What if I told you that someone just wrote the female version of Joker, and that it’s actually better than that movie?

Genre: F#@%d Up
Premise: A single mother in New York City begins seeing a mysterious older man from her past around town and becomes convinced that he’s come back into her life to kill her daughter.
About: This one finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. Writer Andrew Semans has been writing and directing short films as far back as 2000. His only feature is a 2012 movie called “Nancy, Please” about a man who must retrieve a precious book from his former girlfriend.
Writer: Andrew Semans
Details: 110 pages

Amy Adams for Margaret?

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I just read.

But I can tell you this. I read from the first to the last page without getting up, without checking e-mail, without going to Youtube, and without checking my phone. I can’t remember the last time that happened.

This script was so freaking weird but simultaneously so amazing!

I don’t know where to start. It’s unlike anything I’ve read before. We’re all trying to answer that everlasting question: What are readers looking for? This is what they’re looking for. Someone with a unique voice. Someone who looks at the world differently, who focuses on things that the average person can’t possibly imagine.

Us readers are so starved for originality that we’re like kids in a candy store when we finally get it.

I have no idea what’s going to come of this script but I can promise you this. A big actress will kill to star in it. This is an actress’s dream role. It has Oscar written all over it. And the writing is so atmospheric and weird (in a good way) that I’m guessing a major director gets involved as well.

I’m reluctant to summarize the script because I want it to be a surprise so why don’t those of you with access to the 2019 Black List scripts (hint hint, check the comments section) go grab this script, read it, then come back.

40-something Margaret works at New York biotech company, Biomatrix. When we first meet Margaret, she seems like a strong, if slightly offbeat, woman. She’s telling her young co-worker, who’s dealing with a controlling boyfriend, how to stand up for herself. How to set boundaries in the relationship.

When Margaret gets home, we learn she has a 17 year old cool daughter, Abbie (When Margaret texts her questions like, “Status,” Abbie texts back, “Shooting heroin”). While there’s nothing overtly dysfunctional about their relationship, we get the sense that Margaret is a bit overprotective.

One day, while on the train to work, Margaret spots a man in his 60s. Overcome with fear, she races out of the train at the next exit. A couple days later, she sees the man again in the park. This is David. Or, as we’ll come to find out, this is who *she thinks* is David, a man she was involved with from the past.

Margaret starts following David around the city and eventually confronts him, tells him to stay away from her daughter. But David, or the man who she thinks is David, says he has no idea who she is.

Margaret’s world begins to crumble. She starts spending more time at home, obsessively keeping an eye on her daughter. She goes to the police to tell them about the man, but they point out that this guy hasn’t called or approached her. There’s nothing they can do.

As time goes on, we learn more about Margaret’s past with this man. When she was 19, she stayed at a remote science lab with her parents. That’s where she met David. He swept her off her feet. But soon, he began making her do things – he called them kindnesses. Small things like not wearing shoes all day. Standing still for an hour. But the kindnesses became more difficult. He kept asking more and more of her.

Margaret eventually got pregnant, and nine months later, had their baby. Her son became her world. Until one day, she came back home to find her baby missing. **And this is where s@#% gets weird** David ate their baby. Not to worry, he says. The baby is still alive, inside of him. If she wants to be with her baby forever, she must stay with him.

But Margaret ran. Ran as far away as she could. Went and had Abbie. And for 20 years, created another life. That is until now. David is back. And he wants to be with Margaret again. He’ll start with a series of small kindnesses. And he’ll go from there…

I KNOW.

It’s weird.

But it’s not the kind of script you can judge from a summary. This script is about its nuances, the cracks and the holes in the wall are where this story lives. It’s so specific and odd and offbeat that you can’t appreciate it unless you read the thing.

I’ll start with the obvious. There’s a sophistication to the way Margaret’s mental state is approached. I see writers trying to write crazy people all the time and they treat crazy like a 10 year old sees crazy. Overly simplistic “crazy” actions like randomly screaming and saying weird stuff.

Movies like Resurrection only work if we believe the craziness. And I knew right away that this writer understood crazy. Margaret obviously has some deep-rooted PTSD that she’s repressed for years and it’s all coming out at once. Her mind is like a popcorn popper. No matter how hard she tries, the kernels keep popping out of her skull.

