More Thoughts On Writing From Theme

Opinions are always divided as to whether the screenwriter benefits from focusing on theme ahead of other aspects of a screenplay.

I’ve been thinking more about FilmUtopia’s recent thought-provoking article, inspired by another blog, quoting an interview with screenwriter-director, Paul Schrader. In the interview, Schrader discusses the importance of knowing your theme and finding an appropriate metaphor, before you build your story. This in contrast to many screenwriting books and seminars—at least those I’m familiar with—which discourage the aspiring screenwriter from thinking about theme before knowing what they are going to write in terms of genre, plot, characters, etc. And FilmUtopia builds on this by emphasizing the importance of writing screenplays in order to explore and express something meaningful, rather than simply to create a safe, familiar and readily marketable rehash of existing films.

As Many Screenwriting Methods as Screenwriters
My response was to applaud the validation of screenwriters whose way of working doesn’t necessarily conform to the models advocated by screenwriting gurus or to the logline-synopsis-treatment-outline-first draft step plan taught on most screenwriting degree courses. Screenwriters come from all kinds of backgrounds, and there are about as many ways to write a screenplay as there are screenwriters. Just listen to Jeff Goldsmith’s podcasts, or read books like The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters by Karl Iglesias, and Story and Character by Alistair Owen.

Theme is like Radiation
So why is the concept of theme always so contentious? Why do many screenwriting teachers treat it with such circumspection? Because theme is a bit like radiation: given in the right dosage it’s medicinal, given in the wrong dosage it’s lethal. So, assuming that you don’t want to poison your audience, but rather give them some kind of meaningful experience, what are the main pitfalls to watch out for?

Pontification

People don’t go to see movies in order to find out what some more or less anonymous screenwriter thinks about, say, the ethics of marital infidelity. They don’t usually care how erudite the screenwriter is, either. And a person who wants to hear a sermon, will go to their church, mosque, etc. People generally watch films, first and foremost, in order to be swept up and away from their daily reality for a couple of hours. Emotionally, intellectually, physically. For some, a romantic comedy does the trick, for others it’s horror or art house drama, and so on. Speaking from experience, as soon as I feel like a film is trying too hard to tell me what’s right and wrong, or is pushing a particular political agenda too forcefully, I become distracted and even annoyed.

Monotony
It’s not a simple thing to weave theme into action and dialogue. As a result, what can easily happen, is that a movie spends too much time repeating the same “message,” scene after scene. It’s often a symptom of the screenwriter underestimating the intelligence of the audience, being afraid the audience (or the producer) won’t “get it.” But whatever the reason, once you understand what a film is about, you don’t want to be constantly reminded of it.

Superficiality
We all know it’s not good to cheat, murder, steal and so on. However, it can be very tempting, especially when confronted with people in the film industry who demand everything be spelled out for them, to “dumb down” your theme. For example, instead of, say, writing about how different people deal differently with the responsibility that comes with parenthood, you choose to paint a black and white picture in which there are good and bad parents. In my opinion, a degree of moral ambiguity can turn the audience into active participants in the film, making the experience far more meaningful for them personally.

Explicitness

Although sometimes being up-front about theme is the right way to go, I find as a viewer, that if there are too many explicit references to what everything in the film is supposed to be about, I switch off. I like a nice bit of subtlety! Let the theme go underground, or into the background for a while. My feeling as a screenwriter is, if you know what you’re writing about, then the theme will permeate all the choices the characters make anyway. It’s in these choices that the audience can experience the questions you’re addressing, rather than consume some kind of processed, pre-packaged message.

Personally, when I’m writing, I love nothing more than to ramble on for page after page about a question that intrigues me. At some point, I inevitably find a kernel of a question which then evolves into a story. This may not be the most productive screenwriting method. It’s certainly not the most lucrative and often leads to awkward situations when someone wants to know why I wrote what I wrote. But it does ensure that the writing process itself contains its own, intrinsic reward: I am constantly learning and discovering new questions to explore. That, to me, is what writing is all about.

Well, that’s my two cents for today on theme. Thanks again to FilmUtopia for stimulating my brain on this issue once again.

Movie Characters And The Stoic Trichotomy Of Control

You might associate the word Stoicism with asceticism and suffering, but this ancient philosophy has a lot to teach screenwriters about writing great characters.

