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One of the reasons I have a unique perspective on screenwriting is that I’ve read more bad scripts, from cover to cover, than anyone else on earth.
I can’t prove this, of course. But if I’m not number 1, I’m definitely in the top 5. And that’s because I do something really unique, which is I review screenplays. And when you review screenplays, you can’t stop reading them when they suck.
Almost everybody else in this industry (and this industry is the only place where anybody actually reads screenplays remember) will stop reading a script the minute they get bored. They only finish a script when they’re enjoying it.
I would stop whenever I was bored if I could. But I can’t. I have to keep going so I can accurately review (or consult on) the script.
Maybe there are some readers – especially back in the 90s when agencies and production houses had to keep up with a massive screenplay-driven industry – who have read as many bad scripts, cover-to-cover, as I have, since they had to write up coverage. But I doubt it.
So why am I bringing this up?
Because you don’t truly understand what you *shouldn’t do* in a screenplay until you’ve been forced to read 80 pages past the first moment you knew the script sucked. Let me give you an example.
I read a script a long time ago. It might have even been reviewed on this site. It was about a group of people who were stuck inside a castle during a zombie attack. Absolutely nothing happened during this script. I think the zombies attacked once or twice. By and large, the script was about people waiting inside a castle. I figured out pretty early what the main script mistake was – that the protagonists weren’t active. That they sat around and did nothing until the zombies attacked, in which case they’d ward them off, then go back to doing nothing for 40 pages.
It’s one thing to learn what’s wrong with a script and give up on it immediately. It’s another to know what’s wrong with a script then have to endure two more hours of it. When you’re forced to sit with a mistake for that long, it gets tattooed into your brain. You will never again make the mistake of writing non-active characters after reading Zombie Castle.
But it goes further than that. Because then I had to ask the question, “Well, wait a minute. There are good movies with characters trapped inside of one location. Why do those movies work?” You research those movies then you say, “Oh yeah, a big difference is that there’s way more conflict between the characters in this one than in Zombie Castle. That conflict kept the scenes entertaining even though the protagonists weren’t actively trying to achieve something.”
In Cloverfield Lane, a group of characters are locked in a bunker the whole movie, the difference being our main character WAS TYRING TO ESCAPE. In other words, she wasn’t just waiting around chatting like the characters in Zombie Castle. She was scheming. She was plotting. That kept the plot moving despite the fact that it was contained.
I wouldn’t have learned this stuff if I hadn’t endured two hours of the worst version of it and then asked myself “Why?” That’s my favorite question to ask when I’m watching something bad, by the way. “Why is this bad?” Not “why” in a general. “Why” as in SPECIFICALLY WRITE OUT WHY. It’s a powerful way to learn.
I think you know where I’m going with this. That’s right. I’m telling you you have to read bad screenplays. And I don’t mean two or three total. I mean at least one a week. Because until you become a high intermediate screenwriter, you will learn more from a bad screenplay than you will a good one. Hands down, guaranteed. You need to sit in these mistakes for hours at a time for them to resonate. And once they resonate, YOU WILL NEVER MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES IN YOUR OWN WRITING.
I can already hear the whining. “I don’t want to.” “That sounds like my own personal hell.” “What a waste of time.” Guys. You want to make this your profession, right? Then that means, sometimes, you’re going to have do things that you don’t like. And this is one of them. Cause I’m telling you, it’s going to make you a better screenwriter.
The irony of only reading good scripts is that you get so lost in the glow of the script, you don’t actually understand why the script is working. You just have a good “feeling” after you’ve read the script. This feeling then “inspires” you to work on your own stuff.
But all you’re doing is riding the high of inspiration adrenaline. There isn’t some Law of Writing Transference whereby if Aaron Sorkin writes a great scene, you too, will write a great scene just because you enjoyed his. Let me quantify that for you: Feeling good while you’re writing doesn’t mean you’re writing well.
Don’t get me wrong. Inspiration is a good thing. But unless you identify what it is about a screenplay that works, you’re probably not going to be able to transfer that into your script. For example, if you don’t know that the main reason The Rock’s and Kevin Hart’s characters in Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle work because of irony (a weak insecure teenager is placed into the strongest body in the world, a star high school linebacker is placed into the weakest body in the world) and instead try to generically mimic the banter between the characters, it isn’t going to work because you haven’t actually learned anything.
When you’re bored out of your mind reading a bad script, that’s all you have time to do is identify why you hate the script so much. It’s actually the perfect situation for learning because you’re stuck.