The thing is, I usually hate scripts about “are they or aren’t they crazy” characters. But when I read a script like Resurrection (which needs to be retitled “Margaret” right away), I’m reminded that a good writer who understands the sophistication behind how people lose their minds, can make it work. It’s that old adage of don’t write something you’re not capable of writing.

I don’t understand the stock market. I’ll never understand it. So if I tried to write a movie about the stock market, it would be terrible. Same thing about mental states. If you don’t truly understand how the mind works, don’t write a crazy character. It never comes off believably. I know this because I read tons of these scripts.

Getting back to Resurrection – this is a script that has a plot. But the real reason we keep reading is the main character. And I think that’s where you find the best scripts. When you’re turning the pages because the character is so interesting and not because you want to find out what the next plot point is.

The specific reason why Margaret is so compelling is because of the contrast in her character. We meet her as this strong, intelligent, determined hard-worker who’s very successful. But, the more we get to know her, the more we realize how fragile she is. That’s where characters come to life – when their external is opposed to their internal. Because that means they’re always going to be in conflict and we’ll want to read to find out how that conflict is resolved.

That’s why I read through this so obsessively. I wanted to know if Margaret was going to fall into insanity or if her external strength was going to pull through.

But don’t get me wrong. The plot was strong as well. We had a clear GSU. The goal was to kill David. The stakes are the safety of Margaret’s daughter. And the urgency is David threatening to kill Abbie soon. So it still works on a basic storytelling level. But the character of Margaret just took this script up 15 levels. She was such a great character. I couldn’t turn away.

If they get the right package of people working on this, this is going to be the first ever Taxi Driver slash Nightcrawler slash Joker with a female lead. And not a lip-service version either. This will stand toe to toe with those movies if it’s done well.

Wow! This was a wonderful surprise.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (TOP 25!!!!)
[ ] genius

What I learned: There’s something about great screenwriters I haven’t yet been able to quantify. They seem to be able to write weird WITH A PURPOSE. I read a lot of weird scripts. But it’s usually sloppy weird. “All over the place” weird. There’s no rhyme or reason or plan to the weirdness. Whereas with this script, which has a man who claims to be carrying a woman’s child that he ate for the past 20 years in his stomach, the weirdness has purpose. It feels organic to the story. I still don’t know how to explain the difference. All I can tell you is that writers like Semans are able to take offbeat chances and yet back them up with a plan. They’re connected thematically. They’re set up well. They’re paid off well. It isn’t just someone throwing whatever they can think of in the moment at that wall. That’s when weird gets sloppy. So even though you have an “original voice,” that voice is too wild to be taken seriously. You need the ying (structure) with the yang (weirdness).

This week I talked to not one, not two, but THREE separate writers who were all having the same problem. They were having trouble coming up with a movie idea to write. Movie ideas are probably the most debated aspect of the screenwriting process. Everyone knows when they see a good one. And yet coming up with your own good movie idea remains the most challenging part of the process.

That’s because we don’t judge our ideas the way we judge others. We judge other ideas with objectivity. If it sounds good, we give it the thumbs up. But we create our own ideas out of emotion. There’s an element within the idea – the main character, the subject matter, the theme – that resonates with us on a deeper level. And that’s the problem. That resonance creates rose-tinted glass we see our idea through.

Emotion is not a bad thing, of course. You want emotion when you’re writing a screenplay. But it does get in the way of conceptualizing your idea. You can be so laser-focused on how you’re going to express this element that you can’t see the rest of the idea for what it really is – confusing, or generic, or maybe plain boring. Which is why you always want feedback on your ideas.

But today I want to make the process a little easier for you. What I’m going to do is give you the ten best ways to generate a movie idea. All of these are legitimate approaches to coming up with a good idea. I’m going to start with the worst of these options and move my way up to the best option. Let’s jump into it.

10) Horror and Guns – If you’re really struggling to come up with an idea, write a horror movie or a Guy/Gal with a Gun movie that contains ONE ELEMENT WE HAVEN’T SEEN BEFORE. Like a horror movie where you can’t make a noise (A Quiet Place). These are the two most marketable genres for spec scripts. So when in doubt, write one of these. Because you’ll have the best chance at actually selling them.

