Write Your Screenplay Podcast

What they got right (and wrong) with Tina Fey's newest film, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and what you can learn from it to improve your own screenwriting techniques!

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10 Cloverfield Lane: Everything Possible Must Happen

By Jacob Krueger

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Oftentimes, when we’re developing the story of a film, developing the plot of the film, we’re afraid that we’re going to run out of story, that we’re going to run out of the right story. We worry that we don’t have enough story, or a good enough story, that our idea doesn’t work, that we don’t have the right ending, that we don’t know what we’re building, and we get scared.

We start to look outside of ourselves for structure. We start to look outside of ourselves for plot. We start to look outside of ourselves to figure out what happens. Maybe we look at another movie. Maybe we look at a screenwriting book. Maybe we look at a hero’s journey archetype. Maybe, heavens forbid, we look at a software program that pretends it can tell us what happens in our story. Maybe we look to our friends for advice. But none of these places are where we really want to be looking.

Where we want to be looking is inside the content of the screenplay itself. We want to be looking inside of what we’ve already written to figure out where we need to go.

All of the answers for where we need to go in your story already exist in the initial pages of your screenplay. The structure of your movie can grow organically simply by looking at the things that exist in your story, and saying, “If this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true?”

In this context, by the time we make it to the end of the movie, in some way, everything possible must happen…

Now, just a warning, there are major spoilers ahead.

What’s wonderful about 10 Cloverfield Lane is that we never know exactly what is true and what is not. In fact, we’re dropped directly into the experience of the main character.

The main character, Michelle, has just left her husband at the beginning of the movie. She is driving away down a road, something hits her car, and the next thing she knows she wakes up chained to a bed in an underground bunker with an IV in her arm, being nursed back to health by what seems like a totally deranged man, Howard (played by John Goodman). And Howard tells Michelle a bunch of really disturbing things, none of which seem like they could possibly be true.

Howard tells Michelle that the entire U.S. has been attacked. Howard tells Michelle that the air is so contaminated that it will rot your flesh right off the bone. Howard tells Michelle that it may be aliens that have attacked their country, that it may be mutant worms, that whatever these weapons are, they certainly aren’t American.

Howard seems to have a thousand crazy theories, and he does not seem mentally stable at all. He seems dangerous. After all, what kind of man rescues someone only to chain them to a bed? It seems a lot more likely, especially given Howard’s strangely aggressive habits and neuroses, that she’s been kidnapped and taken prisoner.

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10 Cloverfield Lane: Everything Possible Must Happen

By Jacob Krueger

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Oftentimes, when we’re developing the story of a film, developing the plot of the film, we’re afraid that we’re going to run out of story, that we’re going to run out of the right story. We worry that we don’t have enough story, or a good enough story, that our idea doesn’t work, that we don’t have the right ending, that we don’t know what we’re building, and we get scared.

We start to look outside of ourselves for structure. We start to look outside of ourselves for plot. We start to look outside of ourselves to figure out what happens. Maybe we look at another movie. Maybe we look at a screenwriting book. Maybe we look at a hero’s journey archetype. Maybe, heavens forbid, we look at a software program that pretends it can tell us what happens in our story. Maybe we look to our friends for advice. But none of these places are where we really want to be looking.

Where we want to be looking is inside the content of the screenplay itself. We want to be looking inside of what we’ve already written to figure out where we need to go.

All of the answers for where we need to go in your story already exist in the initial pages of your screenplay. The structure of your movie can grow organically simply by looking at the things that exist in your story, and saying, “If this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true?”

In this context, by the time we make it to the end of the movie, in some way, everything possible must happen…

Now, just a warning, there are major spoilers ahead.

What’s wonderful about 10 Cloverfield Lane is that we never know exactly what is true and what is not. In fact, we’re dropped directly into the experience of the main character.

The main character, Michelle, has just left her husband at the beginning of the movie. She is driving away down a road, something hits her car, and the next thing she knows she wakes up chained to a bed in an underground bunker with an IV in her arm, being nursed back to health by what seems like a totally deranged man, Howard (played by John Goodman). And Howard tells Michelle a bunch of really disturbing things, none of which seem like they could possibly be true.

Howard tells Michelle that the entire U.S. has been attacked. Howard tells Michelle that the air is so contaminated that it will rot your flesh right off the bone. Howard tells Michelle that it may be aliens that have attacked their country, that it may be mutant worms, that whatever these weapons are, they certainly aren’t American.

Howard seems to have a thousand crazy theories, and he does not seem mentally stable at all. He seems dangerous. After all, what kind of man rescues someone only to chain them to a bed? It seems a lot more likely, especially given Howard’s strangely aggressive habits and neuroses, that she’s been kidnapped and taken prisoner.

To try to prove that he is telling the truth, Howard takes Michelle up to the portal door of the air chamber, where he shows her two dead pigs through the window, insisting that they were killed by the poison gas. There might even be a small small part of Michelle at that moment that wonders if Howard might in fact be telling the truth.

But, a moment later, she sees the dent in his truck, flashes back to her car accident, and realizes that Howard did not, as he claimed, find her on the side of the road and save her.  He, in fact, was the person who ran her off the road in the first place.