Let me give you another example.
I once reviewed a script with a really fun premise called, Liar, Coward, Judge. Here’s the logline: “Deep winter in Civil War Era Missouri – A Union Deserter, a Priest and an Assassin must fight for survival when they are stranded in the wilderness and hunted by a terrible Sasquatch.” Cool right? How can something like this be bad? But it was bad in the worst kind of a way: It was boring.
Because I was forced to sit with my boredom for so long, I got punched in the face over and over again with the script’s biggest mistake. That the characters were too simplistic. Here’s what I wrote in the review…
“But strangely enough, I didn’t sense depth to any of the characters. They were all surface-level people. A priest who’s a dedicated priest. An assassin who’s a mean assassin. A deserter who’s a coward.
The best characters tend to be dynamic. Bad people who have good qualities and good people who have bad qualities. That unexpectedness adds a rich extra layer to the character that makes them far more interesting to watch. Think of one of the most popular characters in the history of cinema – Batman. He’s a good person, but he’s not above doing bad things to get the job done.”
Sitting with weak characters for so long taught me the value of adding dimension to characters. I guarantee you I don’t figure that out if I stop reading the script the second I get bored.
So many of the mistakes I see writers make wouldn’t be made if they had read just ten bad screenplays cover to cover. For example, let’s say a writer sends me a 150 page script, which happens more often than I’d like. I guarantee they never would’ve done that, if they themselves, were forced to read ten 150 page scripts cover to cover. “Oh yeah,” they’d realize. “Reading one of these kind of sucks. Okay, I’m never making that mistake again.”
Where do you find bad screenplays? Head over to SimplyScripts.com. They’ve got a lot of beginner screenwriters over there posting stuff. You can also do a search here for “Amateur Showdown” and there are many amateur scripts you can download from the posts.
I’m going to say it one last time. You will be more likely to not make a mistake if you yourself were tortured by that mistake.
Happy weekend writing (and reading)! :)
Is this the script Christopher Nolan should’ve directed instead of Interstellar?
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: After NASA sends a crew of astronauts into deep space to find another habitable planet, the crew is unexpectedly woken up from hyper-sleep and must survive a mysterious new threat that comes from the one place they never expected – Earth.
About: This script appeared on last year’s Black List. The writers, John and Thomas Sonntag, are repped by Gersh. About five years ago, they sold a show called “Blackmail” with Aaron Paul attached to NBC but it never went to pilot. They’re still looking for that big produced credit break we all are!
Writers: The Sonntag Brothers
Details: 100 pages even
You still have a month and a half to finish your script. You should be writing every single day.
After finishing Generation Leap, I thought to myself, “Would this script win Sci-Fi Showdown?” I came to the conclusion that the answer is yes. It’s not a great script. But it’s got an interesting premise. It’s got a plot that moves fast. And I haven’t seen this movie before.
Some of it is sloppy but that’s the case with almost every script. So, if you’re entering Sci-Fi Showdown, read this screenplay (someone from the Comments section should be able to send it to you). Cause this script is the bar you’re trying to beat. Let’s take a look at it…
At the beginning of our story, our heroine, Morgan, explains the Wait Calculation to us. “Imagine a nest of birds and they’re out of worms. Dire stuff. So one brave bird volunteers to fly out across the land and save the nest. But while she’s out on her perilous journey, the R&D department back in the nest creates a jetpack. They strap that sucker on a second bird, and suddenly the second bird passes the first bird, gets the worm, and returns to the nest a hero.”
She continues with the foreshadowing monologue: “How long should someone wait to leave so they won’t get lapped by something better? It’s the hardest question for an explorer to get right because there is no answer.”
Cut to 120 years later where Morgan, along with former surgeon Isaiah Wilkins and elder statesman Leland Wong, are the three astronauts tasked with traveling to the planet of Meliora to see if it can sustain life. NASA wants another planet to go to when the ozone completely collapses. We’re currently in the middle of the 300 year journey.
But the three are woken up from hyper-sleep by a giant ship that engulfs them. Inside that new ship, they meet Hunter, Yuri, and Alyx, also from NASA. Hunter, the captain, explains that they left earth just *twenty* years ago, also to fly to Meliora, and part of their mission was to pick these three up. Had they not, by the time Morgan, Isaiah, and Leland made it to Meliora, it would’ve already been settled.