9) Follow Your Heart – This is that idea that won’t go away. It’s been sitting in your head for years. It may not be an objectively good idea. HOWEVER. Passion plays a large part in writing a great screenplay. The more passionate you are about something, the more likely you’ll go the extra mile to make it great. So the idea is that you’ll make up for the lack of a big hook by writing something emotionally earth-shattering. That’s how Titanic was written. That’s how Get Out was written. You have to accept that, when you’re finished, you’ll get less script requests. But, hopefully, the people who do request it will be more likely to enjoy it.

8) Update It – If you straight up suck at coming up with ideas, this is a good option. Go back 10, 20, 30 years ago and look for movie types that were popular then. If they were popular once, Hollywood believes they can be popular again. So just bring that genre back with a little modern update if possible. For example, romantic thrillers like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction were big in the late 80s. Goofy horror movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer were big in the 2000s. It doesn’t take a lot imagination to update these genres so it’s an easy way to come up with a marketable concept.

7) Ripped From The Headlines – This is another option for those of you who struggle to come up with your own ideas. Take a hotly debated issue that’s out there in the headlines and build a GENRE movie around it. That last part is key. If you try and build an on-the-nose drama about the issue, we’re going to roll our eyes. Express the execution through a marketable genre. Invisible Man (horror) was about toxic masculinity. Get Out (horror-thriller) was about racism. The Hunt (thriller/satire) was about the political divide. Don’t Worry Darling (Thriller/Sci-Fi) is about toxic masculinity. Right now, this is a great formula for coming up with a sale-able spec.

6) Twist and Shout – Look through all of the time tested movie types out there and see if you can find a way to twist them. So, for example, the buddy cop sub-genre. One of the most reliable formats in movies. “Bright” takes that format and changes one of the parties into an ogre. It was enough to result in a huge spec sale and Netflix’s most watched movie to date. A bigger example would be “It.” A time-tested formula – a young group of friends coming of age during the summer – set in the horror genre.

5) Fascinating True Stories – Find a true story that sounds good and let it do all the work for you. Some writer found a story about JFK saving a dozen people when his boat capsized during World War 2. These days googling, “Great War stories” could find you hundreds of big screen worthy stories that haven’t been told yet. What are you waiting for?

4) An Underdog Story – Underdogs are the most beloved characters in movies. In a medium where writers struggle to come up with heroes audiences give a s@#$ about, underdogs are a cheat code. Forrest Gump. Rocky. Slumdog Millionare. Luke Skywalker. Deadpool. The Mule. The Social Network. Come up with an underdog at the heart of your story and I promise you, your script will be one of the easiest reads of the year.

3) Irony – A good ironic premise instantly separates itself from the pack. Here’s what I wrote in a previous article: “The most basic form of movie irony is to make your hero the opposite of what’s required of him. So you wouldn’t write a story about an atheist who starts his own atheism support group. You’d write a story about an atheist who takes a job as a Christian preacher to make ends meet.” Here’s a whole post about ironic premises.

2) A Fascinating Main Character – This is for writers who are bad at coming up with plots. If your mind doesn’t think that way, do not fear. Instead, come up with a really interesting character then build the bones of the plot around them. Take a look at Arthur Dent (Joker) or Louis Bloom (Nightcrawler) or Max Fischer (Rushmore). In all three of these movies, I’m betting the writers came up with the character first and then formulated the plot pieces around them. The reason you can get away with writing a script that doesn’t have a big plot hook is because everything in this business still comes down to getting bankable actors on board. So if you’re a reader and you see a logline with a really interesting main character, you know if the script turns out to be good you could get a lot of actors interested.

1) High Concept – The biggest, the flashiest, the cleverest, ideas still always win. This is a NUMBERS GAME. That means a certain number of people need to read your script before someone says yes. Therefore, it is in your interest to come up with ideas that get the most people interested in reading your script. The best way to do this is still the high concept idea. How do you come up with a high concept? The best model I know of is the “strange attractor” approach. You must have that thing in your concept that sounds both big and unlike something we’ve seen before. It’s the thing that makes your idea different from everyone else’s. The good news is you can come up with high concept ideas for big movies (The Meg – A group of scientists exploring the Marianas Trench encounter the largest marine predator that has ever existed – the Megalodon shark), medium-sized movies (Split – Three girls are kidnapped by a man with a diagnosed 23 distinct personalities), and small movies (Saw – Two men wake up in a small room chained to the wall with a saw in between them). So you don’t have any excuses. Still the king of the concept creation pack in my opinion.