One of my favourite books of late is: A Guide to the Good Life; The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, by William B. Irvine. This is not a book written for screenwriters, in fact it’s not about films or screenplays at all. It’s a book which makes the principles and values of Stoicism relevant and applicable to the 21st century, and advocates adopting them as a philosophy of life. It’s a fascinating and enlightening read in and of itself, but also contains many surprisingly relevant and practical insights for screenwriters. The main reason for this is because the book deals with how we can and should relate to the things we desire, if we want to live a joyful and fulfilling life. Which is kind of what most great movies are about too, when you scratch beneath the surface.

I want to highlight just one of these insights here, which Irvine, in typical philosopher-speak, calls the trichotomy of control.

So, What is this Trichotomy of Control?
The ancient philosopher Epictetus advocated the following: Don’t set your desires on things over which you have no control, as this will inevitably lead to disappointment and misery. In other words, he divides the things human beings have to deal with, into things over which we have control, and things over which we have no control.

Irvine expands these two categories into three:

Things over which we have absolutely no control. This includes external things such as the weather, the economy, traffic, etc., and internal phenomena like impulses, aversions, cravings, urges, and any sensation or thought that arises spontaneously.

Things over which we have complete control. These would be things like our opinions, the goals we set ourselves, the values we decide to live by, etc.

Things over which we have some, but not complete control. This refers to things like, achieving goals we set for ourselves, developing our skills to the best of our ability, living according to our values as much as possible, acting or not acting on our impulses, etc.

Using these three categories, it’s possible to decide quite rationally where to invest effort and where not to. And besides being a very useful way of analysing and dealing with real life situations, it’s also a great way to focus your character’s behaviour too.

What does your character have absolutely no control over?

Externally, this is the physical threat or opposition a character faces from a powerful antagonist. Whether the hostile force takes the specific form of an individual, a natural environment, an organization, etc., doesn’t matter: The fact of the opposition is something the character has no control over, and must somehow deal with. Internally, the character is confronted with their own unconsciously generated, spontaneously occurring impulses, aversions, and desires. Perhaps these internal forces are initially less obvious to the character than to the antagonist (and the audience…), but they are nevertheless events over which the character has no control and which they must deal with.

Some examples:

- Phonebooth – External: Stuart (Colin Farrell) is powerless in the face of the invisible sniper who has him in his sights. Internal: Stuart has to contend with his intense aversion to being honest.

- A Serious Man - External: Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg) is confronted with a fait accomplis, his wife’s infidelity. Internal: Larry must deal with his incessant need to understand what’s happening to him.

- Ratatouille – External: Remy the rat can do nothing about the fact that he’s regarded by the human world as vermin. Internal: Remy can’t help his relentless desire to cook.

What does your character have complete control over?
These are mostly internal phenomena, like opinions, goals, values. In other words, a character can quite rationally and consciously decide to take sides in a military conflict, or to strive to achieve a particular academic or professional qualification, or to try and win the love of a particular woman, and so on. The character is also in complete control over how he or she tries to achieve their goal, or defend their position, and so on. This says nothing about their chances of succeeding, of course, because as often happens in films, the character is free to choose the wrong approach, too. In most mainstream, narrative films, the main character will face a final, painful moral dilemma at some point. Here too, the character has complete control over their choice.

Some examples:

- The Lives of Others - Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) chooses to work for the repressive East German state security police.

- Avatar - Jake (Sam Worthington) chooses to switch sides and defend the values of the Na’vi.

- An Education – David (Peter Sarsgaard) consciously chooses to deceive Jenny (Carey Mulligan) by not telling her he’s married.

What does your character have some, but not complete control over?

Here’s where a character’s choices become interesting, and where conflict and dilemmas can really take hold. We all know how hard it is to live consistently according to values we hold dear, or how hard it can be to resist acting on impulses which we know will lead to trouble. Equally, we all know when we’re cutting corners or doing our utmost, and that choice is within our control. Even more so, then, for a fictional character, whom you deliberately place in the worst possible circumstances in order to test their mettle. Because it’s when a character has some, but not complete control over events, that their choices become dramatic. The screenwriter deliberately confronts their characters with difficult choices in order to emphasize a particular moral issue. The drama, or comedy, comes from the uncertainty about whether the character can distinguish between what is within their control and what isn’t. Will they recognize temptation and withstand it? Will they see the danger but persevere anyway? Will they overestimate their powers? In the end, what characters have control over, are their choices and the lengths they’re willing to go to achieve their goals.