Hunter is a bit hoity-toity about the whole thing. And when Morgan and Isaiah attempt to give their opinions on matters, the “future” group rolls their eyes. Morgan and her crew are from a lost generation. It’d be like someone from 1930 telling you how to handle stress.
While the two teams butt heads, they’re alerted by the ship’s A.I. to an object up ahead. It turns out there’s a *third* clunky-looking ship ahead of them. As they come up on it, they learn it was a ship sent to Meliora from the Reagan era! Our ship has just overcome THIS ship via the Wait Calculation. Unfortunately, the technology of that ship is so dated that when they try to de-thaw the pilots, the entire ship malfunctions and the astronauts die!
Back on the big ship, the two 3-person generations get to talking and realize that, if the Wait Calculation has already been met twice, it will surely be met again. Which means a fourth ship is coming! Lo and behold, that’s what happens. The group go back into hyper-sleep but a few years later, get woken up and boarded by the fatest of the Wait Calculation ships yet.
The big difference is that these new astronauts are angry and militaristic. It turns out that after the third group left earth, there was a world war. Which has shaped this latest mission by NASA, which is more territorial in nature. The two original teams will have to unite to take on the military team. But it may be for nothing. Because even if they defeat them, who says another ship isn’t coming?
What a weird script that’s also kind of a good script.
First off, I’ve never heard of this principle before. But as soon as it was explained to me, I thought, “Huh, that’s cool.” I like sci-fi ideas that make you think. And this one kept me thinking.
Let’s go through it together. You can get in a shuttle now in order to reach another planet in 300 years. However, if you wait 50 years, the technology could theoretically advance to a point whereby you make it to the planet in 200 years. Even with a 50 year head start, you would still beat the first ship to the planet by 50 years. But it gets better. If you wait 100 years, the technology might advance to the point where it only takes you 50 years to make it to the planet, in which case you beat the first ship by 150 years and the second by 100 years.
If that’s the case, why leave now? Why not wait until technology advances and you can get there faster? But if technology is always advancing, you should technically never leave (since waiting is always going to get you there faster).
Ugh, my head hurts.
The Wait Principle isn’t the only neat idea in Generation Leap. The script also poses the question of how generations 100 years apart would work together. The ideologies that defined each generation would be night and day. Imagine the mindset of someone who risked their lives to defeat Germany in World War 2 working with someone whose entire existence has been defined by social media posts. Could those two vastly different mindsets work together effectively? I find that an interesting question.
Unfortunately, the script doesn’t have enough time to get into those deeper questions. The first generation is basically about being the first humans to visit another planet. They want all the glory. The second generation doesn’t care about prestige. They just want to get the job done. And the third generation is hardcore militaristic.
As a result, with a few fleeting exceptions, the debates are surface level.
Despite this, the script’s relentless plotting keeps it entertaining. We’re woken up from hyper-sleep by something mysterious. It’s the next generation ship, swallowing them up. After they come to terms with this new team, they discover another ship. It’s the ship that left before them. As soon as that’s over and they go back to sleep, we cut to the military ship showing up. These guys are so combustible that they create enough problems to keep the plot firing on all cylinders until the end.
This is the kind of script I could see becoming a movie. That’s why I’m making it the bar for Sci-Fi Showdown. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it doesn’t explore its premise as intelligently as I would’ve hoped. But there’s more good here than bad. And when you have more good than bad, you have the foundation for a movie. Generation Leap was a fun, if imperfect, script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: I’m putting an end to one of the most overused science-fiction tropes out there right now. You cannot use it anymore. I’m talking about when the ship (or base) doesn’t have enough oxygen to keep everyone alive for the remainder of the mission, so now they have to decide who to get rid of. I’ve read this in maybe 50 science-fiction scripts. I’ve written it before in my own science-fiction script. Science-fiction is one of those genres where you don’t want to pick the low-hanging fruit. The way to stand out with science-fiction is to dream up things that we haven’t seen before. So no more ‘oxygen is running out’ subplots. Every time you think of that as an option, remember that the reader has probably encountered it a dozen times.
Genre: Drama/Supernatural/Comedy
Premise: A family becomes internet sensations when they find a real ghost in their home and start posting videos about it on social media.
About: One of the hot projects that came together this month was the David Harbour Anthony Mackie collaboration with director Christopher Landen (Happy Death Day, Freaky, Paranormal Activity 2). Landen will be adapting the Vice short story by Geoff Manaugh, which you can read here. This one came out of nowhere, as the short story was published all the way back in 2017. Netflix bought the package.
