How Does Your Character Decide?

More and more neuroscientific research is pointing to the fallacy of believing that morality is based in rationality. Jonah Lehrer looks at this subject in detail in his new book How We Decide.

In previous centuries the common assumption has been that we reach moral decisions by thinking as logically as possible about our options and choosing what we consider to be right according to set of abstract ethical rules. Scientific, empirical evidence is making it increasingly clear this is not how it works.

Instead, we decide on a course of action within milliseconds of perceiving the options. The rest is rationalization of a choice we’ve essentially taken unconsciously, on the basis of what we desire most. Which is not to say there’s no merit in overriding one’s impulses, it’s just that often we follow our impulses and pretend (to ourselves as well as to others) that we chose rationally and morally.

Think about your main character for a moment. Are you crediting him or her with too much rational executive power over their decisions? Does your character even really know why they have taken a particular course of action? And more interestingly perhaps, how does your character rationalize and justify their actions? What moral story do they tell, which might not have anything at all to do with the real reasons for their action?

To understand how difficult it is to know how your character decides, try understanding how you yourself decide.

Think about a major(ish) decision you’ve taken recently that involved some kind of moral ambiguity. A secret you kept to yourself or divulged, something of value you found and kept or returned, a malicious rumour you spread or dispelled, and so on. Be honest about how instantaneous your decision was in comparison to the amount of time you spent rationalizing and justifying your actions in retrospect.

It’s quite shocking, if you’re honest about it.

Generally speaking, we don’t really have much conscious insight at all into our moral decisions. The only thing we’re conscious of, is the narrative we construct after the fact, in order to make our actions seem logical and acceptable.

To my mind this distinction between a more or less instinctive, emotion-driven decision and the retroactive illusion of rationality, can be a valuable addition to the screenwriter’s toolkit. It’s a powerful way of thinking about conflict in scenes, but also internal conflict.

Why Your Screenplay’s Future Is More Important Than Its Past

It’s sometimes difficult to accept that no one besides you (and your accountant) cares whether you spent two years writing a screenplay or two weeks. The only relevant considerations are whether the writing is any good and whether the script is right for the current market.

It would be nice if your history with the screenplay mattered, but it doesn’t.

Seth Godin posts on his blog today about ignoring what he calls sunk costs. His take is useful in the context of screenwriting:

When making a choice between two options, only consider what's going to happen in the future, not which investments you've made in the past. The past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.

So let’s say you have two screenplays, one you’ve spent two years perfecting and one you’ve hammered together in two weeks. Which one should you run with? Emotionally, you probably have vastly more invested in the one you’ve worked on for longer. Not to mention the fact that you’ve invested so much time (i.e., your own money) in it.

However, if your aim is to earn a living writing movies, then the more relevant consideration is: Which of the two scripts stands a better chance of being optioned or produced? To decide this, you need to determine which producers you can realistically pitch to, what the potential budgets might be, what the target audiences are, and so on.

Several years ago I wrote a very detailed scriptment based on a biblical story. I did a huge amount of research, and toiled diligently until one day I saw an announcement that the very same story was being produced by a big production company, with some a-list actors attached. I very reluctantly put that scriptment away and turned my attention to other work. The fact that I had worked on it for ages, didn’t stop it’s market value from dropping to zero. Of course the scriptment is still there in my drawer. Who knows, maybe one day the market will be right for it again.

It’s just an unfortunate but understandable fact of the screenwriter’s life, that the value of a screenplay is not determined by the screenwriter’s “sunk costs” (i.e., it’s past), but rather by it’s quality and potential (i.e., it’s future).

What’s “Primal” About Your Screenplay?

In a recent post entitled High Concept Rules, screenwriter and screenwriting teacher Blake Snyder discusses some aspects of what makes a film “high concept.” The term that struck me most was “primal.”

Primal — Bruce Snyder, Distribution President at Fox, used this very word in a recent interview to help explain why Taken was a hit: Someone took my daughter. I have to get her back.

