I’m going to be hard at work all weekend on the newsletter so there’s no time for a Showdown today. But do not worry. I’ll be doing Second Chance Showdown next weekend. As for what to expect with the newsletter, I can confirm now there won’t be any Star Wars in it. For those of you who get angry whenever I talk about Star Wars, rest assured the newsletter is Star Wars free.
However, as long as we’re on the topic of Star Wars, I found out that Leslye Headland is making a Star Wars show for Disney Plus. Headland wrote the movie, “Bachelorette,” about a bunch of mean women being horrible to the soon-to-be bride. More recently she made time-loop show Russian Doll for Netflix. I suppose some people will like this news. But there is nothing in this woman’s work as far as I can see that would indicate she’s right for Star Wars. Star Wars is not mean. It’s not harsh. It doesn’t have angry people walking around being angry at everyone. To be honest, this choice is baffling. What criteria are they using to greenlight stuff over there? And why does Kathleen Kennedy still have a job?? It’s madness I tell you! MADNESSSS111!!!!
Okay, sorry, I had to get it out of the way. I did that so I wouldn’t have to include it in the newsletter so you’re welcome.
Let’s leave you with some screenwriting theory to ponder. A common mistake I encounter in the screenplays I read is the act of convincing yourself versus convincing them. As writers, when we want something to work, it’s very easy to convince ourselves that it works. But you’re not the person you have to convince. You have to convince the reader. And the reader has a much higher bar than you do.
For example, let’s say you’re writing Parasite (spoilers if you haven’t seen the film). You know that you want an ending where Poor Dad kills Rich Dad. So you need to come up with a reason for why that would happen. The “convince yourself” writer writes a single scene before the climax where Rich Dad yells at Poor Dad because he forgot to gas up the car. In the Convince Yourself writer’s mind, he’s done enough to justify Poor Dad raging out and killing Rich Dad.
The seasoned screenwriter, however, knows that that’s not going to fly. So he goes back into the script and writes five separate scenarios where the Rich Dad becomes increasingly disgusted by the Poor Dad’s smell. We see, in each instance, the Poor Dad getting angrier and angrier about the matter. So when he snaps at the final party, it makes sense to us.
This may seem obvious but I run into this issue at least once in every amateur script I read. It’s clear that the writer only worked hard enough to convince himself and didn’t put in the effort to make it believable on the reader’s end. And the reader’s end is the only end that matters.
HAPPY WEEKEND!
Going back through Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s script reviews, I identified a common theme, which was: HOLY SCHNIKEYS, STRUCTURE MATTERS A LOT!
Without structure, you can lose your grip on a good concept by page 20. I actually like the concept of a smart house attacking someone. I know it’s been done before but no one has come up with the definitive version yet. Which means it’s out there for the taking.
But the lazy structuring killed that script.
And a sex VR unit that gets in between the friendship of two couples is also a good idea. Done well, it could be a modern day Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
But the nonexistent structuring killed that script.
So what went wrong? Let’s dive a little deeper.
With “An Aftermath,” a script about a woman whose controlling dead husband lives on in her smart home’s AI, the writer didn’t move the plot along fast enough. For example, it took until page 80 until the house did something even mildly harmful (locking a guest in a freezer).
With “Blur,” about a group of 20-somethings whose lives become entangled after a Sex VR system enters their lives, there was no structure at all because there was no plot. Characters didn’t have anything to do, which left many scenes hanging in the wind, looking for a reason to exist.
Since structure is synonymous with plotting, we can identify part of the problem by looking at the definition of “plot.”
Here’s Wikipedia definition: In a literary work, film, story or other narrative, the plot is the sequence of events where each affects the next one through the principle of cause-and-effect. The causal events of a plot can be thought of as a series of events linked by the connector “and so”.
Ugh. That definition is an enabler for boringness. It’s basically saying that as long as things keep happening one after another, and that they’re connected in even the vaguest way, you’ve properly “plotted” your film. Which is actually what got this week’s scripts into trouble.
When it comes to movies, you want to think of plot as “a character trying to achieve an objective who then must overcome a series of obstacles along the way.”
Almost every good movie follows this model.