Writer: Geoff Manaugh
Details: about 5000 words (one-quarter of a screenplay)
Today’s story institutes the dreaded 3-genre mash-up. For those new to screenwriting, the 2-genre mashup has resulted in some amazing movies (Comedy and Supernatural = Ghostbusters). But it is REALLY hard to pull off the 3-genre mash-up. Why? Because the more genres, the less focus. And focus is everything in a screenplay narrative.
Now I’m not saying it’s impossible! No no no no no. Don’t you misquote me now. Yesterday’s movie, which I loved, spanned three, maybe even four genres. But the degree of difficulty rises exponentially with multiple genres. And I’m not convinced Ernest rises to the challenge. All things considered, this is such a weird short story, that I’m not going to dismiss it out of hand. It’s worth discussing for sure.
Frank Presley, the newly headhunted president of a suburban hospital-billing firm, has just moved into an old house in the Chicago suburbs with his wife, Melanie, his 14 year old son, Fulton, and his 18 year old son, Kevin. One night, while trying to sleep, Frank hears a noise, goes downstairs, and finds a ghost hanging out.
Frank pulls out his phone camera, presses record, and, for some reason, starts laughing uproariously. He later puts this up on Youtube. People don’t take it seriously because, of course it’s not a real ghost. But Frank keeps seeing the ghost, who he names “Ernest,” and keeps recording it, putting more and more videos online until people can’t deny anymore that it’s a real ghost!
The good vibes don’t last long, though, because Frank is a big fat jerk. He yells at the ghost, tries to scare the ghost, throws things at the ghost, mocks the ghost, and, of course, laughs at the ghost. Melanie is not a fan of the way her husband is treating Ernest. She believes it’s because he hates his work and needs an outlet for his anger.
Then, one day, Ernest disappears. And Kevin does also. The millions of people who watch Frank’s videos pour through them and spot all these background conversations where Kevin and Ernest were secretly chatting with each other. The two have run off together. When the police catch up with them, Kevin tells the world that Ernest was murdered by his uncle and justice must be done!
But the FBI puts Ernest behind bars for the crime of kidnapping. A bummed out Kevin goes on Jimmy Kimmel to make a case for the government to release Ernest. But Kimmel has a surprise. It’s Ernest! Who’s just been released. They verified the murder. And although the uncle who killed Ernest died 20 years ago, Ernest finally has peace. Which means he can disappear into the next realm. Kevin asks if they’ll ever see each other again. Ernest says, without question.
I always love speculating on how a project got purchased. It’s important to study these things if you’re a writer because you want to understand what things buyers are interested in. At first, this seemed too zany to fall into any obvious sale category.
But a couple of things stuck out to me.
First of all, any idea with a ghost in it has the potential to be marketable. If this were a movie about a family that found a normal person living in their house, it’s not nearly as marketable, right? (Although, as I typed that, I realized that could be a pretty interesting movie in its own right) I bring this up because I read so many scripts that don’t have a clear element for a studio to market the movie around. You need that if you want to get people excited about your screenplay.
On top of that, the idea is fresh. I’ve never seen a movie before about a ghost going viral on Youtube. I’m not the biggest fan of the idea. But, objectively, it’s a fresh idea in so much as we haven’t seen it before. So now you’ve got two things working in your favor.
Finally, there’s actually some interesting character stuff going on in this story. The dad clearly has issues. He’s torturing a ghost, laughing about it, and putting it up on Youtube. Wherever there’s interesting character stuff, there are actors who want to play those parts. Between the dad and the ghost, there’s some juicy stuff to play around with here.
The problem is that there isn’t a clear movie structure to this story. I’m guessing that’s why nothing’s happened with it since 2017. It’s kind of hard to see where the movie is.
You can’t tell the movie through Frank’s eyes. He’s too much of an asshole. I suspect that the story will be told from Kevin’s POV, even though he’s a background character for most of the short story. He’s the one who wants to connect with Ernest. You’d probably also move them leaving to earlier in the screenplay. That’s the big “journey” that jumpstarts the narrative so it can’t show up 60% of the way into the story. I’m thinking it should happen at the beginning of Act 2.
And then you would need to clarify why they’re going on this journey, which the short story does a lousy job of explaining. You have to explain that Ernest is trying to solve his murder. In which case you CANNOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES have his killer already be dead. There’s no dramatic value in that choice whatsoever. It’s way more interesting if the guy who killed him is still alive and Ernest (with Kevin’s help) is going to confront him.