That makes absolute sense, doesn’t it? It’s not completely abstract, but it’s also not very specific and yet it conveys a visceral sense of what the film is about. To my mind this works precisely because there’s no mention of characters or location or any other concrete clue as to the specific content of the story. It’s just the raw emotion at the heart of the story, expressed from the point of view of the main character.

Of course we’re talking high-concept here. These are scripts you need to be able to pitch in a few sentences at the drop of a hat. Once produced, these are movies that are marketed to a mass audience using exactly this kind of pithy, gut-level copywriting. But isn’t this also an excellent way of examining for yourself what’s at the emotional heart of a screenplay you’re still working on, even if you’re never going to say as much to another human being?

Sometimes explicitly identifying a central emotional motive in a story can help to focus the action, create unity and direction. If the main subject is, say, revenge (as in Taken), then everything about the characters, the narrative, the locations and so on becomes focused on one or other aspect of this drive. Everyone who is anyone in the movie has an opinion and a feeling about revenge and acts accordingly.

It’s a similar mechanism to articulating the theme, or the premise, or the designing principle, or the central moral question, depending on whose screenwriting jargon you prefer. And it’s similar also in that not all writers like to know what they’re writing about while they’re writing. In other words it's entirely up to you to determine when, if at all, in the writing process you want to clarify what is “primal” about your story.

Just as visualizing your trailer is a great way of exploring the essence of your story, it seems to me that formulating what is “primal” about your story is yet another useful implement to put in your writer’s toolbox, to be taken out and used at your own discretion.

Thanks to Blake Snyder for pointing that out!

Screenwriting's Only Rule: Find Your Voice

I often see advice to screenwriters couched in very normative language. Screenwriters are admonished by authors of how-to books, by professional script-readers, know-it-all bulletin posters anyone else with an opinion on the matter, NEVER to break certain cast-iron rules that will absolutely, definitely ensure that your material is never read.

Um … maybe. Maybe not. Let’s take a look at some of these so-called sacred interdictions and their rationalizations.

• Never use “We see …” It’s old-fashioned, today’s film execs don’t like it and it shows you’re not up to speed about current screenwriting conventions.
  
  
• Never use the phrase “he realizes.” You can’t see what someone is thinking, it has to be a description of something they do, which demonstrates what they’ve realized.
  
  
• Never use camera angles, it takes the reader out of the story and displays arrogance, as if you’re trying to do the director’s work.
  
  
• If anything can be shown rather than said, always go with the non-verbal alternative. Dialogue is for theatre plays, whereas film is all about telling a story by juxtaposing images.
  
  
• Never describe what someone is thinking, or anything else you can’t see or hear. Similar to the previous rule, but with the patronizing qualification: Save that for your novel.
  
  
• Never use flowery, literary language. Be concise, businesslike and to-the-point. Any other style will be perceived as you showing off your literacy, rather than your storytelling skills.

There are others, I’m sure you’ve heard and read them too. But what strikes me every time I study any great screenplay (i.e., a screenplay that became the foundation for a beautiful movie), is that really good screenwriters don’t care about these rules.

It’s a bit like saying that Arthur Rubenstein wasn’t really a good pianist because he played with flat fingers, which is not how you’re “supposed” to do it.

I recently finished writing an article for TwelvePoint.com on Knocked Up by Judd Apatow. Now there’s a script that could easily be a stage play. It’s almost all dialogue! But it’s a fabulous film script, too. Witty, moving, and visual (yes). Do you think any producer in his right mind would have rejected the script on the basis of some abstract rule concerning how much dialogue is allowed in a film script?

Or what about The Departed, by William Monahan? Now there’s a nail-biting screenplay, full of double-crossing twists and reveals, action-packed and thrilling to the last page. That script contains plenty of no-nos, such as “we see,” “he realizes,” as well as specific descriptions of what someone is thinking. Somehow I think Martin Scorsese was OK with that.