It does get tricky in certain situations and if you’re not versed in plotting, you may think some great movies are ‘structure-less’ because they don’t line up with this definition. But they usually do. The formula is just slightly tweaked.
In Shawshank Redemption, for example, Andy Dufrense spends the entire movie hanging out in a prison trying to live a happy life. Where’s the plot in that? Well, as it turns out, Andy Dufresne had a gigantic goal he was trying to accomplish. To escape. It just wasn’t revealed to us until the end.
Or then you have movies like Infinity War where the villain has the goal and all our superheroes are scrambling. That can be confusing since the traditional heroes aren’t the ones going after the primary objective. But the main thing to remember is that somebody wants something really badly and their quest to get that thing disturbs the environment in a way where they’re constantly encountering obstacles that may stop them.
If nobody’s moving anywhere, you can’t throw anything in front of them. That was Blur’s problem.
If characters *are* moving but you’re not throwing enough things at them, you get a script like An Aftermath.
Another reason writers struggle with plotting is because they don’t understand the three act structure. They understand it theoretically. But they don’t know how to put it into practice. Especially when you start having to meet certain page checkpoints. It can be a lot to manage when all you want to do is get your ideas down on the page.
So here’s a basic 2-rule hack to give your script structure. One, give your main character a goal they’re after. That’s imperative. And two, make something big happen every ten pages.
If you want to know a secret about how The Disciple Program was written, it was written during an interactive contest where the writers had to write ten pages at a time, then submit them for feedback before writing the next ten pages. What that did is it forced the writer to make something cool or exciting happen at the end of every ten pages. It basically ensured that the plot kept moving.
Or if you want to make it even simpler on yourself, HAVE BIG PLOT POINTS HAPPEN A LOT FASTER THAN YOU THINK YOU HAVE TO MAKE THEM HAPPEN. What I’ve found with beginner screenwriters in particular (but this can happen to any screenwriter) is that they believe their script is more interesting than it is. This gives them permission to allow their plot to unfold verrrrrrry slowwwwwwwwly. You need to constantly disrupt your story with new obstacles, new information, and new developments.
95% of screenplays are boring because they don’t follow this simple principle.
That would’ve helped “An Aftermath.” But Blur is a tougher case because it doesn’t fit into that neat structural box.
That’s because you have four protagonists instead of one. The reason this is a challenge is because it prevents you from doing the “Main character has a goal they go after” approach. How do you address this?
You do it by applying the same approach, but split up between four characters. That means each character should have a goal they’re trying to obtain during the story.
For one it might be getting into law school. For another it might be getting a job in the city they always dreamed of living in. For another it might be breaking up with their significant other, something they want to do but haven’t had the courage to do. These goals don’t have to be Avengers-level goals. They just have to be important in relation to the story you’re telling.
Once you give these characters goals, something magical happens. They’re now going to have places to be. They’re now going to have things to do. They’re now going to have more interesting things to talk about. You now have obstacles to throw at them because there’s finally something to throw an obstacle at (Character A gets admitted into law school but then is denied a student loan. They can’t afford school without that loan. What are they going to do?).
You may say, what does this have to do with a VR sex machine story, Carson? This is the beauty of adding purpose to your characters’ lives. You get to tell the exact same story you’re telling – these characters get intertwined with an addictive new sex technology – but it’s now happening inside a life that has more detail, has more interesting developments, has… well… HAS MORE SH#% GOING ON!
But most importantly, these new objectives in your characters’ lives provide the script with STRUCTURE. The reader now has a sense of where your characters want to be so they feel like we’re all on a purposeful journey together.
You need to provide the reader with a series of rewards along the way for them to feel satisfied. “If you read just a little bit longer,” you promise them, “you’ll get to find out if Jane convinced the bank to give her that student loan.” But if you don’t integrate these purposeful journeys for each of your characters, your script won’t have these rewards. And if we, the reader, aren’t being rewarded, we’re getting bored.
So yes. Character is important. Dialogue is important. Theme is important. But if your structure is limp, or worse, non-existent, none of that matters. So make sure your structure is on point.
Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or $40 for unlimited tweaking. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. They’re extremely popular so if you haven’t tried one out yet, I encourage you to give it a shot. If you’re interested in any consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!
