Ryan and I sent off our latest draft of the screenplay today; the fourth draft with seven revisions. That would arguably put it closer to six drafts of actual work.
After hitting send, it occurred to me that for a blog about two filmmakers who define themselves as writers first, directors and producers second – there hasn’t been a whole lot of discussion about how we go about the craft of screenwriting in this blog.
That’s probably for the best. I’m still learning, and I’m not a teacher. Karel Segers is a teacher. You would be far better served talking to him.
But.
Gah.
There IS something I want to talk to you about. Something cool. Something mysterious.
I want to resist the impulse, because I firmly believe that a bad teacher is worse than no teacher at all. The temptation to go through with it anyway is just too strong, though.
The problem, you see, is that I want to talk about Magic.
Real magic.
Not the kind where you have to stay in the audience and watch a magician do his ‘tricks’ up on the stage. I want to bring you up there with me, so you can experience actually making magic yourself.
When Ryan and I break a plot – when we work out the beginning, middle and end of a story – we always centre it around two things. The first is what we hope is a commercial concept. The second is the thematic premise; the message of the movie. We start off with our hero at the start of the story having a flaw in their character. Something that obviously needs to be fixed, otherwise his or her life will go tragically wrong. Usually, this flaw is a reflection of a flaw that Ryan and I are wrestling with ourselves.
Here’s where things get freaky deaky.
After we write out the plot for our concept following structural rules that we choose to abide by, we take a step back and look at the choices we made at each plot point. When we look, we can see a pattern. The series of choices that we have made, within the confines of that structure, represent an answer to the thematic premise that we have been wrestling with.
In other words, the answer to our problems was already within us. The process of writing out a plot according to our structural rules allowed us to express a great Truth about life that we didn’t know we knew… unconsciously.
You’re looking at me funny. I’ve lost you, haven’t I. You have no idea what I’m talking about.
OK, look. Let me take another tact. The great Karel Segers wrote an awesome article about the structure of film story. You can find the whole article in the link below, but I reference it because he provides a beautifully simple summary of plot structure that we essentially agree with. Our structure template follows three acts, not two, and we have more specificity, but still. Here’s how he sees it:
Act One
The hero experiences the (first) Inciting Incident.
The response to the Inciting Incident is flawed, as they continue their dysfunction.
They enjoy a major win, and for a moment it seems the goal is (almost) achieved.
Act Two
The hero experiences a second Inciting Incident, as part of the MPR.
The response to this MPR Inciting Incident is the right response, as now the Hero makes an effort to improve, to heal.
They enjoy a final win, and we trust that in the future they will continue to act in the right way.
Nice and simple, right? When he says ‘MPR’, he’s talking about a mid point reversal. It’s the middle part of the story where the hero sometimes thinks they are achieving their ultimate goal, but it’s at that moment that the rug is pulled out from under them, they see that the goal was really fool’s gold, and they need to completely change their approach in order to achieve a resolution.
So the way you make Magic of your own is, you write out your plot according to those points and then the choices you have made will tell you something deeply truthful about you.
Like, every time.
Take Jurassic Park, for instance. In every article I have read about that movie in which the original author, Michael Crichton, or the director of the film, Steven Spielberg, talk about what it is really about, they have never actually said what it is really about. Spielberg directed the film, and he appears completely unaware of what his unconscious was obviously telling him! Isn’t that incredible? Allow me to illustrate the point by filling out Karel’s structural template with plot points from the film.
Act One
The hero experiences the (first) Inciting Incident. [Dr Grant and Dr Sattler are asked by Hammond to visit and ‘sign off’ on a park designed for kids. The Hero, Dr Grant, does not like kids, and does not want to be a parent – unlike his partner, Dr Sattler]
The response to the Inciting Incident is flawed, as they continue their dysfunction. [When they arrive at the park, Dr Grant is forced to be with Hammond’s grandchildren. Worse, he’s left alone with them and must behave as a responsible parent when dinosaurs that are prevented to have offspring of their own through mutation start tearing the park apart. He resists these experiences as much as he can.]
They enjoy a major win, and for a moment it seems the goal is (almost) achieved. [Dr Grant gets the kids near the entrance to the park, but are stopped by a huge fence. He acts as their teacher, and has discovered that ‘life found the way’ to get around the dinosaur mutation and achieve the ability to have offspring as nature intended.]
Act Two
The hero experiences a second Inciting Incident, as part of the MPR. [One of the kids, Tim Murphy, is electrocuted while climbing the fence.]
The response to this MPR Inciting Incident is the right response, as now the Hero makes an effort to improve, to heal. [Dr Grant is desperate to save the boy. He gives him mouth to mouth, the closest he can get to ‘giving life’ to a child under the current circumstances.]
They enjoy a final win, and we trust that in the future they will continue to act in the right way. [After saving Tim, he gets the kids and the other survivors in the park onto a chopper and they escape. The last shot we see of him has his arms draped around the sleeping children, who hug him tightly.]
So. Do you think Jurassic Park is actually about dinosaurs? Or cloning? Or science? Or anything anyone has said about it up until now? I mean, when you break it down like this, it’s pretty obvious what the ‘message’ is, whether you agree with it or not – procreation and/or the rearing of children is the most important thing you can do. Avoiding it is bad. Embracing it is good.
And like I said, nothing I have read about the making of the film suggests Mr Spielberg is even aware of it.
Magic.
Like I said before, those list of plot points are pretty easy to follow. You could do it with almost every film. Try it with a movie like Die Hard, for example, and I’m pretty sure you’d find that the film is NOT really about a cop against thieves in a high rise building, but is instead about how bad it is to ‘judge a book by its cover’. Go ahead, try it out for yourself. You’ll see.
And look, while that can be fun, it’s got nothing on the experience of doing it for a story that you come up with yourself. It never ceases to amaze me. Ryan and I know its going to happen. We rely on it, even. And then we go ahead and write out our plot, we take a step back and then when we can finally see what our story is about… well, it’s goosebumps time. We even have a name for this process. In the mid 1500s, there was a Renaissance sculptor I’m sure you’ve heard of: a guy by the name of Michelangelo. He has been quoted thus:
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
We think he was talking about the same thing. We think he was tapping into the Magic, but instead of doing it with a keyboard, he was staring at a solid piece of granite until the Truth of his art became apparent, and then he started chipping away. So when we take a step back once we have written our plot, we are Seeing What The Stone Tells Us.
The stone is wise. The stone knows us inside and out. The stone IS us – and we listen to it, to our great benefit.
Hmm. I just realised that it sounds like I am comparing us to Michelangelo. Holy crap, that is NOT what I’m doing here. I’m just suggesting that he knew something hundreds of years ago that we have only recently discovered. That Magic is real, and accessible to anyone.
Ryan and I don’t just believe – we know – that Seeing What The Stone Told Us when we broke the plot for Contained was a massive reason behind that screenplay being selected for production. The idea that all the good things that are happening to us right now is because of our reliance on Magic delights an old cynic like myself.
So the next time you are struggling with a flaw you have recognised in yourself, or someone you know, I suggest you try writing a story about it. There’s knowledge within you that you do not know you have. You are carrying the answer to your problems. You just need to wave the magic wand of story structure, and hey presto – the solution will reveal itself to you. You can make Magic, whenever you need to.
In these tumultuous days, the world could use a bit of fairy dust, don’t you think?