One of the problems I see writers make is they try to come up with movie ideas out of nothing. They sit at their computer and try to will a good idea into existence. That kind of thing can work under certain conditions. That’s how Bruckheimer and Don Simpson used to come up with ideas. They’d read through the day’s newspapers and magazines until they found a good idea. But that’s generally not how the best ideas emerge. The best ideas come through organic inspiration. You’re out and you see something interesting and your mind goes into, what if that was a movie? You write the idea down and you don’t go back to it. If that idea is still nudging at you three months later, chances are it’s a good idea. Coming up with a good movie idea will always be hard but hopefully this list makes the process a little easier.

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!

Genre: Thriller/Horror
Premise: Two years after a free solo accident nearly killed her, a fearless climber enlists the help of her old climbing partners to document her comeback.
About: This script finished number 2 on last year’s Hit List. It was part of a bidding war that Netflix won. Netflix always wins. The project will be produced by Ridley Scott and directed by his son, Jake Scott.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 112 pages

You guys know I’m all about the Free Solo.

The more time I can spend with Alex Honnald’s people, the happier I am. So when I found out there was a free solo spec script, by golly I had to read it!

35 year old Hillary Hall is the best female free solo climber in the world. She’s got an achilles heel, though. She’s arrogant. And that arrogance leads to her downfall, literally, when in the opening scene she slips and falls off the rock cliff.

Lucky for Hillary, she hit a branch on the way down, which slowed her fall enough that when she plunged into the forest, she was able to survive. Two years later, after lots of rehabbing, Hillary wants to climb again. And she’s got her sights set on a virgin wall – the Diyu Shan, 4000 feet of sheer granite in the Sichuan Province of China.

She gets the band back together – the documentary crew who filmed her now infamous fall – to create a comeback story. The leader and head photographer, Neil, is game. He knows Hillary is his path to stardom, maybe even an Oscar. Rounding out the crew are Jen, a scrappy cameraperson, and Ernie, the guy who tried to save Hillary from falling that day and failed.

Off the crew head to China where they immediately start getting bad vibes. Their driver tells them a couple of Americans came here months ago and died on the cliff, their bodies never found. And when they reach the actual cliff, they see a giant cave right in the middle of the ascent, like a mouth waiting to gobble them up.

The good news is, they’re going to be using ropes this time. And Neil’s going up with her. This is a “first ascent” which you can’t do solo. Every foot you ascend is a mystery so you need to be safe. However, it turns out that climbing is the least of their worries. Hillary begins seeing visions of the two men who died on the cliff.

And back on ground control, Ernie becomes convinced that the wall is alive. That it’s going to kill all of them. Needless to say, this turns out to be anything but your average ascent. There’s a good chance that none of the crew is leaving this mountain alive. That’s what you get when you don’t bring Alex Honnold with you.

It’s been over two weeks so I was stoked to get back to reviewing scripts. Thirty pages into this thing, I was salivating. It was exactly what I was hoping for.

And then things started to take a turn.

So here’s the thing.

We’re all looking for that +1.

We’ve got the script idea but wouldn’t it better if we had that ONE EXTRA ELEMENT to put it over the top?!

In theory, that’s a good way to think when constructing a movie concept. But, in reality, 1 + 0 can equal 3 and 1 + 1 can equal 0.

Confused?

Let me clarify. Sometimes, you already have everything you need. You don’t need a +1. Take Rocky for example. Can you have a +1’d Rocky where you turn him into a boxing cyborg? Sure. But you already had a great story about an underdog boxer who takes on the heavyweight champion to begin with. That’s enough to entertain an audience on its own… as long as the execution is good.

And that’s where screenwriters get scared. They don’t know if they can execute the basic story so they add on some horror or supernatural element for insurance.

Which is what happened here, in my opinion.

This was a good character-piece with a marketable hook all on its own. The world’s best free solo climber nearly falls to her death then rehabs to make a comeback two years later on a never-before-climbed wall in China. There’s plenty to work with there, especially from a character development perspective.

Making the mountain a ghost isn’t a bad idea. I was just never convinced the movie needed to go there.

Also, you should always be wary of concepts that allow you to use the “Am I going crazy” trope to create scary moments then never have to explain whether those moments really happened or not. It’s a straight up cheat and while audiences will give you a couple of those in every horror movie, they don’t want you doing it every other scene. It just becomes this ongoing cock tease where you’re not really committing to one side or the other. Is it a drama and they’re just imagining all this? Or is the mountain really attacking them?