Speaking of the murder, I kept asking why it took half the story for Ernest to mention he was murdered. Why didn’t that come up earlier? Even if he didn’t want to bring it up, the tens of millions of people studying Ernest on the internet would’ve known his entire life story within ten minutes of him going viral. They would’ve figured out he was murdered, which would’ve necessitated us to explore the murder plot. Here, it feels like something that came up as an afterthought. Oh yeah, and I was murdered.
This is the kind of story that needs somebody really weird to tell it. A Charlie Kaufman type. Maybe even the director from yesterday’s wonderfully weird movie, Anders Thomas Jensen. Christopher Landen is a good director who understands the balance between horror and comedy. But I’m not sure that’s what this is about. This movie wants to make some deeper statements about humanity and Ernest has some, dare I say, Edward Scissorhands qualities to him that will require a deft touch. If Landen can nail it, though, he’s going to jump to the next level as a director.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Who you choose as your main character has a huge impact on the story. Here, you can choose between Frank, a dude who’s having a mid-life crisis and taking it out on the ghost who lives in his house, or Kevin, who’s much more grounded, much more sympathetic, and therefore makes a cleaner protagonist. They were just talking about this issue for the development process of Jungle Cruise. That movie had been in development for a couple of decades. The way they finally cracked the story, according to the producer, was to shift the protagonist role away from The Rock’s captain character and make Emily Blunt’s scientist character the hero. By doing this, it freed up The Rock’s character to be more fun and goofy, similar to what they did with Jack Sparrow in the Pirates movies. If the movie being told in your current draft feels boring, ask yourself, “What would the movie look like through the eyes of [Second Biggest Character] or [Third Biggest Character]?” Ya never know. Your boring movie could instantly come alive. Go ahead, do it right now. I dare ya.
Today’s film will end up in my Top 10 movies of the year, maybe even my top 5!
Genre: Thriller/Drama/Comedy
Premise: After a highly volatile army general loses his wife in a subway crash, a trio of mentally unstable men come to him with evidence that the crash was orchestrated by a criminal organization known as the Riders of Justice.
About: Nikolaj Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen have written a ton of screenplays together. Anders has something like 25 feature credits. I guess they write and make movies a lot faster in Denmark! Star Mads Mikkelsen has worked with Jensen a number of times. Here’s Mads’ insight into their most recent collaboration process: “As far as I remember, I think Anders Thomas pitched both the story and the idea of morphing his two dramatic universes together: his own “insanity world,” and his more [straightforward] writer side, which writes dramatic things for others … Normally, he pitches me his stuff, and if I call him and say, “What the f**k are you doing?,” then that’s a good sign. Because it’s always insane, what he’s doing, and if I’m on board it gives him the confidence to continue writing.” Riders of Justice is currently a digital rental so you can watch it right now!
Writer: Nikolaj Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen
Details: 2 hours long
I, of course, could’ve gone and seen “Old” this weekend.
The reason I didn’t was because I could’ve written that review without seeing the movie. I already know what’s going to happen. I know Old is going to be sloppy. I know it’s going to be inadvertently silly at times. I know the last 20 minutes are going to be terrible and not make sense. I know I’m going to get triggered about how someone as untalented as M. Night was able to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes for so long and make a living in this business. I’ve written that review a dozen times already. Nothing ever changes with Night.
Conversely, Riders of Justice may be the most unpredictable movie of the year. You have no idea what’s coming next. Not only that, but everything about this movie screams “This shouldn’t have worked.” The main character is aggressively unlikable. The tone of the movie shifts wildly between dead serious and sitcom-level broad. It’s weird. It’s unruly. It’s unconventional.
I love when scripts take big risks that shouldn’t have worked and somehow make them work because those are the scripts that have the decoded matrix within them. If something works that shouldn’t have, there’s some insight into the fabric of storytelling we don’t usually get.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the story. A teenage girl, Mathilde, and her mother, are riding a packed subway car. Otto, an odd man who uses extreme mathematical equations to predict car accidents, has just been fired from his job. Still, he offers the mother his seat. After she sits down, a sheet of metal from another train slices through the side of the train, killing everyone who was sitting on that side, including the mother (Otto and Mathilde survive since they were standing).