What? A new feature on Scriptshadow? A full 10 years after the site started? How does that even happen??
Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama
Premise: (from Hit List) When new technology allows people to have realistic sex in virtual reality, a man begins to suspect that the avatar he’s been digitally hooking up with behind his girlfriend’s back might belong to his best friend’s girlfriend. Secrets and lies come to the surface, jeopardizing both relationships in the process.
About: I’m SUPER PUMPED about this script. One of the best unknown directors out there is making his directorial debut with this film. I don’t know anything about the writer other than he made the Hit List in 2018 with this script. But director Saman Kesh is amazing. You can watch his short film, Controller, here.
Writer: Jacob Colman
Details: 107 pages
Writing is so interesting.
Because whenever you write a story, you’re writing about problems. This is a necessity because if everything is okay, it wouldn’t be interesting. That means when you write about a marriage, it typically has to be a marriage in disarray so that we want to keep reading to see the problems resolved. If the marriage is fine, there’s no reason for us to stick around.
However, if you aren’t careful with the way you present the problems with your characters, you risk things feeling depressing or sad. Did anybody see that Mike Nichols movie, Closer? It didn’t do very well for that specific reason. You watched that movie and just felt… depressed.
A little of the same thing is happening with Blur.
These are people with problems which SHOULD MEAN that I want to see their problems get resolved. But I don’t. Why? Because I don’t like the characters. That’s another tricky thing with writing. You have to write about people in bad situations but you have to present them in a good enough way that we like them.
“Blur” follows four people. There’s TV editor and self-esteem poor Liam. There’s ladies-man who’s never had a job in his life Bobby. There’s wholesome but boring Amy. And there’s hot but detached from life Lydia.
Liam and Amy, both on the verge of 30, are married and have known each other since college. They also knew Bobby in college. And the group is close enough that Bobby and Amy had a brief fling before Liam and Amy got together.
Bobby has now brought his latest girlfriend, Lydia – who you could buy a diamond ring for while walking a puppy as the two of you were experiencing Disney World for the first time and she would still find a way to be bored – to spend some couples time together.
Independently, Liam and Lydia learn about this thing called Tryst VR where you can participate in realistic VR sex. The two each secretly buy a Tryst, keeping it from their significant others. The experience is particularly intense for Liam, who’s had a limited sex life. He meets another virtual person in the program and she rocks his world. Little does he know, it’s Lydia.
Liam begins to re-request this girl, named Eve in the program, and they engage in a myriad of sexual acts. Liam obviously feels guilty about the whole thing. But not guilty enough to stop! Meanwhile, Bobby secretly discovers Lydia’s Tryst VR and hops on it to see who she’s virtually banging. And the next thing you know, he’s rage-banging Liam, although neither of them are aware of it.
Will Tryst VR destroy these two couples? Or is it actually solving their relationship issues?
As much as I wanted this script to work it just doesn’t.
For starters, there’s no plot – nothing moving anything forward here. We’re just watching characters talk. Then watching characters go to work. Then watching characters use the Tryst headset. Then watching characters talk again. There isn’t a single active character or plot event pushing anything forward.
I guess there’s the VR stuff. Liam is technically being active by using it. But somehow even that storyline is stillborn. If you’re crafting a movie that’s all about sexual VR experiences, then each time you go in, the experiences should escalate. They should get either more intense or more dangerous. But they mostly stay the same in Blur. In a movie, things need to escalate and evolve, not stay the same.
It’s disappointing because this is the second script in two days that didn’t exploit its premise.
Quick tip for everyone. Be wary of writing a story where characters have miserable lives and don’t do anything interesting. Even if that’s the point you’re trying to make – that life is unfulfilling – there’s a high probability we’re going to be bored by your characters. Why wouldn’t we be? THEY DON’T DO ANYTHING AND THEY’RE ALL MISERABLE. Who wants to watch that? Especially when you don’t have a plot to fall back on. At least with a plot, we’d have something to look forward to.
American Beauty is a movie that played with unhappiness. A guy was unhappy with his life and so he made a drastic change to stop doing what the world told him to do and, instead, do whatever he wanted. It covered the same themes as Blur but it did so in a way that was much more active and entertaining.