It’s not that you can’t make this work but audiences don’t like being fucked with for too long. Sooner or later, they want an answer. And this script doesn’t give them one until the final minute.

With that said, the script manages to finish the climb.

It’s got as clear of a structure as you’re going to find (goal – get to the top, stakes – if you fail, you die). There’s no urgency, per se, but you don’t need urgency if your timeframe is tight. We know this is a 2 day climb so we’re not clamoring for the story to speed up. We know when it’s going to end.

There are also some fun checkpoints Bannon plays with. We’ve got that mysterious cave halfway up. What’s in there? And they’ve already been told that the final stretch is a ‘point of no return’ situation. Once you get past that point, the only way off the mountain is up.

You always want things looming in your story. Give us stuff not just to look forward to – looking forward is good – but stuff to WORRY ABOUT. That’s the real special sauce that keeps us reading. I knew that cave and that point of no return were coming at some point which made me want to keep reading.

Also, Bannon makes his best choice of the script once we reach the point of no return. Hillary has to climb the last stretch of the mountain solo.

This is a tough one to rate because it’s one of those situations where I wanted a different story than the writer wanted to tell. So I can’t ding him for not giving me what I wanted. But I really think he missed an opportunity to tell a compelling character piece about a woman making an impossible comeback in the most dangerous sport in the world.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: When the size of something is a major component of your story, you must provide a reference for the reader. We’re told Diyu Shan is 4000 feet tall. I have a vague idea of how tall that is but I have no visual reference for that. Bannon clears that up for us with this line: “That’s higher than the Twin Towers stacked on top of each other.” That’s something I can visualize. — Remember that screenwriting is about helping the reader visualize the movie. Anything you can do in your description to facilitate that, do it.

56 pages in. Who would’ve thought?

This weekend, I watched “The Platform.”

It’s a movie on Netflix with a clever premise. You agree to be a part of a 6-month experiment and, if you finish, they give you something important you need in life.

The catch is you don’t know what the experiment is until you’re in it.

So our hero, Goreng, wakes up in a concrete room with a roommate and a giant square hole in both the middle of the ceiling and the middle of the floor. We also notice a big number on the wall – 43. Before Goreng knows what’s going on, a giant table of food descends into the room and stops.

The giant table of food, however, is leftovers. Chicken bones and mostly eaten cake. Goreng watches in confusion as his roommate, the older conniving Trimagasi, ravenously attacks the leftovers.

What Goreng will soon learn is that the table of food comes down once a day, starting on the top floor with all the food. The table lowers every 60 seconds and each floor can eat as much food as they want during that time.

Goreng stares at the picked-over leftovers, the result of 42 previous floors of eating, and then asks the question all of us are wondering. “How many floors are there?” “200,” Trimagasi says. 200? If there’s only this much food on floor 43, how much reaches floor 100, floor 150, or floor 200? The thought is too scary to think about.

The story is obviously a metaphor for capitalism and it works well. Also, it’s a dream concept for a producer, which is why I got so jealous the second I saw it. A never-before-used high concept that takes place in a single location? It doesn’t get any better than that. You could shoot this movie for a quarter of a million dollars if you had to.

The movie seems to be getting a divisive reaction. The people who love it really love it. But when I tried to get my brother to watch it, he couldn’t make it past the ten minute mark. “It’s a guy in a room. Who cares?” He said. “I’m already bored.”

Because I have the 2-Week Screenplay Challenge on my mind, I imagined what it was like writing this movie and how it might be applicable to what all of you are dealing with.

My theory is that this was a first draft. It was a really good first draft – it probably had half-a-dozen polishes, otherwise known as “light rewrites” (change a scene here, alter a scene there). But you could feel the writer searching for interesting story elements as the story moved into its second half.

What really gave it away was the ending, which was the kind of ending writers write when they don’t have an ending. They convince themselves they’re being thoughtful and “challenging” the audience, when in reality they throw in some vague nonsensical finale and hope the audience does the work for them.

What I’ve found with endings is that you never nail them on the first draft. They alway take numerous drafts to figure out because endings are payoffs to setups. This requires you to go back to the beginning, set some things up, then pay them off in the climax. Which means starting a new draft so you can do that.

Then you learn your new setups aren’t perfect so you start to fine-tune them. And that takes more drafts.

