My friends, we actually have a good script today. A very good script.
Genre: Action/Period
Premise: Set in the 14th century, a shepherd watches as a group of mercenaries assault and murder his employing family, setting him on a path of revenge.
About: Today’s writer, Will Dunn, has been writing for a long time. He first made strides by getting into the Twentieth Century Fox writing program back in 2011. Since then, he’s sold a few scripts, including one called “Ion,” about a man who travels to other planets and dimensions in search of his reincarnated lover. The Peasant also made last year’s Black List.
Writer: Will Dunn
Details: 98 pages
This role seems tailor-made for the fast-rising Alan Ritchson
Katt Williams, my new muse, said something interesting in a recent interview. He said, “People think stand-up comedy is easy because you’re just talking. And everybody thinks they can talk and be entertaining. The irony is that the better I get at my craft, the easier it looks. But those people aren’t considering the 30 years of work I put in to make it look this easy.”
It’s the same thing with screenwriting. The better the screenplay, the easier it looks to write a screenplay. There’s no place that better represents this issue than the Black List. We’ve gotten a ton of bad scripts from the list and, one would think, it is partly due to the delusion people have of thinking this craft is easy.
It’s not. It’s hard.
But lucky for us today, we finally have a screenwriter who knows what he’s doing.
It’s the 1300s in Tuscany, Italy. War is so prevalent at this time that even when there’s no war going on, bored soldiers will join together in teams and just rape and pillage towns in order to accumulate as much wealth as possible.
We meet Oliver, a 40-something shepherd, as he’s teaching a young boy, Luca, how to use a sling. Oliver is staying with Luca’s family, including Luca’s father, Gio, after having shown up a month prior. It’s clear that Oliver has some sort of shady past but, at least at first, it’s unclear what.
That changes when a group of mercenaries show up, knock Oliver out, then go kill the family he’s staying with. A brutal “Patrick Bateman (American Psycho)” like leader named Janick revels in the destruction. But what he’s really taken by is the knight’s sword that was hidden in the barn. It is highly unusual for a peasant family to have a sword like this.
When Oliver comes to and learns of the family’s demise, he has one goal and one goal only. Go find Janick and kill him. Oh, and kill anyone Janick knows as well. Janick is staying at a castle town called Volterra nearby. His mercenary crew lobbed off the head of the king there and turned the place into their own little vacation villa.
After a brief detour, Oliver heads to Volterra, breaks in, and kills a bunch of mercenaries. But Janick and his men get the upper hand, forcing Oliver to retreat into Volterra’s only church. Here, the bad guys aren’t allowed inside, giving Oliver an intermission to recover. It’s also here where we learn of Oliver’s true roots – that he was the Pope’s assassin! It’s only a matter of time before he comes back out swords-a-blazing. But will the evil Jannick ignore God’s will and break into the church to get the upper hand? We’ll have to see.
Today’s screenplay highlights a little-known screenwriting hack.
What you do is take a thriller/action/revenge type scenario, add a dash of urgency, and place it in olden times. The reason this works is because audiences don’t associate period pieces with these genres. They associate them with movies like Titanic or Shakespeare in Love or Legends of the Fall.
That’s a gigantic reason why 1917 did so well. It took this hack and exploited it to the extreme (going so far as to set the movie in real-time).
Today’s movie is a Wick-type setup but set in the 14th century. So, right away, it had my attention.
However, the setup has the same challenges as the Takens and the John Wicks do in modern day. They’re working with a cliched template. Cliched templates have an increased likelihood of creating cliched screenplays.
But I’m going to tell you how to get around that.
You have to first make us like the person or people who is going to be killed in the first act. Here, Dunn doesn’t just casually introduce us to the family. He creates a specific bond between Oliver and Luca. Oliver teaches Luca how to use his slingshot. He then imparts wisdom on him in a heartfelt exchange.
The amateur writer often screws this up because they speed through it. They don’t find any specific moment between the two. They just sort of show our hero saying, “Good job, champ.” But the point is, if you can nail that first part, you’re golden. Cause if we loved the person who was killed, we will want them avenged.
Next, you want to create a bad guy who we hate. And as simple as that sentence is to write, it’s frustratingly hard to do. Cause you figure, just make him really mean! Then we’ll hate him! But it doesn’t work like that for whatever reason.
What you have to do is make the bad guy mean in a way that feels a little more complex. Dunn does that here. Janick doesn’t initially come up to Oliver and start berating him or kicking his ass. He actually offers an exchange of goods. He says to Oliver, “I’ll buy your flock of sheep from you.” Oliver then politely discusses why he can’t sell him the sheep, which ends in Janick knocking him out.
It’s a small thing. But that sort of stuff is important when creating a villain because we don’t normally assign rationale to villains. So when they’re being reasonable, it makes them more of a real person in the reader’s eyes.
Of course, after Oliver refuses, Janick kicks him in the face and goes and kills the family, establishing his true awfulness. But our first impression of him is of a reasonable man, even if we sense that sinister element beneath the surface.
The reason this is important is because when you combine the killing of a person we genuinely liked with a villain who we genuinely hate, that right there can power an entire screenplay. You can make all sorts of mistakes along the way and it won’t matter. Because the core of your story is so solid. And this script does make mistakes. It makes several of them.
There’s this silly little side-quest where Oliver has to go into the forest to find two forest-women warriors who dress like demons because they know the secret way into the castle. Just have him find his own way into the castle.
And then there’s a period of the script after he takes out a bunch of mercenaries where he’s pulled into the church and we just hang out in the church for like 20 pages and Oliver talks to a bunch of people. It’s fine to take a breather after an intense sequence. But 20 pages? Come on, man.
But in the end, these missteps don’t have much of an effect on the story because the core is so strong.
It’s why I always say, spend the majority of your script-writing on the PILLARS of your story – the things that affect how the audience experiences the movie the most. Is it a nice little subplot in Titanic that the captain is mad that the powerful figures on the boat bully him into going faster than he wants? Sure. But getting that subplot right holds 1/1000th the power of making sure that we believe in and care about the love story between Jack and Rose.
I don’t say that lightly. If you had written Titanic, I would beg you to show it to at least five people and ask them, “Do you care about the love story between Jack and Rose?” Cause if they don’t, that means your biggest pillar is weak, which means you don’t have a script yet, no matter how good the rest of the script is written.
It appears that this script was (smartly) written to become a franchise. There are so many John Wick clones these days, how do you separate yourself? You separate yourself in the way that I told you to at the beginning of this review. Jump back 800 years or so. That world is so different from ours today that you can literally copy the exact same template as John Wick and it feels like a completely different movie.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you’re writing a big long action sequence, consider underlining the truly important moments to draw the attention of the reader towards them. Because, often, readers will skim through repetitive action. It’s the unfortunate nature of script-reading in Hollywood. Therefore, let them know the important beats by underlining them. Just don’t do it too often or the underlining will lose its power.
