Now a lot of you are probably asking, “Carson, why the hell did you pick Cast Away for a script breakdown?” I’ll tell you. Because it’s different. Because it took chances. Because it’s something that shouldn’t have worked. And I love breaking down scripts that shouldn’t work. I love exploring the deviations and figuring out why they succeeded (when so often else, they fail). The film itself famously teamed up Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks and took a YEAR BREAK in the middle of production so that Hanks could lose weight and look like a real castaway for the second half of the film. That story overshadowed screenwriter William Broyles Jr.’s own escapades to get the script right. The Apollo 13 and Planet of the Apes scribe deliberately stranded himself on a beach in the Sea of Cortez for a week to force himself to search for food, water, and shelter. For today’s tips, I’ll be reading an earlier draft of the script in order to see some of the changes they made.
BUY WILSON HERE! – Wilson
1) If your protagonist cares about something enough, so will we – The success of Wilson The Volleyball defies just about all rationale. Many people actually cried when he was swept out to sea at the end of the film. Although rumors persist that I was one of those people, I steadfastly deny my involvement in any Wilson-related crying. The question is, why did this happen? Well, if your protagonist really really cares about something, whether it be a family member, a goldfish, or a volleyball, we will too. And you can use that tool to create moments like this one, where you rip that something away from the hero to provoke an emotional response from the audience.
2) The Set-Up World needs to be exciting – The “Set-Up World” is that 10-15 pages BEFORE the inciting incident. The inciting incident, of course, is when something happens to throw your character’s world into disarray (in Cast Away, this is when the plane crashes, obviously). Here’s the problem I see in a lot of scripts. Writers believe that because they’re just “setting things up” and the exciting inciting incident is right around the corner, that The Set-Up World can be boring. They can show their protagonist doing boring things and it’ll all be okay because the fun is coming soon. NO. It’s very important that during The Set-Up World, you set up your character in the most interesting way possible. So here, we show Chuck (Tom Hanks) running all over the world, desperately trying to ensure that Fed-Ex packages arrive on time. He’s yelling at people, busting his ass to get all the packages on the trucks. Things are HAPPENING. You can intersperse a few slower scenes in this section, but be careful. Too many and we’ll get bored before your inciting incident even arrives.
3) Know what you need to set up in the Set-Up World. Set up those things and nothing more – Make a list of the ESSENTIAL THINGS you need to set up about your main character. Come up with those scenes and don’t include ANYTHING MORE. This will keep your setup streamlined. In the early draft of Cast Away I read, there was all this extraneous stuff about the FEDEX headquarters and Chuck’s family that JUST WASN’T NECESSARY. Broyles Jr. and Zemeckis figured out they needed to set up Chuck’s job, his relationship with Kelly, and that was it. So those other scenes were excised.
4) If your protagonist’s life is boring and therefore uninteresting to document, get to your inciting incident sooner. – If your protagonist is someone who doesn’t have an interesting life to set up, such as The Dude in The Big Lebowski, try to get to your inciting incident even sooner. We establish The Dude in a robe at the grocery store. Then in the very next scene, when he gets home, two thugs attack him and piss on his rug, which is the inciting incident that starts the story. Exciting characters can have longer Set-Up Worlds. But do NOT give us 6-7 scenes of a stoner being stoned before the inciting incident arrives. We’ll give up on the script before it happens.
5) IRONY ALERT – Remember, always add irony to your script if possible. Double points if it’s a part of your premise! Chuck is the man who’s always on a tight schedule, who never has a second to spare. All of a sudden he’s on an island with all the time in the world.
6) Recognize when you have a good character and expand his role – Surprisingly enough, Wilson was barely in the draft of the script I read. But someone recognized how powerful he could be and so majorly expanded his role. If you have a show-stopping (or interesting or memorable) character, make sure to give him as much time as you can in your story. An example of a writer missing the boat on this was George Lucas in Episode 1. He had a badass villain in Darth Maul, but didn’t recognize it, didn’t expand his role, and therefore missed an opportunity to do one of the only things right in that script.
7) MID-POINT SHIFT ALERT – Remember, a good mid-point shift SHIFTS the second half of the movie in a slightly different direction so it’s not the same as the first. We have a pretty clean mid-point shift in Cast Away. We cut to 3 years later, with Chuck no longer being the green timid survivalist, but an aged vet of the island who’s figured out how to survive.
8) If you are going to jump forward in time, use an event to motivate it – Staying on that topic, I always see writers insert huge time-jumps into their scripts that come out of nowhere. We’ll be sitting with a family watching TV, and then the next line I read is… “8 months later.” If you’re going to make a big time jump in your screenplay, try to create a weighted moment to initiate it. Cast Away does this with Chuck’s tooth, which has been killing him for weeks it hurts so badly. He finally has no choice but to take it out. He does so with a rock, and the pain causes him to pass out, which leads perfectly into a FADE IN and a “3 years later.”
9) We need to be constantly reminded of the motivation if we’re to care about your hero succeeding – In this draft, Chuck did not have a picture of Kelly (his girlfriend) that he kept looking at to keep him going. I was shocked by the effect it had. In the movie, I so wanted him to get off the island. In this draft, I definitely didn’t care as much. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how big of an effect that picture of Kelly had. Because I was reminded of her, I constantly wanted Chuck to get back to her. Getting off the island to survive is selfish. Getting off the island to get back to Kelly is selfless.
10) The 10 Draft Rule – Every script should go through at least 10 drafts. The Sixth Sense had 20+ drafts. Good Will Hunting had over 50. And by ‘draft,’ I don’t mean going through a script and casually rewriting scenes you don’t like. An official ‘draft’ is where you read through your script and assess all problems (what is and isn’t working) in order to come up with solutions to apply to those problems. I read way too many scripts that feel like early drafts, such as this Cast Away draft which includes ten early pages of family scenes that are totally unnecessary to the story. That unfocused stuff drains its way out of the screenplay after ten drafts.
BONUS TIP – Good Chuck, Bad Chuck, Fuck Chuck – Here’s proof of the above. In this draft of the script, Chuck starts going crazy and is therefore split into two personalities, Good Chuck and Bad Chuck. Clearly, this was a method designed by Broyles Jr. so that Chuck could logically speak out loud and we could learn what was going on in his head. It was also a very cliché EARLY DRAFT choice. By going through many more drafts, he eventually realized that Wilson The Volleyball could take on the roll of someone for Chuck to talk to. I read too many scripts where writers don’t get past Good Chuck, Bad Chuck. And the script suffers for it.
These are 10 tips from Cast Away. To get 500 more screenwriting tips from movies as varied as “When Harry Met Sally,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “The Hangover,” check out my book, Scriptshadow Secrets, on Amazon!