All of the answers for where we need to go in your story already exist in the initial pages of your screenplay. The structure of your movie can grow organically simply by looking at the things that exist in your story, and saying, “If this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true?”

In this context, by the time we make it to the end of the movie, in some way, everything possible must happen…

Now, just a warning, there are major spoilers ahead.

What’s wonderful about 10 Cloverfield Lane is that we never know exactly what is true and what is not. In fact, we’re dropped directly into the experience of the main character.

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ROOM: What's On The Other Side Of Your Wall?

By Jacob Krueger

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This week we’re going to be looking at the Academy Award Best Picture nominee Room.

It’s interesting that we’re looking at Room because, as screenwriters, we often lock ourselves in our own little rooms. Like the main characters of Room, we get bound up by other people’s rules, by our own comfort zone as screenwriters, by the movies that we have seen before. And we forget that every wall has another side, that there is actually something out there bigger than the story we know how to tell, than the movie that we’ve seen before, than the structure that we’ve been handed down, than the rules that have been imposed upon us.

And Room, in its execution and its subject matter, really shows us what it is to transcend those rules, to transcend our expectations as we write, and to transcend the expectation of our audience for what our film is supposed to be.

Now, a lot of people who have studied the rules of screenwriting might look at a screenplay like Room and say, “is this even a movie? Shouldn’t this be a play?”

After all, nearly half of the film takes place in a single room. And, even when we get out of that room, most of the action still takes place in a single location: in the living room of a home.

Although this is certainly wonderful from a budgetary perspective, this is not something we see very often in movies. In fact, the dogma tells us this is impossible.

And, of course, there are reasons for that dogma.  Movies are a visual medium. By using the power of dynamic visual action, and the power of our cuts, we draw an audience into our stories. There are a lot of reasons why these rules exist.

The problem happens when we start letting the rules rule the script, rather than the other way around. When we try to follow all the rules in a vacuum, rather than figuring out the rules we actually need for the story we want to tell.

The truth is, if you were to follow the dogma and “open up” a movie like Room, if you were to take it out of that one location, you’d damage it terribly. Because that choice would undermine the whole point of the movie, the whole theme that the writer, Emma Donoghue, is building: everything that we loved about the film.

Now, this is not to suggest that you should run out right now and write a movie set in one room. But what I would like to suggest is that the rules of screenwriting (while they may make your life easier on certain projects) should not dictate what you should do with a script. The story that you tell should dictate the rules that you follow.

There are other rules that Room breaks as well. Imagine what would have happened to Room if Emma Donoghue would have followed the dogma of “no voice over.” Imagine what would have happened to Room if she had allowed herself to be confined by the rules rather than asking herself “what are rules that serve my script?”

This is the hard thing about the psychology of being a writer, because we all long for rules. We all long for structure. We all long to understand how a good screenplay is built. And we all long to “do it right.” And often, just like Jack and Ma in Room, when we are exposed to the vastness of the outside world, to the other side of the wall, we get overwhelmed.

When every possibility becomes possible, it can become terrifying, it can become paralyzing. Whereas when we are in that small room with the door closed, sometimes things feel safe, sometimes we can feel free, even when we are not.

So, I’m not suggesting that you need to break every rule to be a screenwrit...

It’s interesting that we’re looking at Room because, as screenwriters, we often lock ourselves in our own little rooms. Like the main characters of Room, we get bound up by other people’s rules, by our own comfort zone as screenwriters, by the movies that we have seen before. And we forget that every wall has another side, that there is actually something out there bigger than the story we know how to tell, than the movie that we’ve seen before, than the structure that we’ve been handed down, than the rules that have been imposed upon us.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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Spotlight & The Big Short: The Difference Between Plot & Structure

By Jacob Krueger

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This week we’re going to be looking at two Oscar Winners, Spotlight and The Big Short. And we’re going to be looking at them not only as good screenplays, but as examples of very different kinds of screenplays. We’re going to be looking at them in terms of the difference between plot and structure.

The concepts of plot and structure are ideas that get mixed up all the time.  They are words that are often used interchangeably, but that in my opinion actually mean very different things.

I like to think of plot as the crap that happens in your movie, or for that matter in your life.  And I like to think of structure as the choices a character makes in relation to that plot.  The choices that change their lives forever.  Plot is the stuff that happens, but structure is your character’s change.

And if you think about your own life, you’ll probably realize that the difference between plot and structure matters to you as well.  You’ve probably met the person who gets a hangnail and it destroys their whole day.  And you’ve probably also met the person who gets cancer and gets a whole new lease on life.

You have probably met the person who finds beauty in the most horrible situations and the person who creates horror into the most beautiful ones.

And this is the exciting thing about the difference between plot and structure.  Plot, as much as we obsess about it, is pretty much interchangeable.  We spend so much time as writers, and in our daily lives, thinking about plot, worrying about what happens next, what happens next, what happens next, that we forget to think about what it all really means.  We forget that what really matters is not just what happens, but what the we do in relationship to what happens.  And how we allow that to bring meaning and change to our lives.