Some examples:

- Greenberg – Greenberg (Ben Stiller) constantly faces the negative social consequences of having acted impulsively in the past, and still struggles with this urge in the present.

- Little Miss Sunshine – Olive (Abigail Breslin) is never destined to win the beauty pageant, but because she makes such an effort, she achieves something far more valuable.

- The Crying Game – Fergus (Stephen Rea) finds his conscience at odds with life as an IRA gunman and chooses to desert. Interestingly, Jody (Forest Whitaker) mocks Fergus, saying he has no control over his choices because of his intrinsic nature!

Is your character trying to change something over which he has no control?
Here we get to the crux of the drama or comedy in a story. Because before a character understands he’s battling something he has no control over, instead of focusing on the thing he can control, he will continue to bang his head and get into worse trouble. This confusion is often resolved in a kind of “aha” moment, when the character realizes they’ve been focusing too much on some insurmountable, external opposition, when really they need to face their inner demons first.

Some examples:

- The Fountain - Tommy (Hugh Jackman) spends almost the entire film fighting against something no one has any control over: death. It’s only after his wife has died that he acknowledges this and finds some degree of peace.

- The Crucible – Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis) struggles against the absolute power of the church, almost saves himself by confessing to something he didn’t do, and eventually chooses death above hypocrisy.

- Nemo –Marlin tries to prevent his son Nemo from taking risks, but must finally acknowledge that he can’t stop Nemo growing up and becoming independent.

All the above examples deal with big-picture, basic story elements. But the same trichotmoy is just as useful for examining other, more detailed aspects of a screenplay, such as sequences, scenes and even individual beats or lines of dialogue.

So you see, those dusty old Greek philosophers knew a thing or two about human nature, which is, essentially, the screenwriter’s main raw material.

Character Equals Choice Under Pressure… Really?

Character = choice under pressure. Another of those damned screenwriting axioms that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Sure, it’s what we would like reality to be like, so in that sense it’s perfect. It explains why films, certainly mainstream commercial films, always have to have heroes who get stuck in increasingly difficult dilemmas and who eventually choose the right thing. That delicious fantasy, the monomyth in which good prevails over bad, purely through the individual force of will of the hero.

Instant, Unconscious and Irrational Decisions
Wouldn’t it be great if human decision-making worked like that? Unfortunately current neuroscientific and psychological insights show conclusively, it doesn’t. We take most of our decisions instantaneously, unconsciously and pretty much irrationally. Usually we embellish our motives with rationalized explanations after the fact. But it’s very rarely a simple, albeit painful, conscious cost–benefit analysis that drives a decision. Especially not the kind of dramatic decisions portrayed in films.

Memento
I personally haven’t yet found a way to deal with this challenge to such a pillar of screenwriting dogma, in my writing. I still write characters who, in one way or another, take difficult but conscious decisions and learn from them. Neither have I seen many movies that successfully subvert the current paradigm of the hero taking charge of his fate, while remaining entertaining. Perhaps Memento gets close, because the main character is unable to consciously control his decisions due to a memory defect.

How Free is your Character’s Will?
It’s no wonder that changing the way we think about film heroes isn’t easy. Look at the underlying philosophical assumptions we would have to challenge: free will, individual autonomy, the nature of consciousness… Not trivial issues. We like to think of ourselves as rationally and morally motivated beings. We like to imagine we mature over time and learn, through experience, to assess choices and take decisions based on what’s right rather than on some indefinable, unconscious criteria.

In your dreams.

Goodbye Freud, Hello… What Exactly?
Although it does happen sometimes. But to my mind, more by coincidence and facilitated by context, than because of moral backbone. In fact, this entire notion of force of will, the individual forcing him- or herself to act counter to their own unconscious interests, is a complete myth. It’s clear that unconscious prompts and conditioning are far more important in the decisions we take, than any noble, parochial moral considerations. Just read Dan Arielly, Jonah Lehrer, Richard Wiseman, Philip Zimbardo, or any other post-Freudian, scientific approach to decision-making.

The Road to Hell…
Which doesn’t mean we don’t decide to do things. What it does mean, is that most of the time we have to deal with the consequences of choices we didn’t intentionally, consciously take. A lot of our mental energy is spent making up stories for ourselves and our surroundings, that appear to explain why we did what we did. Which is another reason we love traditional narrative films so much, I guess, because they reinforce this idea that our decisions are always fundamentally reducible to psychological motives.