Markus, an army captain currently on duty, gets the call that his wife has died and flies home. Markus, who’s consumed with violence and anger issues, has a terrible relationship with Mathilde. This should be a time of togetherness. But he and his daughter seem as distant as ever. They are soon visited by Otto, who’s been studying the train crash. His computer model has discovered that this was not an accident, but rather a hit. A gangbanger who was also sitting on the fatal side of the train was about to name the Riders of Justice gang in court for a series murders. So the Riders of Justice had the other train deliberately crash into this one to kill him.
A furious Markus is now determined to kill every single member of the Riders of Justice, something he can’t do without help. So Otto enlists his buddies Lennart (who’s spent a large amount of time in a mental hospital) and Emmenthaler (an overweight OCD hacker with anxiety and depression) to help find each of the members and kill them. Of course, when the Riders of Justice figure out what’s happening, they take the fight to our motley unorthodox crew instead.
One of the hardest things to figure out about this movie is how a main character THIS UNLIKABLE could work. We talk all the time about how important it is to make a character likable because if the audience doesn’t like who’s leading them on the journey, they’re not going to care about the journey. And they certainly aren’t going to care whether the hero succeeds or not.
Markus shouldn’t have worked. He’s not only an asshole (one of the first lines we hear from him after he gets home from the mother’s funeral is to tell Mathilde that she needs to work out so she doesn’t get fat) but he doesn’t talk a whole lot. When someone’s an asshole and ALSO doesn’t say much, it exaggerates the assholeness. We’re not able to get inside their head to understand why they’re an asshole, so the fact that Markus just stares forward angrily all the time makes him even more unlikable.
So why do we still care? Why do we root for Markus?
Well, when you have an unlikable hero, it’s critical that you incorporate something called OFFSETTING. Offsetting is exactly what it sounds like. You come up with a bunch of things to offset the hero’s negative disposition. For starters, Markus’s wife was just killed. We’re always going to feel sorry for a character who’s just lost someone.
Markus is active. Audiences love active characters. They love characters who go after what they want. The more aggressively they go after it, the more we tend to like them. As soon as Markus realizes that his wife was murdered, he goes into Active-Mode. It’s time to kill the Riders of Justice.
Audiences also like characters who are good at what they do. There’s a scene early on where Markus goes to ask their first ‘person of interest’ what they know and the guy sticks a gun in his face and tells him to leave. Markus doesn’t say anything, lets the guy close the door on him, walks back to his car, and then, out of nowhere, he spins around, walks right back up to the door, knocks, and when the guy opens the door with the gun, Markus executes a blink-and-you-miss-it takedown of the guy, snatching his gun away then shooting him in the face. It’s not only an intense scene. It shows how skilled Markus is. After that moment, we think, “Yeah, I’m glad this guy is on our side.”
Another thing I noticed Jensen do was he offloaded more screen time than normal to the other characters. Riders of Justice is more of an ensemble piece than a “John Wick” style revenge movie. The reason why that’s important is because all of the other characters are interesting and positive and cool and fun. So we’re not stuck, 90% of the time, with this dreary angry man. That’s a big takeaway for me. If you have an intensely negative hero, consider making your script more of an ensemble piece.
The other thing about this script that shouldn’t have worked was the tone. On one side, you had Markus living in the most extreme intense dramatic movie you could imagine. While on the other side, you had Denmark’s version of Larry, Mo, and Curly.
There’s this whole subplot whereby Mathilde insists that her father see a psychiatrist for his anger issues and when she catches him talking to Otto, Lennart, and Emmenthaler in their barn, the four of them freak out and lie to Mathilde, telling her that they’re Markus’s new psychology team, here to make him better. They’re going to be sticking around for a few weeks and working with him 24/7. At one point, the ruse goes so far that Lennart, who, remember, is certifiably crazy, pretends to be a psychiatrist and does a therapy session with Mathilde. I mean that’s a scene you might see on Modern Family.
It took me a while to figure out how they made this work. Because this is the kind of thing I routinely rip screenwriters for – jumping back and forth between wildly different tones. What I realized was that these three characters weren’t just wacky to be wacky. As the movie goes on, we get into all of their backstories, which inform us why the three of them are so broken. In other words, their psychosis is anchored in reality. It’s not like Jensen said, “Eh, let’s just make him a goofball hacker and have him say funny nonsense.” This hacker has led a tortured life, as have the other two.
I still don’t think many writers could’ve pulled this off. But the ones who can are the ones who build up those backstories so that the “crazy” characters’ lives are based in some level of reality.