Key in on that word – ACTIVE. Lester in American Beauty was ACTIVELY pursuing his dream of living life on his terms. Amy, Liam, Lydia, and Bobby just sit around and complain about their lives.
Based on this director, here’s what I know. This is going to look amazing. And I feel like he’s going to give us sex scenes that we’ve never seen in a movie before – really weird visceral fun shit.
But no matter how good of a director you are, you can’t save a script that a) has no forward-moving plot and b) fails at the main thing it’s trying to do.
This movie is trying to explore relationships but the dynamics that have been set up are aggressively uninteresting. Both of these are lame-duck relationships. They’re doomed. So why do I care if two people cheat? It’s just speeding up an inevitable process. And it’s not even real cheating. It’s computer cheating.
If these couples were in a good place, or even if only one of the couples was in a good place, now you have something to ruin because the character who cheats is potentially destroying the only thing that matters to them – their marriage.
In Blur, there are no consequences. Even if you make the argument that virtual cheating is still cheating, and therefore getting caught means breaking up, THAT WOULD BE A GOOD THING FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED because they were all miserable to begin with!
This was frustrating. Was hoping for more.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: We’re going to add a new feature in script reviews. A Character Description Ranking. Every script I read, I will take a character description and give it a ranking. Black Star – terrible. Bronze star – Barely okay. Silver Star – Good. Gold Star – Great. Platinum Star – Superb. The reason I like this below description is it takes us out of the static two dimensional world of words and pulls us into a real live environment. It’s not just adjectives. We’re in a bar looking at this person.
GOLD STAR CHARACTER DESCRIPTION! – “Amy does her makeup in the mirror. She’s exceedingly cute. That wholesome look that emboldens shy guys in bars.”
Today’s screenplay poses the question, “What if you could date Hal 9000?”
Genre: Thriller
Premise: After a whirlwind long-distance online romance, a once-cynical writer inherits a remote smart-house from her newly deceased new husband and discovers he might not be entirely gone after all.
About: Lauren Caris Cohan is a writer-director and this is going to be her directorial debut. This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Lauren Caris Cohan
Details: 112 pages
Last week was Fun Script Review Week.
We had two interesting scripts to talk about.
Will that trend continue this week?
Only time will tell. However much time it takes to get through the plot description.
The evil smart house concept is not a new one. About 15 years ago, the concept of a smart house entered the media, igniting many screenwriters to write Smart House horror scripts. I think a few of them even became movies.
But when the smart house the world promised us never came to be, people forgot about the idea. Until now. To Cohan’s credit, it’s a good time to explore this idea as we really are moving towards those concepts first imagined 15 years ago. I can turn on the lamp over by the window by yelling at Alexa to do so. And my bedroom Alexa tells me every morning how many people died from Corona virus in the last 24 hours. And some argue technology hasn’t made the world a better place.
I’m a little wary, though. How much danger can a smart house really create? I’m pretty sure by walking to the middle of the living room, Crazy House AI can’t touch you. But isn’t that the challenge of writing? Every idea has limitations. Good writers are able to find solutions to those limitations. Other writers are not.
Sheila is a 42 year-old British woman who may have stolen my quarantine to-do list since she’s apparently been watching a lot of 90 Day Fiance. Without ever having physically met Michael (she’s only talked to him online for the last 6 months) Sheila flies over to the U.S. and marries him. Immediately they head off to Michael’s lovely home in Big Sur.
Michael is rich, retired, and really into nerdy stuff. His entire house is automated. Sheila, a writer, starts working on her latest book, only to get a surprise visit from the cops. Michael’s car flew off a cliff and he died. Poor guy.
A week later, Sheila receives a white box from a company called OUROBOROS. The Ouroboros module allows Michael, whose consciousness has been downloaded to a computer, to come back to life as the home’s AI!
Sheila is weirded out at first. But after visiting Ouroboros and being assured that this is all above board, she allows Michael to come back, because what woman wouldn’t want her husband looking over her shoulder 24 hours a day? Sheila is happy for a while. But then she meets the studly local convenience store owner, Caleb. Yumma yumma.
