Ever fancied having a bash at a movie or TV script? In a new series, acclaimed filmmaker Paul Duane tells you everything you need to know about writing for the screen...
Basic Screenwriting Principles, Part 2
(NB This article contains spoilers for a pair of classic movies, The Third Man and North By Northwest, both well over a half century old. If you haven't seen them, please do so immediately)
In the first part I tried to put across the basic principles of plot construction, and how the plot is a series of incidents that, through conflict, allow the audience to learn more about the characters.
The thing is, without interesting, fresh and charismatic characters, the plot is nothing more than bare bones. Plot is necessary, but character is everything.
Plot is 'The Nazis are looking for the Ark of the Covenant'.
Story is ‘Indy can’t be bothered fighting with the scimitar-wielding guy - so he just shoots him’.
WHOSE IS THE POINT OF VIEW? This is one of the most crucial questions you will have to answer when you start writing your script...
Control of the point of view – POV, for short - is one of the most useful things in the filmmaker’s bag of tricks. A story can seem very different, simply by being told from a different point of view.
Alexander McKendrick’s great book on film writing and direction has an exercise where he takes the great Carol Reed classic, The Third Man, and tells it from the point of view of various characters in it.
Each of them is a very different, and inferior, telling to the original, because the story is told from the point of view of Holly Martins, the naïve writer of Western novels caught up in a world that is far more ambiguous and dangerous than he knows, and that’s how it was designed to be told.
But it can be very useful to try to imagine your story told from different character POV’s. For instance, the POV of the antagonist is very useful. It can offer you solutions to problems. One of my basic principles is, the stronger the antagonist, the better the story. A one-dimensional villain creates a one-dimensional story, while understanding your bad guy (which is not the same as excusing them) makes them more interesting and more rounded.
Splitting the POV is often done to give the audience privileged information – information the other characters don’t have – so as to put the audience ahead of the protagonist, for a while, and to create tension. It happens in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest about halfway through, and it explains something the main character doesn’t know about himself – that he’s been mistaken for a spy, but the spy he’s been mistaken for doesn’t exist, and is just an elaborate hoax meant to deceive the enemy.
The story progresses as we watch the characters get what they initially wanted and then discover it is the opposite of what they wanted, and now they have another and bigger problem. This is often called, after the classic short story, The Monkey’s Paw.
Character, as I said in the beginning, is revealed through interactions with other characters and through conflict with situations. What a character is, basically, is the personification of a point of view. The more specific the point of view, the more interesting the story.
Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) in North By Northwest is an advertising man who takes nothing seriously, so the film puts him through a series of increasingly absurd, but very serious, situations, which cause him to grow up and become, finally, a serious person. Holly Martins in The Third Man is a boy who never grew up and idolises his childhood friend Harry Lime, so the film brings him into contact with the consequences of Lime’s actions, and causes him to kill his oldest friend.
The antagonist is the personification of what the hero is up against. The next piece in this series will try to identify how the clash between protagonist and antagonist can be worked out in a fresh and original manner...
To be continued...