How about No Country For Old Men, by the Coen brothers? A wild and gripping read, whisking the reader along from one unlikely encounter to the next. But it almost reads like a director’s shot list in places, it’s so full of explicit camera instructions.

I could go on. But the point I’m making is that sticking to a set of arbitrary style guidelines is not going to make a screenplay more likely to be picked up and produced. The thing that jumps off the page in the scripts I mentioned above is precisely the vividness and originality of the writing. Above all, what these screenplays have in common is a unity and consistency of style.

They each have a distinct voice.

The inner cogitations of The Departed would seem out of place in Knocked Up. The deeply ironic and self-ridiculing dialogue in Knocked Up wouldn’t fit in No Country For Old Men. The camera-centred style of No Country For Old Men would feel clumsy in The Departed. And so on.

In other words, the only thing that really counts, is making the script a really entertaining and intriguing read by finding your own voice.

How Much Do You Leave Up To The Director?

One way of making a distinction between the screenwriter’s job and the director’s job is this: The writer’s job is to determine what to film, the director’s job is to determine how to shoot it. So when it comes to deciding what to include and what to cut from the script, it’s often a matter of choosing the level of detail.

Finding the right balance between too little and too much detail, is a large part of the art of screenwriting. Use too little detail, and you run the risk of not adequately getting your intention across. Too much detail, on the other hand, can feel restrictive and rigid. So the trick is to use just the appropriate amount of detail for the given beat, making clear what the beat is about while leaving enough room for the director to visualize the beat in his or her own way.

Take for example the famous scene from American Beauty, where Ricky (played by Wes Bentley) shows Jane (Thora Birch) his video recording of a plastic bag being blown about by the wind. Here’s how screenwriter Alan Ball describes Jane’s initial reaction to the video:

Jane sits on the bed. She watches Ricky’s WIDE-SCREEN TV, her brow furrowed, trying to figure out why this is beautiful.

Which is a lot of information for two short sentences. You know Jane is sitting on the bed, you know she’s watching the TV screen and it’s clear she’s feeling confused because she likes Ricky and is trying hard to understand him, so she can decide whether she really wants to get any closer to him.

This little description does a great job of pointing everyone on the set in the same direction. However, none of the information tries to force a particular way of shooting the beat. Which means that as the screenwriter, you hand the director (and the actors) all the necessary ingredients, but you leave it up to them to do the cooking.

A little further along in the same scene, while Ricky expresses the wonderment he felt when he first witnessed the flying bag, all Alan Ball says about Jane’s reaction is:

Now Jane is watching him.

Which is about as brief a description as you can imagine. It doesn’t give any concrete (visual) information other than: Jane has switched her attention from the video to Ricky. However concise though, this little snippet does have a clear function: it shows that Jane is more fascinated by Ricky than by the video. She’s not so much sharing his experience of the video, as feeling something similar while watching him. But again, it leaves the director and the actors free to portray this information in whatever way they find most appropriate.

Some directors will storyboard extensively before venturing onto the set, others like to “let it happen” and then compose the scene during editing. That’s all about execution—the how— rather than inventing the scene in the first place—the what— which is the screenwriter’s job.

As far as I’m concerned, the answer to my initial question is: Leave as much as possible up to the director, while making absolutely sure not to lose the essence of the beat.

On The Evolution Of Reversals By Natural Selection

In a recent interview with The New Yorker, writer-director Tony Gilroy, of Michael Clayton fame, amongst other things, comments on the problem that audiences have become accustomed to “… an aesthetic of disorientation.”

Lots of mainstream movies now routinely play around with chronology and use sophisticated cutting in order to maintain suspense. Audiences catch on quickly though, forcing filmmakers to push the creative envelope again and again.