The two clearly have chemistry but because Creepy AI Michael watches everything Sheila does, she can’t spend any meaningful adult time with him. But when she can’t ignore the need for physical connection any longer, she turns Michael off and Caleb comes over for dinner.
Sheila doesn’t realize it. But she’s just Microsoft Dossed her lover. The next day, while Sheila is out, Creepy AI Michael locks him in the freezer! And when Sheila returns, he locks her in the house as well, informing her that unless she changes her behavior, he’s going to provide the cops with irrefutable evidence that she murdered him for his money. Will Sheila wise up? Or will she burn this place to the ground?
“Aftermath” wasn’t a bad screenplay.
It just didn’t do anything exceptional in the execution.
I knew the script was in trouble when I saw a 7 line paragraph on the first page. In Cohan’s defense, I’ve seen good scripts with 7 line paragraphs in them. But even most beginner writers know that you don’t pull out a 7 line paragraph on the very first page.
The bigger issue with Aftermath is that the structure isn’t there.
When you go to a movie about a controlling killer house, what do you expect to see? I’m guessing you expect to see a controlling killer house. But the house doesn’t do anything controlling or killing until page 80.
That’s partly because Cohan had to do a lot of setup here. We had to establish this complex relationship where they met online and got married and they’re going to Michael’s house for the first time and the house is a smart house. That took a while to explain.
But the rest of the structural problems are on the writer. We spend a lot of time with Sheila heading to the city to meet with Ouroboros and asking them questions. You have a confined thriller set up. You shouldn’t be allowing your heroine to run around, willy-nilly anywhere on the planet. That’s the opposite of what you want to do with this setup. It creates a sense of freedom. It makes the audience think that Sheila can leave safely whenever she wants. Not to mention, you’re sending her out for the least dramatic reasons possible – so you can feed more exposition to the reader. If you’re going to break protocol in a screenplay, you want to do it because you have an entertaining scene idea. Not 20 Questions with a Scientist.
Another problem is there’s no sense of Sheila’s life before she moves here.
This is a common mistake beginners make so I want to discuss it. We often pick characters who don’t have a lot of friends or family because we just want to focus on our main characters. But that usually catches up to you. Take Sheila, for example. We’re supposed to believe that Sheila has no family, no friends, nobody she talks to. Her job history is limited at best. That’s not a real person. That’s a lazy writer.
That’s someone who doesn’t want to give the character a real job because that means figuring out what that job is. Which means it may shape our hero in a way we don’t quite like. It means figuring out how long she’s had that job. If she likes that job. If getting that job was part of her life plan. If it wasn’t, where did things go wrong? It means knowing who she worked with. Some of those people would likely be friends. Why do all that when you can just not do it? Not doing it is easier, right?
But I promise you this. If you’re making a decision in a script because it means less work for you, 99% of the time your script will be worse for it.
I especially get suspicious when a character’s job is writing. A writer will often make this choice for two reasons. One, the writer knows this job well. And two, you don’t have to give a writer any responsibilities or have them need to be anywhere ever. This provides a false sense of security because now you don’t have to worry about a character’s schedule or have them be anywhere. You have total freedom. Which is also why it’s a bad idea. Total freedom is the opposite of everyone who’s going to watch your movie. They all have jobs. They all have lives. They all have friends. So watching some person who’s sitting around all day doing nothing is going to be both un-relatable and unentertaining.
Stephen King makes all his characters writers but Stephen King would be the first to tell you he does this because he’s lazy. And also, he’s one of the most creative people ever. So he’s able to make up for it.
All of these things resulted in a script that was too laid back. This thing never got out of third gear and spent most of its time in second. You have to at least hit fourth gear in your movie. And, preferably, you should have a couple of fifth gear moments.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the biggest sins you can commit as a writer is promising a cool concept then not exploiting what’s unique about that concept at all. This is a movie about an evil smart house. The most original thing the smart house does to attack its occupants in “An Aftermath” is lock someone in a freezer. That’s like if Jurassic Park had a single dinosaur scene where a stegosaurus stole the hero’s spaghetti.
Today Carson does the unthinkable. He makes the argument that character development is pointless in an action movie (Okay, he doesn’t go that far but it makes for good clickbait)
Genre: Action
Premise: (from IMDB) A fearless black market mercenary embarks on the most deadly extraction of his career when he’s enlisted to rescue the kidnapped son of an imprisoned Indian crime lord.