Honest, I Don’t Know Why I did it, Sir!
Films characters appear to wrestle with the moral aspects of choices they made, or have to make. In real life morality is far less relevant, even though we don’t like to think so. What most of us experience far more than moral dilemmas, is ignorance about why we do things. Sure, we like to frame this ignorance as moral confusion, but often is just a simple lack of insight into how a decision actually came about.

Up in Arms… I think
We love to think we’re in charge, little drivers in huge Avatar-like robots or androids which are our bodies. The bad news is, that Cartesian notion has long since run its course. A revolution in the self-image of Homo sapiens has been going on for quite a while now. Welcome to the new reality, in which:

Character equals rationalization in retrospect due to complete ignorance of how choices were made.

So what does this mean for screenwriting? It means breaking rules of convenience that govern how to portray human experience in films. It means considering the significance, in terms of morality, of not necessarily being consciously in charge of your actions. It means challenging the stale old screenwriting mantras that lead to mountains of multiplex cheese…

Now then, why did I write this? I have no idea. I’m going to go away and fabricate a narrative that rationalizes my tirade.

Screenwriting - The Vomit Phase

Thinking too rationally, too early in the creative process can kill all sorts of possibilities dead in the water and leave you with an anaemic, generic screenplay.

The other day I listened to Nicholas Stoller, screenwriter of Get Him to the Greek, being interviewed on the Creative Screenwriting podcast (what a brilliant service to the screenwriting community that podcast is! Jeff Goldsmith should get a knighthood or something). When Stoller described his writing habits, he said he always gets to a point where he writes a “vomit draft.” This is a first draft, which is certainly going to be too long, unsophisticated, and far removed from the end product in terms of quality. But he gives himself permission to write it, in order to get the basic story onto paper. Then the real writing work starts, i.e., the rewriting.

The Creative Process: Inspiration and Elaboration
In any creative endeavour, the initial phase of coming up with ideas—the inspirational phase— has to be allowed to flow freely, without any thought about practicalities. In her book Screenwriting Updated, Linda Aronson equates this phase of the writing with lateral thinking. The kind of brainstorming technique, made famous by Edward de Bono, that can go in any direction, and that isn’t bound by any critical evaluation of the quality of the ideas. It’s only in a subsequent phase that more rational, task-oriented vertical thinking, takes over. This is the elaboration phase, or the craft aspect of the writing. A phase in which logic and conscious considerations play a more dominant role.

The Vomit Draft Gives you Something to Work on
Inspiration and elaboration are phases in every stage of the process of writing a screenplay. Whether you’re writing a logline, a synopsis, a treatment or a first draft, there’s a time to let rip and a time to be critical. The point is, that once you allow yourself to get something down on paper, however rough and unruly it might be, that gives you something to rewrite. And it’s in the rewriting that specific details begin to emerge and decisions about structure become important.

Giving Yourself Permission to Vomit, is Half the Work
The final draft of a screenplay usually contains about 15,000 words. However, the road to that final draft is littered with hundreds of thousands of words of discarded scenes, characters, dialogue, and so on. That is in the nature of screenwriting. The end result is tiny in comparison with the huge amount of material generated along the way, that isn’t used. So it’s essential to allow yourself to, uncritically, get all those initial ideas out of your mind, in order to be able to subsequently whittle them down into an imaginative, original and well-crafted screenplay. Of course, without a really firm understanding of the craft aspects of screenwriting, all you end up with is an uninspiring generic screenplay, or, well... a pile of vomit.

How Being Up-Front About Theme Influences The Audience

Stating the theme of a film loud and clear at the beginning of a screenplay is sometimes the best way to focus the audience’s attention.

I recently watched Woody Allen’s wonderful Match Point, which I thoroughly enjoyed on all sorts of levels. Beautiful acting, great tension and suspense, gorgeous cinematography. But what struck me above all about this film, is the boldness with which its theme is presented right at the beginning of the opening scene, both in voiceover and as a visual metaphor. Here’s what it looks like in the screenplay:

EXT. TENNIS COURT - DAY

In slow motion, a tennis ball passes back and forth over the net.

....................CHRIS (V.O.)

.........The man who said “I’d rather be

.........lucky than good” saw deeply into

.........life. People are afraid to face how

.........great a part of life is dependent

.........on luck. It’s scary to think so

.........much is out of one’s control –

.........there are moments in a match when

.........the ball hits the top of the net,

.........and for a split second it can

.........either go forward…or fall back.

