Today’s script uses one of my favorite framing devices in all of screenwriting. Oh, and Andrew Kevin Walker is back!
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: After one of the world’s best assassins fails to kill his latest target, he must endure the devastating repercussions from his handlers… unless he fights back.
About: It’s finally here! This was the re-team-up I’ve been waiting for. Andrew Kevin Walker, the writer of “Seven,” and David Fincher, arguably the best director in the world. The film debuted this weekend on Netflix.
Writer: Andrew Kevin Walker
Details: about two hours long
No, it was not on my 2023 movie bingo card that David Fincher’s next movie was going to be his take on John Wick.
You know, sometimes you cry out to the screenwriting gods and you ask them, “Why do you not giveth in 2023? Why do you only taketh away?” And the movie gods came back and they say, “I’m sorry. I’ve been preoccupied up here. We had a writer’s strike. We had an actor’s strike. I’m still hung over from that whole Covid thing. I haven’t been at my best. I read Scriptshadow every day, Carson. I understand how upset you are. So as a token of my appreciation, and as a big apology, I give you, The Killer.”
I was nervous going into this one. David Fincher lost his way with whatever that movie was he made a couple of years ago. Pretty sure Mank will be used by future psychiatrists to study the long-term effects of boredom.
So I didn’t know if Fincher just didn’t care about entertaining audiences anymore or he spent a night reading 1078 positive reviews of his movies in a row and became convinced he could make anything work, even a wandering narrative about a house.
Also, this project had next to zero promotion behind it. I don’t understand how the re-teaming of David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker has a zero dollar marketing campaign while that monstrosity of Marvel underachievement is blanketing every inch of ad space on my computer screen. I’m just gonna blame Netflix for that. They still don’t seem to know what a marketing campaign is!
Ironically, that helped my viewing experience. Because I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this film. Due to preconceived notions, I actually thought it was a movie about a serial killer. I figured if Andrew Kevin Walker wrote it and David Fincher directed it and the movie was called The Killer, it had to be about a serial killer. But it was not about that. It was about a hitman. And I would go so far as to say it’s the best hitman film made in the past decade.
We start out with our hero (“The Killer”) in an empty apartment in France keeping tabs on an apartment across the street. A rich businessman lives there. Over the next 20 minutes, The Killer takes us into his assassination routine, which basically amounts to: stay patient. Wait for your opportunity. And when the time comes: strike. Oh, and listen to good music along the way.
There’s only one problem. The Killer screws up and accidentally shoots the wrong person. This is the first time this has ever happened to him so he isn’t sure what to do. But he knows that it’d be better to figure it out while running. So that’s what he does.
Cut to Brazil, where The Killer heads to his wife’s house. But when he gets there, he finds out that she was attacked. Luckily, she survived and is in the hospital. He knows the truth. They came for him and when he wasn’t there, they tried to make it hurt. The Killer gets from his wife what little she knows about the attackers and then a different kind of killing begins – personal killing.
He heads out to different parts of the world – first to attack his boss, the man who ordered the hit, then to find the cab driver who drove his wife’s attackers to his home, then to the two attackers (a crazy scary roid-rage dude and a mysterious woman whose hair reminded the driver of a “a q-tip”). Each sequence is its own little mini-movie. And each one carries an intense determination. For the Killer wants to make sure that nobody – and he means nobody – ever gets a chance to kill his wife again.
So, what is this framing device I alluded to in the byline? A framing device is just a way to frame the story you’re telling. One of the most common framing devices is real time. It just means you set your story in real time. Since movies are generally two hours long, you’ve created a frame by which your story will take place in two hours time.
Today’s framing device is a little more complex. I call it the vignette framing device. It’s the device that Quentin Tarantino popularized. Instead of telling one long movie, you break your movie up into vignettes. The vignettes can be as long or as short as you want them to be. The reason it works so well is because it breaks your story down into more manageable chunks. Instead of having one long two hour movie, you have six 20 minute movies, as is the case here. And then, within each of those 20 minute chunks, you tell a more manageable story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The way that Andrew Kevin Walker does it is by isolating each vignette to a new city. So then, within each city, we got a new story. It’s like getting six movies for the price of one.
I loved the way Walker worked within these vignettes. Each one has a similar structure. He sets up a goal – usually an assassination. And then he builds up to that moment. This is an important part of maximizing any story you tell. You want to establish the goal and then build up to it. The build up portion is most effective when you utilize suspense.