And here’s what I’ve ultimately found. You can’t write a great second half until you know exactly how your movie ends. Because everything needs to be setting up that final sequence. If you’re not 100% clear on what that final sequence is, your second half is always going to be squishy.

All of this is to remind you that it’s okay to be messy right now. It’s okay, as you make your way to the climax, if none of the puzzle pieces are fitting together the way you want them to. That will come. I promise you, if you choose to keep writing this script after this draft, it will come.

The only thing you need to worry about right now is having fun. Don’t take this process so seriously or you’re going to hate yourself and want to give up.

And if The Platform truly was a first draft? It shows you what’s possible with a strong concept. You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to exploit as many cool things about your concept as possible. Get into your audiences’ heads. What do you think they would want from your concept? Give them that. I was curious about what the table looked like on the 200 level. They put our characters on the 200 floor later so we see that. That’s how to exploit your concept.

So keep writing. I want one of you to have a featured movie on Netflix. It’s not going to happen unless YOU. KEEP. WRITING.

We’ve said it a million times on this site. One of the best ways to get noticed as a writer is to create a great character. It’s such a powerful trick, in fact, you don’t even need the rest of the script to be that good.

The funny thing about this is that we all know what a great character is after we’ve watched one — Arthur Fleck, Forrest Gump, Louis Bloom (Nightcrawler), Mildred Hayes (Three Billboards), Tiffany Maxwell (Silver Linings Playbook), Annie Wilkes — yet when we’re staring at the blank page and we ask ourselves the question, “How do I write a great character?” we all of a sudden have no idea.

In fact, one of the most common issues I run across as a reader is plain characters. Specifically, plain MAIN CHARACTERS. There are a few of reasons for this but the most common is that we’re afraid if our main character is too complicated that he won’t be able to ground the story. So we give him a little quirk (he’s afraid to open up to the world!) and convince ourselves we’ve created someone juicy. In reality, he’s one more forgettable movie character with a generic flaw.

Before we dive too deep into this, let’s cover the basics. You find character through conflict. And there are three main forms of conflict when it comes to character creation. One is inner conflict. There’s a battle going on inside your character. Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time In Hollywood spends the entire movie battling with whether he’s a good enough actor to keep trying to be a movie star or if he should settle and accept being second-tier villains in bad TV shows.

The second is inter-personal conflict. This is the conflict your character will have with others. You want to create relationships in your story that challenge your characters because challenged characters are forced to react. And that’s where you find the interesting stuff. In Misery, if Paul Sheldon lays over for everything Annie Wilkes wants, Annie can never clash with him. So Paul is always looking for ways to escape, pushing his luck, trying to trick her. This creates that interpersonal conflict that brings out the crazy in Annie. And, of course, the crazy is what makes that character so memorable.

Finally, there’s external conflict. This is the conflict your character has with the outside world. An easy way to test a character is to have the world you’ve created throw something at him. It could be a deadly storm just minutes after he’s survived a plane crash. It could be a horde of zombies standing between him and the only exit in the building.

You don’t need all three of these to create a great character, but you usually need two of them. And the first two are where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck. Something your hero is battling internally and a few unresolved conflicts with the main characters surrounding him. If you execute this well, at the very least you’ll have a solid character. Although, you probably won’t have a juicy one.

Another staple of good characters is that they’re active. The reason active characters yield better results than passive ones is because when somebody is being active, they’re routinely running up against problems in the world. If they stay home and don’t do anything, though, there isn’t a whole lot you can throw at them.

It would’ve been so easy to make Arthur Fleck (Joker) a passive reclusive character. That definitely fits his persona. But I’m guessing the writers realized that if they did that, it would be hard to put Arthur into enough interesting situations. So they made him active in two ways. One, he needed that clown job to pay the rent. And two, he was an aspiring comedian. You’ll notice that the comedian plot line is what dictated everything that happened in the plot. That’s how important active characters are in movies.

Still, these are just the basics. They only get you so far. How do you find the special sauce that elevates a character into something extraordinary?

The bite-size answer to this question is to think of the actor who will be playing the part. When an actor reads the script, they don’t read it like you or I do. They read it from the perspective of, “Is this a meaty role? Is this someone I could do something with?” They want something that’s going to blow people away.

