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SCREENWRITING TIPS (Part II of Characters)

Thursday, 19 January 2012

Part VI: Characters (2)
By Miguel Machalski

We already spoke about conflict being the key component in a compelling plot. This applies to character building as well. And the best conflicts a character can have are inner conflicts, those which involve choosing between two or more options, and where as a viewer you find it hard to decide which is the best because whatever the choice there is almost as much to be gained as to be lost. A paradigmatic example would be Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice where Meryl Streep has to make the most harrowing decision one can imagine: she is forced to hand over one of her two small children to the Nazis to be taken away to a concentration camp, failing which she will lose them both. It is hard to conceive of a more heart-wrenching choice. Not surprisingly, Streep’s character ends up committing suicide.

Conflicts inevitably mean antagonists, whether they are human, mechanical, natural or psychological, and either inherent or circumstantial. In a broad sense, an antagonist is anything or anybody that stands between you and the achievement of your aims. And conflict arises from the difficulty or the impossibility to accomplish that aim. If a character wants to catch a criminal, reach a distant planet or, less dramatically, simply have a shower, then the criminal, and more specifically his strength or cunning, will be the antagonist (if the criminal is weak or foolish, he becomes unworthy as an antagonist), as will be the meteorites that prevent the hero from reaching the planet or a malfunctioning water system for the person who wants to take a shower. The outlaw, the meteorites, the water system all act as antagonists and create a conflictive situation, as defined in a previous article (i.e. conflict is anything that disrupts the normal course of events).

However, they are all external and in a way, impersonal conflicts. A crafty delinquent, a rain of meteorites or the lack of water will be an obstacle for anyone given the circumstances: they are unspecific to any character. But if for example the criminal who is acting as an antagonist bears an uncanny resemblance to the pursuer’s dead brother, whose death he believes he is responsible for and is therefore a deeply traumatic experience, the chase takes on a new dimension. Not only does the hero have to deal with a formidable foe, he also has to grapple with an inner demon because every time he closes in on his prey, the recollection of his deceased brother restrains him. In order to achieve his goal, he has to overcome something in himself. If the man wishing to reach the remote planet is a scientist who has stubbornly maintained that his spaceship can resist any meteorite storm, he will have to surmount his pride if he realizes that he was in fact wrong – or else risk his life by attempting to make his way through the meteorites against all odds. If the person wanting to take a shower is a divorced father going to pick up his daughter he hasn’t seen for a long time and who has always put him down for his scruffiness, he will have to choose between seeing her anyway in a state of dubious cleanliness or call off the meeting until some indefinite future.

Two things need to be clarified here: one is emphasising the importance of the inner conflict from the character’s point of view. In the last example, as presented, it may seem like an obvious choice: most people would probably go and see their daughter and just excuse themselves. But you can build characters in such a manner that though we may not act the same way, we can relate perfectly to their motivations. One of the weaknesses in mainstream filmmaking is trying to make motivations universally sharable as opposed to universally understandable, which leads to gross cultural misconceptions. One might personally not share a character’s blind faith in something or someone, but if portrayed convincingly, one can understand why he may kill or die for his belief.

The other point is that though all this may seem very much a mainstream/commercial moviemaking approach, it can be applied to stories and characters in any kind of film, including the most auteurish or artistically-driven ones. As I believe I have said before, what you narrate must not be confused with how you narrate. The most memorable arthouse films are rife with conflict and high-powered dramatic stakes. Mouly Surya’s Fiksi, one of the most interesting Indonesian films in recent years (accused of being flawed, but bold yet imperfect movies are way more interesting than slick pieces of conservative filmmaking), tells the story of a deranged girl who orchestrates a series of violent acts in order to supply her lover, a frustrated writer, with the material he needs to finish the book he is writing. Though not strictly arthouse, it is a thriller with a different approach to the genre, and a remarkable lead female character.

Another useful approach to characters is deciding how much information you wish to share with the audience. Does the audience know more, less or as much as the characters? There are all sorts of combinations: in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, everyone –the viewers and all the other characters - knows the truth about the protagonist except for the protagonist himself; in Bryan Singer’s Usual Suspects nobody knows the truth about Kevin Spacey’s character, Keyser Söze, except he himself. In Night M. Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, nobody knows the truth except for the writer. The ‘step-ahead’ technique where viewers have more information or guess faster than the character is not necessarily the most effective. If you can surprise the audience without their feeling cheated, they’ll enjoy it.

Let’s look at a simple made-up example. A woman is planning to poison her husband. We let the audience know this, so that when the husband and wife are together, he is an unsuspecting victim, which can be either funny or tragic, depending on the genre. At this point, we know more than the man. We then show him discovering the vial of poison, and substituting its contents for water. Now we’re in the know with him, and the woman is at a disadvantage in terms of information. She pours a glass of her husband’s favourite beverage for him, with the addition of what she supposes is the poison, which he drinks down with a smile on his face. We think she believes he’s smiling innocently, unaware of what’s in store, but we know it’s a smile of one-upmanship. He seemingly pretends to die and in order to control her nerves, she drinks from a different bottle – she has her own favourite beverage – and collapses almost instantly. We then guess the husband turned the situation round by putting the poison into his wife’s bottle. But the seconds tick by and the man fails to rise from the dead. Without either he or us knowing, the wife somehow found out that he was privy to her plan and restored the real poison to its place, though of course she had no knowledge of the fact he had retaliated. Ironically, they both die.

I would not recommend this as a brilliant storyline; it’s just a quick and easily comprehensible example of how one can play with dealing out information. But whichever way we decide to handle this, what really matters is who the characters are. If we put together a clever plot but fail to involve our audience emotionally, it won’t make a lasting impression. Let’s assume that we do actually write a story like the one above (I wouldn’t disagree if you consider it rudimentary, but let’s use it to illustrate our point), imagine that the fiendishly jealous wife’s murderous intentions stem from the firm conviction her husband is cheating on her, something the audience knows is not true. The husband is in fact passionately in love with her – so passionately that discovering she wants to kill him arouses in him a deep hatred, which as we know is a step away from passionate love. At the end of the story, the couple ends up destroying one another, despite – or because of – the fact they are profoundly in love. Unfortunately, other feelings they cannot restrain are at play. Human emotions blur and distort our actions, ultimately causing pain and destruction.

Using paradox in character-building can create the most powerful characters. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “For each man kills the thing he loves…”

take race into account in vaguer ways to ensure academic diversity.

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