Archive for June, 2010
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
My Favourite Scene about Writing
Nope. Not from Barton Fink, not from The Singing Detective and not even from Adaptation (although I must admit I find Brian Cox’s brief and brilliant turn as Robert McKee far more useful and inspiring than any of his books).
My favourite scene about writing comes from wuxia movie Hero starring Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi and Tony Leung. The scene where a caligraphy school is attacked by the Army of Qin and Nameless (Li) and Falling Snow (Maggie Cheung) defend the students and Broken Sword (Leung) while they continue writing.
To get all artily metaphorical for a moment, think of all of the arrows as distractions while you’re trying to write. You need to consciously send out your inner Jet Li out to protect you from them. Even the bit where Broken Sword’s drawing cane is splintered by an arrow… so he grabs an arrow out of the air and draws with that - that’s just using influences from the outside world to fuel your writing 
But mostly, this is just a self-indulgent blog post to say I love this scene and this film in general.
I’m knuckling down with my entry for the Red Planet Prize over the next few weeks so I might be a bit quiet. The story I’m submitting is one that I’ve had in various incarnations over the last few years that everyone has liked the idea of but I haven’t had the script to do that idea justice.
I don’t have the best of luck when it comes to script contests. But even if I don’t get anywhere with this one, it’s not going to be for lack of trying.
Onwards 
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
DETECTIVES: There’s no such thing as too quirky!
The copper who uses their special break-dancing prowess to catch criminals. The Private Eye who can piece clues together using hallucinations caused by auto-esphixiation. The detective who is also a duck. I love them all. But how quirky is too quirky?
In my own writing, whether it stars a procedural copper or an accidental investigator, mysteries have always been my ‘thing’. Trouble is, if your protagonist is just doing their job week after week, it can be hard to generate an emotional connection - no matter how many endearing tics they have.
This is easily remedied in a film/one-off. A case starts as professional but quickly becomes personal (Silence of the Lambs, Chinatown, Se7en). But if you’re creating an ongoing TV, web or comic series - surely everything can’t be ‘hey, this case resonates with that traumatic broccoli experience I had as a child!’ But you’ll probably need something if you don’t want your show to simply be a cerebral exercise.
I’ve heard the appeal of the Mystery described as ‘the audience’s desire to see Order triumph over the Chaos of the outside world‘ (like the drunken football fans who chucked our bins all over the street last night. Where were you, Batman?) But where Bob Peck in a one-off story like Edge of Darkness needed to know why his daughter died, the returning series detective needs a more abstract motivation for taking on the Chaos of the world that we can understand and emotionally connect with.
The reason we connect with any of the above more than, for example, Miss Marple is because of this vocational calling that made them a detective. Details aside, this can usually be summed up as one word. Redemption. Ambition. Validation. Even Retaliation. (they don’t all have to end in ‘-tion’ btw 
)
So it’s okay to pile on as many quirks as you like to make your detective unique. But before you do, make sure you can easily answer the core reason why this guy or gal is a detective in the first place.
Friday, June 18th, 2010
Testing your Characters’ Character.
You’ve probably done the Facebook Quiz that tells which Batman villain/Disney Princess you are (I’m Belle from Beaty and the B… I mean the Riddler, I’m the Riddler!!) But what results do you think your script’s protagonists would get?
In scriptreading, often a character acts out of character so they can steer the plot towards the desired set-piece. This never reads well. Similarly, you can tell when a writer is writing a character who is not like the writer…yet still makes the sort of decisions that the writer would. This doesn’t ring true either.
The Meyers-Briggs test is a personality profiler that categorises you into one of sixteen personality types using 70 ‘yes or no’ questions. It’s quick to do and I’ve become quite obsessed with it of late, profiling everyone I know and finding the results spookily accurate. But whether you believe the entire human population can be categorised so easily or not, chances are your fictional characters can be.
Following my post about films set in a single location, I’ve been working on my own confined script where the protagonist’s decisions/actions will really swing the (hopefully) pressure-cooker environment one way or t’other. My heroine turned out to be an ENFJ categorised as the ‘Idealist Mentor’:
ENFJ = Extrovert + iNtuitive + Feeling + Judging
or ENFJ = 
or 
But the fact that she’s a ‘Mentor’ type doesn’t mean she has to take the Mentor role. Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice and Sam Becket from Quantum Leap are also considered ENFJs, both sharing the same altruistic, externally focussed and positive outlooks and are both clear protagonists. Yet this personality type also has good powers of persuasion and manipulation - so there’s no reason why a ENFJ can’t be the antagonist either.
So TAKE THE TEST - either for your character or even yourself . The results provide a really good abstract character bio that you can then check corresponds with the decisions you’ve made for your protagonist.
I’d love to know if you find they match up (for your character or for you!)
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
Single-Location Movies
I know that anyone *funding* a film loves a single-location concept - but what does the rest of the world think? Are they too much ‘like a play’? Or do the restrictions just add to the creativity in storytelling techniques as with Rear Window’s complicit tension or Reservoir Dogs‘ flashback-heavy narrative?
In my opinion, many single-location stories have an ‘ooooh’ concept but only a ‘meh’ execution. There’s an interesting hook at the beginning, a decent pay-off at the end and a lot of treading-water in the middle. I find this isn’t because the characters don’t go anywhere new - it’s because the STORY doesn’t. I don’t think these films are ‘too talky’ by definition - but it’s all too easy to write redundant dialogue that’s simply filling pages until the next set-piece. (Similarly, filling Act Two with chases and jet-setting doesn’t help matters either. If it doesn’t move the story along, it’s still going to be hollow.)
This is why I always use David Slade’s HARD CANDY as my favourite example of a low-budget, high-impact breakthrough movie. Two principal actors, one main location (a nice house), a central as well as a notorious scene you’ve probably heard about even if you’ve not see it (Download the script here)
In Hard Candy, what keeps the pace alive and the drama vivid is that the SITUATION keeps changing, even if the location doesn’t. Far more expensive films could take a lesson. Each sequence provides a revelation or shifts the balance of power between the two protagonists. This is what grabbed me. It’s by no means perfect but, by the end of the film, I didn’t know whose side I was on - let alone how I wanted it to end or how it actually would.
From Hard Candy to The Shining and The Breakfast Club, there’s no way these films are a gimmick. They just seem that way when the writer has come up with a cool location instead of a cool story.