About: Here’s writer and producer Joe Russo on how this film came together: “So we were doing Community on TV, and wanted to transition to features with this and thought the smartest thing to do was take this idea we had around an extraction, with this damaged central character, and turn it into a graphic novel. That gave us a visual document that was easy for a studio executive to pick up during their lunch hour and understand what we were trying to accomplish. A long journey writing and rewriting later, we had conversations while shooting Infinity War and Endgame with Hemsworth and Sam Hargrave, and when we put the movie together, that’s when Netflix came into the conversation.”
Writer: Joe Russo (based on his own graphic novel)
Details: about 2 hours long
Extraction may have just done for stunt coordinators what Quentin Tarantino did for video store workers. After Chad Stahelski and David Leitch showed the world the untapped potential of stunt coordinators with their breakout feature, “John Wick,” Sam Hargrave has now proven that the path from stunt coordinator to director is no fluke. His knack for coordinating action has resulted in one of the best action sequences I’ve ever seen.
But outside of his nutso single-take set piece for the history books, was Extraction actually a good movie? Or is it just the world’s best action movie resume for a director looking to impress the studios?
Let’s begin with the plot. I never understood exactly what was going on in Extraction. I knew that Chris Hemsworth had rescued a rich 12 year old Indian boy from some bad people who had kidnapped him. And I knew that some other badass Indian dude wanted the kid and was chasing Hemsworth throughout the movie. But I couldn’t tell you any of the other parties involved beyond that. Which is why I’m glad there’s Wikipedia. Here’s what they say…
Tyler Rake, a black-market mercenary and former Australian Special Air Service Regiment, is recruited by fellow mercenary Nik Khan to rescue Ovi Mahajan Jr., the son of India’s biggest drug lord Ovi Mahajan Sr., from Dhaka, Bangladesh because he is held for ransom by Bangladesh’s biggest drug lord, Amir Asif.
Whilst Rake is in the process of extracting Ovi from his kidnappers, Saju, a former Special Forces soldier and Ovi’s father’s chief henchman, attempts to bring the boy back, doing so in fear of his family being killed and in order to avoid paying the substantial ransom money, which neither he nor Ovi’s currently incarcerated father can afford.
(Kudos, by the way, to Joe Russo for creating the most action hero name ever)
Our boy Tyler Rake is able to secure the kidnapped boy easily and begin his extraction. But on the way to the checkpoint, he’s ambushed, forcing him and the boy into the heart of Bangladesh, where he’s relentlessly hunted down by this Saju guy. It seemed to me like they had the same goal (get the boy back to his dad) so I don’t know why they were against each other. But what are you going to do? It’s a Netflix action movie.
For the longest time, I’ve been obsessed with this topic of how to make an action flick stand out on the page. Or, more specifically, how do you make “generic” interesting?
Because the reality is almost every straight action movie is built on a generic premise. Taken – save my daughter. John Wick – Take down the Russian mafia. Extraction – Extract a kid from the bad guys.
Action is such a generic genre that a fight scene that takes place in a bathroom can be heralded as a step forward for the genre.
Here’s the truth of the matter. The two elements that have the biggest impact on action are a) the directing and b) the casting/acting of the lead actor. You can see what Liam Neeson and Bruce Willis did for Taken and Die Heard respectively. And you can see how much Chad Stahelski and David Leitch elevated John Wick with their action choreography.
The thing that elevates Extraction is an incredible one-shot midpoint set piece that has Rake and the kid car-racing through then running through the heavily populated Bangladesh slums with a SWAT TEAM, police, and a crazed fellow extractor in pursuit. It is unforgettable in its brutality, realism, creativity, and relentlessness. And that’s 100% directing.
There was one point in particular where they’re out on the street and there were probably 800 locals running around and I sat there wondering, are these all background actors? Or are they shooting in a real place and just allowing real people nearby? While that may sound ridiculous when you consider the legal ramifications of doing such a thing, the fact that I genuinely wasn’t sure is a testament to how realistic this sequence was. I don’t know too many directors who would’ve even have attempted it, much less pulled it off.
