of course, the two of them are slowly falling in love.

There's a brilliantly written scene about halfway through the movie between Kim and Fahim that subtly captures the depth of that relationship. Kim arrives in Afghanistan and pretty quickly shows that she is a lot more than the scared fish-out-of-water that she seems. That, in fact, she is incredibly brave- fearless even- and willing to do pretty much anything to get a good story.

 

In one of the early scenes, she gets out of the protected Jeep in the middle of an ambush, and is running around unprotected trying to shoot video of the skirmish. And it's a surprise that this happens so quickly (and I’ll talk later about why it's also challenging structurally that this happens so quickly) but what we’re watching with Kim is that Kim actually does...