In the end, the thing I liked most about this script is that it morphed into this unexpected family movie. All these weird people were living together under one roof. And despite being the most unlikely family ever, they managed to make it work in a weird way. There was something sweet about that. And I don’t think I’ve ever used the word ‘sweet’ to describe a John Wick style premise. Riders of Justice shows you how to subvert expectations THE RIGHT WAY. If you liked Parasite, you’ll definitely like this.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Always try to link your hero’s journey to what you’re personally going through in life at the moment. It will instantly add depth to them. Here’s Anders on how he came up with the character of Markus: “It started with me having this completely normal 40-year crisis that all men have where you look at your kids, you look at your life, and you wonder, “How did I get here, and did I do enough?” You start rebuilding, you start looking forward, and you start looking for connections that will give your life meaning. That’s basically Markus’ character, a guy with PTSD returning home who’s lost faith in everything but needs to find a way to move forward in his life. Of course, it’s highly dramatized, but the core is very personal for me.”
What I learned 2: Anders is okay with ditching outlines if the script calls for it: “Normally, I’ll put a structure up on the wall then write a script from that. But with a script like this, it was a gut feeling. Especially in this film, it had to be a gut feeling. You had to get around so many characters and themes and layers, and if you put that up on the wall, it becomes somehow schematic. You can see the technicality of it. People in film schools hate when I say this, but it’s not something I can teach anyone.
SCI-FI SHOWDOWN REMINDER
What: Sci-fi Showdown
When: Entries due by Thursday, September 16th, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
How: Include title, genre, logline, Why We Should Read, and a PDF of your script
Where: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com
In honor of Neil Blomkamp’s newest movie trailer and Sci-Fi Showdown, we are going back to one of the best science-fiction movies of the 21st century. Here’s what I wrote back in 2009 after I saw District 9: “Today, I went to see District 9. Even after all the hype, I still walked out amazed. We’re looking at the next James Cameron here. Sci-fi like this has never been done before. Within two minutes I actually believed this was happening – that aliens had landed on our planet.”
I think I may have invented the phrase, “This didn’t age well” with that take. It’s hard to put your finger on why Blomkamp fizzled. There’s no question he’s an insanely talented guy. I think part of the problem was that he never put as much effort into the mythology of his subsequent films as he did District 9. The guy is a director, through and through. But he’s never been a great writer.
District 9 feels like a dozen people sat around a room for a year and discussed every single detail about what this world would be like. You need that with science-fiction. You try to cut corners on mythology and your movie can go from deep to thin in a millisecond. We saw that with his follow-up film, Elysium, where you got the sense that Blomkamp wrote the script in a weekend.
But we still have District 9, which is a sci-fi classic. And Blomkamp is even talking about a District 10, which I’ll be first in line for. In honor of everything Blomkamp, here are 10 screenwriting tips from District 9!
1) The hunter becomes the hunted – One of the best ironic situations to place your hero in is to start him off as the hunter and then turn him into the hunted. Audiences LOOOOOOVE that. Why? Because everybody loves irony. To emphasize how effective this is, imagine if Wikus doesn’t work for the organization moving the prawns out of their homes. Imagine if he’s just some street food vendor who turns into an alien. It’s not nearly as exciting of an idea, is it? That’s the power of irony.
2) The Goal Before The Goal – A lot of writers make this mistake. They focus on the main character’s primary goal only. In this case, it’s for Wikus to figure out how to turn back into a human. But there’s often a period of time in your story before the main character is presented with a goal. In that case, if possible, you want to insert a goal BEFORE the goal. That way, your movie gets going right away. What Blomkamp does is he creates this storyline where South Africa has decided to move all of the aliens to a new location. This act of moving them creates a purpose for the story before our real plot begins.
3) Characters should always have something to do – When characters don’t have something to do, the story comes to a standstill. But it’s important to know the difference between the good something to do and the bad something to do. That difference lies in the goal being PLOT RELEVANT. A hero who’s going to get a coffee is NOT DOING ANYTHING. A hero meeting a hitman at the coffee shop to discuss killing his boss – THAT’S DOING SOMETHING. Whenever your character is doing something that’s pushing the plot forward, they’re doing something. Otherwise, nothing’s happening in your screenplay.
4) Don’t roll out the red carpet for your hero. Put up a barbed wire fence instead!!! – A classic beginner mistake is rolling out the red carpet for your hero’s interactions. Whatever he needs to do, it goes off without a hitch. It should be the opposite. You want to put up a barbed wire fence. Make it difficult. Especially in sci-fi movies where the stakes are high. Go and watch the sequence where Wikus tries to move the prawns from their homes. Literally every prawn gives him trouble. There isn’t a single house where the process goes smoothly. Fences create conflict. Red carpets create boredom.