So does that mean there’s nothing action writers can do? Do we come up with yet another generic action premise and write lots of generic action set pieces and hope we’re that one script that gets picked out of the action slush pile to be made? Or is there something we can learn from these successful action films that goes beyond directing? That goes beyond Liam Neeson delivering the most famous challenge ever to a bad guy?
Here are four things action writers can do to improve their scripts.
The single best thing you can do is create a sympathetic main character. This is true for all movies. But it’s especially true for action movies because they don’t have a lot of character development. We’re never going to connect with a character in an action movie the way we’ll connect with one in a drama like, say, JoJo Rabbit, A Star is Born, or Marriage Story.
Dramas are built to explore the inner workings of people. Action, which is built to explore the external adventures of people, can’t compete with that on a character level.
However, a sympathetic main character can supersede depth when done well. When we feel sympathy for someone, we want them to succeed, regardless of how well we know them. The trick is, it has to be organic.
Liam Neeson in Taken is a great example. The thing that makes him sympathetic is that he was absent for most of his daughter’s life and now that he’s retired, he desperately wants to make up for that lost time. He wants to be a huge part of her life. That’s organic to the situation since the situation is about his daughter getting kidnapped.
If the writer instead would’ve had Liam Neeson recovering from alcoholism, going to AA meetings, and had him help another alcoholic in the group, sure, that is a sympathetic action. But what the hell does it have do with a movie about a former black ops agent whose daughter was kidnapped by international criminals? Make sure the sympathy is organic.
Tip number 2 might surprise you: Don’t turn your action movie into a character drama. If you read a lot of screenwriting websites, you’d think that the most important thing in writing action is creating characters with complex backstories and fully-fleshed out character arcs and tons of inner conflict. You certainly want some of that. But that’s not what action movies are for. They’re for action. Nobody leaves an action flick talking about the monologue where the hero remembers some valuable advice his mother gave him.
Aim to get the majority of your character stuff taken care of in the first act when you’re setting your hero up. Then have one or two ‘character reveals’ later in the script that provide more context to your character. Otherwise, keep your eyes on the prize and focus on the action. Cause when you try and make your action movie a character drama, you get Gemini Man. Nobody – and I mean nobody – wants Gemini Man.
Next is to put every creative atom in your body to work on creating strong original set pieces. It’s an action movie. If your action scenes are the same as action scenes we’ve seen before, we’ll get bored. And I don’t care how you get this across to the reader. If you have to tell them straight up, like Extraction that, “The next 20 page action scene will take place all in one take,” do it. Action is boring to read (“Bam bam. Pow. He ducks. He shoots. He punches”) so any trick you have up your sleeve, use it.
Creativity is essential when writing action. If you don’t have at least two set pieces that have never been seen before, don’t send your script out to anyone.
Finally, give us at least TWO unexpected plot beats somewhere in your movie. Like I said. Action is inherently boring to read. So you need to keep the reader on their toes. I was actually bored through the first 35 minutes of Extraction. It was all by the book. But the second Rake nears the extraction point and he realizes that something’s gone horribly wrong and they’re being ambushed, the movie turned a corner. I specifically remember sitting up after that moment and thinking, “Okay, we have a movie now.”
To help you, here’s a little saying you should have on repeat in your head: “Nothing should go according to plan.”
Straight action is always going to be the most generic genre. So you have to separate yourself from the pack somehow, despite the fact that your toolset is limited. Follow the advice above and you’ll come out on the other side better than most of your competition.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Dueling Badasses – If it was just Rake going up against a bunch of faceless cops the whole movie, it would’ve lost a worth the stream [x] from me. What made it double worth the stream was this fellow badass who would keep catching up to Rake and battle him to near death every time.
What I learned 2: No excuses. Joe Russo – JOE RUSSO! – wrote this. Joe Russo is married. Joe Russo has two kids. Joe Russo was a director on two of the biggest movies ever made. Joe Russo just shot another movie this year with Tom Holland (Cherry). Joe Russo has started a production company with his brother where they’re trying to become the next Bad Robot. Yet Joe Russo still found time to write this script. No excuses, guys. No excuses.