Think about it. Let’s say you’re an actress and you received the scripts for “Yesterday” and “Marriage Story.” In Yesterday, you’d be playing Jack Malik’s manager/love interest, a down home girl who isn’t interested in all the glitz and glamour of the rock star life. In Marriage Story, you’d be playing the cutthroat heartless divorce lawyer for Nicole, who’s more interested in “winning” than she is serving the best interest of her client. Which role would you want to play?

Unfortunately, the “actor hack” doesn’t give us any technical direction. Still, it’s a quick way to see if the character you’ve written is interesting at all. If you can’t imagine actors climbing over each other to play the part, it’s probably not that compelling of a part.

Another “quick-fix” tip on creating juicy characters is to build HEAVY CONTRAST into them. If you think of your character as a spectrum, you want to play with both ends of that spectrum. If you only play with the middle keys, the character is going to be pretty boring.

Annie Wilkes is the jolliest woman in the world in one scene, then she’s the angriest woman in the world in the next. Or a character who has terminal cancer but is always happy. Or a Nazi skinhead who’s at the forefront of stopping child trafficking. A cheerleader who’s diagnosed with depression. It’s an admittedly cheap way to create depth but it works! So if you’re trying to write something fast, this may be the way to go.

Now let’s get into the deeper stuff.

One of the big ones is THE HAND YOUR CHARACTER HAS BEEN DEALT. A lot of the most interesting people in this world are people who were dealt a bad hand. Naturally, these characters stick out in movies. Forrest Gump was dealt a bad hand. Arthur Fleck was dealt a bad hand. Stephen Hawking was dealt a bad hand. The reason these characters play so well on screen is because they have to deal with much higher levels of adversity than the average person. And we like to see people overcome adversity. The bigger the wall they have to climb, the more we root for them. If you look at all the Oscar winning roles, you’ll see a lot of characters who were dealt a bad hand.

Backstory is another biggie. If you can get backstory right, it will be the most effective way of creating a deep interesting character. The reason you don’t see it utilized well often is because it takes a lot of work to explore backstory and since a lot of that isn’t on-the-page writing, writers don’t want to do it. But most people are in deep conflict with their past – either who they used to be or a specific event that changed their life. So if you can find something meaningful in your character’s past that shapes who they are today and package it in a manner where the true journey of your story is them resolving this issue? Those tend to be the characters that stay with people the longest.

Mildred Hayes (Three Billboards) is an angry vindictive woman who hates almost everyone. But we know why. Her daughter was brutally raped and murdered and nobody is doing anything about it. That event is the main source of conflict dictating this character’s actions. She clearly needs to resolve this issue if she’s ever going to be “normal” again.

And it doesn’t have to be heavy like that. Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time) is a feel-good happy-go-lucky guy. Taken at face value, his character is almost forgettable. But Cliff has a major event in his past dictating who he is today. His wife either accidentally drowned or he killed her. That extra detail from the past makes that character so much more interesting. Because if he killed her, that means he has to live a lie the rest of his life. If she died accidentally, he lost his wife.

Which brings me to another powerful concept when it comes to character creation – deceit. This kind of falls into the “contrast” category. But we’ll deal with it on its own since it’s utilized so often. Deceit is a character who is built on a lie. They’re presenting themselves to the world one way, when in reality they’re someone completely different. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Walter White in Breaking Bad. The entire family from Parasite. It’s not surprising that these characters pop off the page so easily. Whenever you’re pretending to be someone you’re not, you’re creating a duality that naturally translates into depth.

Finally, I want to talk about addictions because there are a lot of juicy characters who are built around addictions, mostly drugs and alcohol. It’s true. These characters can be memorable. But ONLY if you make a key adjustment. It can’t be about the addiction itself. It has to be about WHAT CAUSED THE ADDICTION. So if someone’s an alcoholic, that’s an empty shell to an audience member. But if they started drinking due to the death of someone close to them, now the addiction is LINKED to something. And once you have something to link to, you have an actionable journey for your character. They’re not trying to kick alcoholism. They’re trying to move past that death.

Let me finish off by saying that it’s really hard to make PASSIVE or QUIET characters work. If you mix those two things into a single character, it’s virtually impossible to make them interesting. And even individually they’re hard to make work. Finally, there is no equation out there that says, if you mix all of these elements together in “this way,” you’ll create a great character. But if you think of them as musical notes, everything discussed today are the notes you want to play with. Some combination of them is going to give you your juicy memorable character. Good luck!

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!