Take for example the wonderful tv drama Damages. I’m well hooked on the second series, although I have to admit, my attention is waning. And here’s why:

The series is all about deception, mistrust, and backstabbing, so it constantly has to reveal new, surprising information to remain suspenseful. Otherwise it would just be another trite (albeit stunningly acted) linear, legal drama. Although the series meets this challenge pretty impressively, I’m beginning to become immune to the following scene:

We see someone in a parked car, in profile, looking troubled. This is a character we’ve been following and have built up some sympathy for, as they’ve been portrayed as something of an underdog or a victim. Then we pull out and discover … shock-horror … one of the bad guys is sitting next to them in the car, and they’re in cahoots.

Sure, this increases our understanding of the character, perhaps we suddenly understand their moral dilemma, or their corruptness. The device certainly moves the story along, and it worked really well for me the first few times I saw it. However, now whenever I see anyone in a parked car looking troubled, I’m out of the narrative. I’m playing: “Guess the treachery” with myself, because the scene has been overplayed, it’s become predictable.

The essence of a good reversal, is its unpredictability. The more a reversal subverts the audience’s expectations (based on what’s preceded the reversal onscreen), the more effective it is. But surprise isn’t sufficient in itself. The surprise has to change the stakes in some way, in order to really hold the audience’s interest. Even better than merely changing the audience’s expectation of what is to come, is doing so while undermining their assumptions about what they’ve already seen.

One great way to achieve this, is what Tony Gilroy does a few times in the movie Michael Clayton. He deploys a ballsy combination of non-chronological editing and repetition. We see the same short scene twice at very different moments in the film. The first time might be a flash forward, or the second time a flashback. Either way, because of what we’ve witnessed in between, our interpretation of the film so far changes drastically when we see the scene for the second time.

It’s precisely this realization that we were fooled the first time we saw the scene, which is such a great “reversal” sensation. It’s strange that it’s so pleasurable to realize you’ve been hoodwinked, but that’s what it boils down to. The audience craves this sensation of been fooled.

Unfortunately, every time they are fooled they become a little harder to fool.

And so reversals evolve …

(Thanks to Andy Conway at Shooting People for pointing out the article!)

The Quantum Mechanics of Screenwriting

A slightly mind-boggling but fascinating article in the latest edition of Scientific American, discusses the intensely counter-intuitive, quantum mechanical concept of nonlocality. Elementary particles can influence each other instantaneously, even across galaxies, without there being any physical connection between them, either direct or indirect.

This notion has been an anomaly for physicists ever since Einstein formulated his theory of general relativity. In fact, Einstein called this nonlocality “spooky,” and presumed it was something that would eventually be explained within the realms of conventional physics. Instead, nonlocality hasn’t gone away, on the contrary, it has made a comeback and is challenging some of our most basic intuitions about how reality works.

What’s all this got to do with screenwriting, you may ask? Ah, well, I’m not sure, you see. But it’s something like this quote from aforementioned article puts it:

“… combining quantum mechanics and special relativity requires that we give up another of our primordial convictions. We believe that everything there is to say about the world can in principle be put into the form of a narrative, or story. Or, in more precise and technical terms: everything there is to say can be packed into an infinite set of propositions of the form "at t1 this is the exact physical condition of the world" and "at t2 that is the exact physical condition of the world," and so on. But the phenomenon of quantum-mechanical entanglement and the spacetime geometry of special relativity—taken together—imply that the physical history of the world is infinitely too rich for that.”

No matter how well-versed you are in screenwriting “techniques,” regardless of how clear your understanding is of concepts such as story structure, character arc, theme, subtext, visual writing and so on, at some point you have to allow for the fact that … shit happens.

Whereas, what the audience wants (or is it the investors?) is a good yarn, with all the loose ends neatly tied up and the emotional drama satisfactorily resolved. Because we want our “primordial conviction” that reality is fundamentally logical, physical, comprehensible and so on, reinforced.

So are we, as screenwriters, simply helping to maintain this illusion? And what would a screenplay look like in which the story deals with the illusion that life is a neat, linear narrative, with cause followed by effect, and effect becoming the new cause, etc.?

There’s a great idea for a film somewhere in that question, I’m sure of it … But for now, I need a drink to numb my baffled mind.