.........With a little luck, it goes

.........forward…and you win. Or maybe it

.........doesn’t…and you lose.

The ball hitting the top of net and hanging for a beat in the air, is actually visible on screen too during this voiceover, although it’s not mentioned in the script. Either way, what this opening does is set the tone and focus your attention on the meaning and point of everything that follows. There’s no need to speculate about what the theme of the film is, it’s laid out for you in the clearest terms.

What’s in a Theme?
Nuances aside, pretty much everyone agrees that the definition of theme is something like: What the film is really about. The issues which, ideally, all the film’s action and dialogue refer to, and the moral aspect of the main character’s core problem. Sometimes you can express the theme in a single word, such as, honesty, greed, etc. Other times it’s the type of specific moral premise advocated by Stanley D. Williams. And there are all sorts of variation in between. But however it’s formulated, the theme of a film is the moral or philosophical case the film is trying to make.

Ladies and Gentlemen… The Theme!
Not all screenplays state their theme as brazenly as Match Point, but they almost always contain a moment, usually during the initial phase of the story, when the theme is alluded to, or even explicitly stated. It’s often a line of dialogue, such as on page 4 of Doubt by John Patrick Shanley, when father Flynn addresses his congregation in church:

..................FLYNN

.........What do you do when you’re not

.........sure? That is the topic of my sermon

.........today.

Or page 4 of The Reader, by David Hare, when Michael’s father Peter responds to his wife nagging the boy to see a doctor:

..................PETER

.........We’re not going to argue about

.........this. People have to take

.........responsibility for their own lives.

Sometimes it’s the lyrics of a song, such as Rock, Rock Till You Drop, the Def Leppard song which opens The Wrestler, written by Rob Siegel.

Stating the Theme Primes the Audience
So what’s the advantage of stating theme as early and explicitly as possible? A lot has been written about the phenomenon of priming , which is basically the fact that we are unconsciously influenced by the choice of words and metaphors we’re presented with. For example, in his recently updated book Predictably Irrational, psychologist Dan Ariely gives some striking examples from psychological experiments, where exposure to a set of selected words prior to the experiments, significantly influences their outcome. Even to the extent that, for example, subjects exposed to words relating to elderly people, walked slower than subjects who hadn’t been exposed to these words, after the experiment was over. Advertisers make use of this phenomenon all the time, as do professional debaters, politicians, salespeople and all sorts of other people whose business it is to influence their audience.

It’s a Screenwriter’s Job to Influence The Audience
In more than one sense, screenwriters should weigh every word in their scripts. Not just because you have to limit yourself to writing what you can see and hear, but also because the way you prime the audience is going to influence how they perceive the rest of the film. I’ve written before about how European films tend to be less emotionally manipulative than Hollywood films, but however much you leave up to the audience to work out for themselves, you still want the film to have a sense of thematic unity. The more your screenplay is about one thing, and the earlier you focus the audience’s attention on that thing, the more engaging an experience it’s likely to be.

What’s Your Character’s Intention?

Knowing a character’s backstory helps you write them consistently, but knowing what’s moving them in the here and now of a scene makes them really come to life.

I have to admit, I never write character biographies. I’ve often tried, using lists, charts and diagrams offered up by various screenwriting books and mentors, but I always find that there are only a few key items that really matter, and those are really only characterization. Things like level of education, social class, a character’s main frustration in life, that kind of thing. Because when it comes to writing the scene, I often find characters wants to do things I hadn’t anticipated. Which forces me to examine their immediate intention rather than analyze their history.









Intention: preparedness for action
The term intention, as it’s used by mindful awareness practitioners such as psychotherapist Daniel Siegel denotes a purposeful orientation of which you’re not necessarily aware but which you can easily bring into consciousness by reflection. An intention is an unconsciously generated state of preparedness, an anticipation of how to respond to other people’s actions or to circumstances as they pan out in real time. All based on lessons learned from experience. In terms of screenwriting, a character’s intention is what drives them to behave in a particular way in a specific situation, based on how they unconsciously expect the immediate situation and their own actions, to unfold. This is not the same as a character’s “want” or “need,” as these are more longer-term, goal-oriented traits.