Walker establishes this in the very first sequence. We see our hitman in an apartment across the street from his target and so we know what his ultimate goal is. But if he just shoots his target a second later, you wasted all of that potential suspense. By building up to that moment over time – and if you’re like Walker, and really know how to milk suspense, you can expand that time out for 15, even 20 minutes – you build a need within the reader to see them do the job.
Because you’re isolating the goal to the vignette, you can build suspense into the sequence itself. Contrast this with, say, a heist. If this same character wanted to rob a bank and the robbing of the bank occurred in the third act, you’re asking for a ton of investment from the reader without giving them much in return. There’s only so much you can do to keep a reader satisfied over 90 minutes without a payoff. But, like I said, if you’re using the vignette framing device, you can give them that payoff much sooner.
Now, it’s important that when you’re using the vignette system, you vary the vignettes. If each vignette is the main character sitting in a building across from another building, waiting for the opportunity to shoot his target, we’re going to get bored. So you just find different goals and different situations you can tell these individual stories in.
(Spoilers follow) For example, one of the vignettes has The Killer locate the cab driver who drove the attackers to and from his wife’s place. The Killer then gets into the cab, pretending he’s a passenger, and only once they’re on the move does he reveal who he really is. And now you have this vignette where he extracts information from the driver.
Later still, there’s a scene where he locates one of the passengers who attacked his wife and he simply shows up at a dinner she’s having and sits down across from her. The entire vignette is the buildup to him killing her. But unlike the other scenes, this one feels different because it’s taking place in a public setting with a character who is perfectly aware that he is here to kill her.
One thing this movie made me realize was that when David Fincher signs on to your script, that must be the single greatest feeling a screenwriter can have. Because his directing is so amazing that he makes every inch of the script 100 times better. I was watching this and listening to certain lines of dialogue and noted how if that line was in a different movie with a different director it probably wouldn’t work. But in a David Fincher-directed project, the line sounds amazing because his directing style is so impactful that you’re pulled all the way into every single moment and believe it no matter what.
Case in point, one of the hardest things to do as a screenwriter is write a fight scene that works great on the page. Every fight scene reads generically. I’m guessing that the fight scene written in this script was similar. But the way Fincher directed it was amazing. It reminded me of a much darker more artsy version of that Terminator fight between the Terminator and the T-1000 when they first battle at the mall. It had that same gravitas. Every throw seemed to move the frame. Every fist that landed felt like an earthquake. And my TV doesn’t even have good sound! I would go so far as to say this fight was better than any fight in any of the four John Wick movies. It hit me harder for some reason. It felt so real.
Back to the screenwriting. One thing that Walker did really well here was he made you wonder what was going to happen at the end of each vignette. Remember that if you build up to a moment for a very long time and that moment goes exactly how we thought it would, we’re going to be unsatisfied. So what Walker does is clever. In that opening sequence, after 20 minutes of our killer meticulously taking us through his perfected system of executing a kill, he screws up and misses his target.
Why is this so critical? Not only is it a surprise that creates a dramatic impact in the moment, but it now means that in every vignette going forward, we’re going to be unsure what will happen. We think he’s going to do his job, but since the writer has established that he can fail, we know that’s a possibility too. And when you have that dichotomy stuck in the reader’s head, your suspense works like gangbusters, because we truly don’t know what’s going to happen at the end of the sequence.
I was thinking all weekend about my Thursday article. I realized that I forgot one of the reasons screenwriting has dropped off and that’s that writers aren’t spending as much time on their scripts as they used to.
Remember, back in the day, any movie you saw had to go through an excruciating process of being vetted by dozens of people, all of whom expressed some level of doubt in the project. The script would then go back into the system to address those doubts and come back stronger. It was only once the script addressed the large majority of these issues that it was allowed to get a green light and get made.
These days, the need for product is so high, especially with all these streamers desperate for content, scripts aren’t being vetted and challenged as much. So we keep getting these “third-draft” movies. And believe me, they feel like third drafts.
This is the first script in a while where I can tell the writer put a maximum amount of effort into it. This feels like a screenplay that has been vetted. It feels like a screenplay that went through a lot of pushback before coming back better. And boy did it make a difference.
All of that leads to one of my favorite movies of the year!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The Vignette Approach is not all that different from the Sequence Approach. The Sequence Approach breaks your script down into eight mini stories, as opposed to one giant story. The difference with the Vignette Approach is that it’s less about blending each storyline in with each other. Which means it’s easier to do, because with the Sequence Approach, there is the additional challenge of making it not look like a Sequence Approach. You don’t have to hide the fact that your script is a series of vignettes and therefore you can just focus on making each vignette as good as it can possibly be.