5) Documentary/fiction hybrids are a cheat-code for exposition – One of the hardest things to do in sci-fi is manage all the exposition and convey it to the reader. Any sort of story with an interview component, such as a documentary, lets you bypass that. District 9 may be the most exposition heavy science fiction movie ever. But I bet you never thought about that until I just mentioned it. That’s because its exposition is hidden inside documentary interviews, so we never consider it exposition.
6) A line of suspense can add an extra level of intrigue to your story – All suspense is is hinting that something bad is going to happen in the future. You can use it, then, to increase the level of interest from the audience. All throughout the opening of District 9, we get these interviews of people talking about Wikus, but they’re doing so as if something terrible has happened to him. “Wikus was always such a kind boy,” his mother tells us. We now know that something bad is going to happen to Wikus, which increases our interest in sticking around. You could, of course, not have shown any of those interviews. But, by omitting them, you also omit a line of suspense that’s driving the reader’s interest.
7) Use language differences to create more interesting dialogue – All of the dialogue between Wikus and the aliens – whether he was trying to evict them or, later, when he’s asking them for help – was charged. It had a heightened unpredictable quality to it. I finally realized it was because Wikus never entirely understood the alien language. He grasped pieces of it, enough so that he could communicate with them. But because he couldn’t speak it fluently, he was always playing catch up. It was a major reason why all the scenes with him and the aliens were so good, that struggle to understand each other and the messiness that brings. I’m thinking you can do the same with any two characters who don’t speak the same language. You can use their misunderstandings and assumptions to create a more interesting interaction than if the two are able to communicate exactly what they’re thinking. Remember, with screenwriting, you’re always looking for ways to make things harder on the characters. Not being able to understand one another is a simple way to make things harder. And, as a bonus, it makes the dialogue better.
8) Your story’s theme and your main character’s flaw are almost always tied together – District 9’s theme is: don’t treat people differently just because they don’t look like you. And Wickus’s flaw is that he doesn’t treat the aliens like real “people” because he doesn’t see the aliens as real “people.” We see this when he’s tossing cat food at them and talking to them like babies. Only when he becomes an alien and sees others treating him the same way he treated the aliens, does he realize his mistake and change.
9) What’s the worst thing you can do to your character right now? – This is a great question that can lead to some great moments in your script. It’s not something you want to use in every scene. But it’s definitely something you want to use occasionally. When Wikus gets home after his long day at work where he’s ingested some strange chemical and has been throwing up the rest of the day, feeling sicker and sicker by the minute, Blomkamp could’ve easily had his wife waiting for him, notice that he’s acting strange, ask him what’s wrong. But that would’ve been a forgettable scene. Instead, Blomkamp asks, “What’s the worst thing I can do to Wikus right now?” And the answer was… give him a surprise birthday party! All Wikus wants to do is rest. He’s sick and getting sicker by the minute. Instead, he has to be happy and peppy and act like nothing’s wrong for the next couple of hours – his worst nightmare.
10) 99% of thriller scripts fall apart when they devolve into an “on the run” story – This is because most scripts go from a STRUCTURED STORY to, all of a sudden, the main character is running around like a chicken with his head cut off, his only goal to stay a step ahead of the bad guys. This trope is boring to watch because all ‘on the run’ stuff feels the same. To combat this, give your character targeted clear goals they’re trying to accomplish. These goals will bring structure back into the story and give it purpose. You can have them run for a few scenes. But then it’s time for them to come up with a plan. Wikus goes back into the Prawn Camp because it’s the only place where he can hide from the authorities. He then agrees to help the alien get his ship operational with the understanding that, when he does, he’ll turn Wikus back into a human. This is a way more interesting storyline than had Wikus just run around Johannesburg for two hours.
Hold on. Don’t tell me you’re sending your script out there without getting professional feedback first. You only get one shot with these industry contacts, my friend. Don’t screw it up by sending them the 10,000th average screenplay they’ve read this year! I do consultations on everything from loglines ($25) to treatments ($100) to pilots ($399) to features ($499). E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested. Use code phrase ‘WARM IN JULY’ and I’ll take a hundred bucks off a pilot or feature consultation. As long as you pay in July, you can send the script to me whenever it’s finished. Chat soon!