What a character wants
What the main character in a screenplay wants, is to solve a specific problem. Or put differently, to achieve a specific goal. The character is aware of what the problem is. Depending on the genre, the goal is normally a concrete objective, such as to escape from captivity, to obtain an object or money, to win someone’s love, to save someone or something, etc.. The story is then the account of the various ways the character goes about trying to solve the problem, and the obstacles they encounter along the way.

What a character needs
What the character needs is more abstract, and takes us into more murky, psychological waters. Usually, what the character needs is something they only become aware of during the course of the story. Although they may think they know what they need to begin with. This is the stuff of the character arc, the (moral) lesson the character learns by the end of the story.

What the character’s intention is
The character’s intention is a kind of intermediate phenomenon, a purposeful focus that sits somewhere in between an unconscious psychological need and a conscious, concrete goal. As long as the character is unaware of their own intention, their behaviour is dictated by habit and they react automatically. If the character is aware of their intention, they are free to act on it or not, but this then becomes a choice. Or in terms of drama: the character experiences a conflict, a dilemma. It’s usually another character who, deliberately or otherwise, points out to the main character what their intention is. This may be an attempt by an enemy to undermine the main character, but it could also be a friend trying to help them by showing them what they’re really up to.

Why intention is more important in a scene than biography
The old-school Freudian model, which posits that individuals are slaves to their past, can lead to a reductive, over-simplified view of individuals, where behaviour in the here and now is always a reflection of some unresolved personal problem in the past. In that context, as long as the screenwriter knows the character’s backstory, they can always point to it and reassure everyone from script readers to studio heads by explaining: That’s why the character behaves the way he does. Very neat, clinical, and unequivocal. But human beings and the decisions they take are far more complex than that. So what matters more than where a character went to school or whether they like broccoli (assuming these details aren’t crucial to the plot), is what the character’s intention is in the scene. That’s what determines their emotions and so their actions and speech. This can’t be surgically separated from the larger, overall picture of who the character is and what aspect of their life is driving the narrative, but it is a distinct phenomenon.

Paying attention to intention
Intention is a funny thing. If you pay specific attention to your own intention in various situations, you might be surprised as to how much less you are consciously “in control” of yourself than you imagined. Your mind is constantly taking stock of events as they happen and formulating intentions concerning what to do next. The same goes for characters in a screenplay. Sometimes it’s more productive to ask what a character’s intention is in a given scene, than to ask why they’re behaving in a particular way. The “why” question automatically generates an analytical, logical answer, but the “intention” question opens up possibilities.

Is Your Idea For A Screenplay Worth The Effort?

Here’s a quote I love from Bob Kosberg of moviepitch.com, alias The Pitch King:

The biggest mistake screenwriters make is - they come up with an idea on a Monday and decide that's going to be the script they're going to spend the next three to six months working on, rather than spending an equal amount of time going through lots of ideas and making sure the one they're going to write is tested, critically received by lots of people and then, when they know they really have something strong, they sit down and spend the time writing it. They work and sweat and bleed on screenplays that are wrong-headed to begin with. It may have good writing, but the idea, story, and concept aren't that commercial or strong and thus, will never sell.

Of course there are those who would say that you have to “follow your passion” whether that leads to a commercially viable screenplay or not. I certainly thought that way for a long time, and I’ve ended up with far too many projects either unfinished or unproduced. And not because I can’t write or because I’m unfamiliar with screenwriting conventions.

The point of the matter is, that writing a good screenplay takes a huge amount of effort and perseverance, and it really only makes sense to put in that work if the idea at the heart of the screenplay is genuinely well thought through. That is, at least, if you’re serious about earning a living writing screenplays.

Does that mean that the only screenplays worth writing are clones or imitations of successful Hollywood movies? I don’t think so. I think the main criterion should be: Is there potentially (and realistically) a market for your movie idea? Does the screenplay have at its core a unique enough idea, or an intriguing enough twist on a familiar genre, to pique an audience’s interest?

Which kind of translates to: Is this idea going to be interesting to anyone besides you? I mean, would your neighbour pay to go and see this movie?

I hate dealing with this issue, because it brings up the whole question of whether film is primarily an art form or a business enterprise. And like most screenwriters, I like to think that what I write has some relevance, that it’s more than “mere entertainment.” The misconception being that an entertaining movie is by definition superficial and vacuous.

Increasingly, I’m convinced that time spent testing and selecting ideas for screenplays before committing to writing a screenplay, is time very well spent. And although writing anything is good practice, it’s a pity to spend months or years writing a screenplay that has no real potential of being produced.