Having said that, I want to start with a script that flies right in the face of all that.  A script that focuses mainly on plot rather than structure. And that script is Spotlight.  

The fact that Spotlight won best picture is kind of amazing, because in many ways Spotlight is just a procedural script.

It’s a very good script, but essentially it’s built like an episode of Law & Order.  It’s built like a procedural.  And what do I mean when I say procedural?  

I mean you’re essentially just watching a bunch of newspaper people do what they do to try to achieve their goal. The truth is the characterization is not very deep in the script. The actors are all such wonderful actors, that they make you feel like they are fully fledged, fully alive people that you care about. But that’s the actors. There is very little character development in the script itself.  

It’s primarily a procedural script: this happened, then this happened, then this happened.... Just like Law & Order: We interrogated this person and they lead us to this person and then we caught this person and then he was tried…

If you think about the emotional issues that any of these characters in Spotlight are dealing with, you’ll realize pretty quickly, we don’t really know. How does Michael Keaton’s character, or any of these characters, for that matter, change? We don’t really know.

So how does a procedural script win best-picture? Part of it is because Academy members have some very interesting nominating and judging preferences. But the other part is because the film is really compelling. The subject matter is interesting and engaging, and extraordinarily well crafted.

The concepts of plot and structure are ideas that get mixed up all the time. They are words that are often used interchangeably, but that in my opinion actually mean very different things.

I like to think of plot as the crap that happens in your movie, or for that matter in your life. And I like to think of structure as the choices a character makes in relation to that plot. The choices that change their lives forever. Plot is the stuff that happens, but structure is your character’s change.

And if you think about your own life, you’ll probably realize that the difference between plot and structure matters to you as well. You’ve probably met the person who gets a hangnail and it destroys their whole day. And you’ve probably also met the person who gets cancer and gets a whole new lease on life.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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DEADPOOL: Breaking The Rules

By Jacob Krueger

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There’s just so much we can learn as writers from Deadpool, and not just because the film manages to do that rarest of feats: to be an intelligent, creatively successful superhero movie, but also because Deadpool manages to both follow the rules of superhero movies and break them in really exciting ways.

The first rule of superhero movies that every single person knows is that your super hero is supposed to be a super good guy.

Superman: yeah, he’s a good guy. Spiderman: sweet kid, good guy. Batman: a little dark, good guy. Thor: a very good guy. The Incredible Hulk may have a problem with anger, but deep down he’s a really good guy. And Ironman may have a bit of an ego problem, but at the end of the day he’s a good guy, too. The world of superheroes is populated by good guys facing down pure evil villains.

And what’s wonderful about Deadpool is that its main character gives the big ole’ finger to the entire notion of the superhero as the perfect good guy character. And, in doing so, Deadpool hopefully puts the last nail in the coffin of the whole Save the Cat formula: this notion that if the audience is going to love your main character he/she needs to be saving kitty cats out of trees and doing nice things for people.

That’s not to say that Deadpool is a bad guy. He’s a flawed guy a violent guy, a shallow guy, an annoyingly verbose guy with a hell of a lot of attitude. He’s also a guy driven by love, but not driven by the love of the perfect girl next store. He’s driven for the love of a prostitute who’s just as messed up as he is.

Deadpool starts the movie as a super badass, work-for-hire hitman. He may have a heart of gold but definitely lives on the darker side of things. He comes from a really messed up childhood. He’s petty, and selfish, and mostly self-interested, and not too deep. He does have a little bit of a soft spot: he’s not an evil guy. His first assignment is protecting a girl who’s being stalked.

But he’s certainly not the prototypical hero we’re used to seeing.

When we watch the origin stories of superheroes, we’re generally watching an A to Z story. The story of a character who changes from being the dopey, put-upon, powerless, low-self-esteem dude who changes into the hero with complete power.

Of course that’s a compensation fantasy for a lot of people. A lot of us feel like we’re weak, or not as strong as we wish we could be. That we can’t stand up for ourselves in the way we wish we could. That we can’t quite be the heroes that we’d like to imagine ourselves as being.

So this is not the compensation fantasy story we’re used to seeing in superhero movies of the weak kid made good. It’s not the coming of age story of the guy who finally grows up. It’s not the story of the wealthy child whose parents die at a young age and now he must become the Batman.

This is a different kind of story. And that doesn’t mean that the character doesn’t go through a huge change, because he certainly does. He goes through a change in relation to his own ego and his own vanity.

Ultimately Deadpool’s journey is to get over his obsession with his looks, so he can finally be with the girl that he loves.

Deadpool’s not fighting to save the world. Deadpool’s not fighting to prevent the evil Ajax from filling the universe with superhuman mercenaries. Deadpool doesn’t give a shit about all that. Deadpool only cares about getting his face back so he can get his girl back.

This is not exactly the noble selfless enterprise we’re used to seeing in superhero movies.

There’s just so much we can learn as writers from Deadpool, and not just because the film manages to do that rarest of feats: to be an intelligent, creatively successful superhero movie, but also because Deadpool manages to both follow the rules of superhero movies and break them in really exciting ways.

The first rule of superhero movies that every single person knows is that your super hero is supposed to be a super good guy.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes