Corona Virus.
Media creation or legitimate threat?
Who knows.
The only thing I can tell you is that I thought this would thin out my gym floor so I could FINALLY use the squat rack but that hasn’t been the case. Humph.
Today we’re going to shamelessly use this virus to learn how to construct a movie idea. Often times, when writers get big ideas, they don’t know how to exploit the idea to create an actual movie.
I’ll give you an example.
Let’s say you had an idea about dinosaurs coming back to life in the present day. Conceptually, it’s a great idea. So you think, ooh, first I’ll have the dinosaurs show up in Japan. And then Russia. Then Brazil. Then the U.S. And each country is dealing with them in their own way. One country is killing them. Another is trying to protect them. Others are trying to herd them towards a central location. I’ll also cover the internal government discussions about what they should do. We’ll bounce around left and right and right and left so we can cover every angle of this phenomenon.
I’m sorry but that’s not a movie.
Jurassic Park is a movie.
My job today is to explain how to get a Jurassic Park idea as opposed to a Dinosaurs All Over The World idea. And we’re going to do so by using topical subject matter. A studio has just come to us and said, “We want to make a movie about a pandemic. Pitch us your best idea.”
FIND AN ANGLE
The first thing you need to do once you’ve got that big idea is to find an angle. The Walking Dead may have started off as, “The entire world is overrun by zombies.” But that’s just an initial concept. There isn’t yet an angle.
The angle is the plan of attack through which your story takes place. And it could be anything. It could be a group of people holed up in a house fighting off the epidemic. It could be following three separate families dealing with the crisis, each living in different parts of the world. It could be three survivors who have to make it from the bottom to the top of Manhattan, which happens to be the most heavily infected zombie city in the world. It could be a doctor who hunts and captures the infected, then brings them back to his lab in the pursuit of finding a cure.
The key question you’re asking when searching for an angle is “Does this fit well into the feature film format?” And I’m going to tell you right now that the more focused your angle, the better your movie is probably going to be. A group of people holed up in a house is likely to be a better movie than cutting between three families in three different parts of the world.
Why?
Because films work best when the boundaries are strong. It’s easier to manage a group of people in a house than it is people in three different locations on the planet. The more contained the space and the time frame is, the better feature story mechanics will work.
Let’s go back to Jurassic Park for a second. It isn’t taking place in all of America. It takes place ON AN ISLAND (contained space). It doesn’t take place over a full month. It takes place over a couple of days (contained time).
Jurassic Park has always flirted with – and even tried – the idea of moving the dinosaurs onto the never-ending geographic location of the United States. But it’s failed because the boundaries are gone. And with that, the structure has weakened.
Look no further than Steven Soderbergh to see what happens when you have a bad angle. Remember that movie Contagion that he made? Of course you don’t. Unless you’ve seen it pop up recently in the wake of the Corona Virus news. But before it started getting marketed again, I’m going to bet that you can barely remember anything about that movie.
That’s because its angle wasn’t feature-friendly. Soderbergh decided to cover multiple people getting infected all over the world. As a result, we didn’t get to know anyone that well, care about anyone that much. And by disjointing the narrative, it becomes harder to engage in each separate storyline.
Does that mean this omniscient angle can never work? No. It’s just not feature-friendly and therefore the difficulty level is higher.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of the few movies I’ve seen that took a scattered angle, covering the alien invasion from numerous different points of view across the globe, and still worked. But even Close Encounters eventually zoomed in on Roy Neary’s storyline of getting to the ship landing.
So we have our directive.
Pandemic. Movie idea.
How do we obtain our angle?
START ASKING QUESTIONS
To find the angle, start asking big questions.
WHEN? When is our story taking place? Does it take place right at the early stages of the pandemic, before full panic has set in? Does it take place when the first stages of fear are setting in? Does it take place as things are starting to get scary? Does it take place AFTER the worst has already happened? Or does it take place long after the pandemic occurred (making it a post-apocalyptic idea)? Each of these is a different movie.
WHAT? What is the threat? Is the threat the flu, then death? Or does the threat turn people into raging killing machines, a la 21 Days Later? Obviously, the answer to this question will vastly change what your movie is.
HOW LONG? How long do you want the movie’s inner timeline to be? Is this like “The Road” which takes place over weeks? Or is like my Manhattan idea above, which takes place in one day? If you’ve been paying attention, the tighter the timeframe, the more movie-friendly your concept is going to be.
WHERE? Where this takes place is probably the second most important question of all. It can take place in a house, in multiple houses, in multiple countries, on an island, on a boat, in a city, at the top of a skyscraper, in a locked down medical facility where the virus seems to be spreading to new departments every hour.
WHO? Who’s involved is usually the most important question. Is it a group of people who don’t know each other? Or is it a family? Is it two people on their honeymoon? Is it four people out on a double blind date? Is it a group of kids in a limo who just left their prom?
FIGURE OUT YOUR CHARACTERS
Once you have your location and a general feeling for the length of the journey, you need to find your characters. This is going be HUGE. I have seen so many good concepts destroyed by forgettable characters. We don’t want that to happen to you. Something to keep in mind is that if you create compelling characters, they’ll work regardless of their surroundings. Even if your concept loses its steam or the plot gets predictable, strong characters keep audiences invested throughout. That’s why Contagion didn’t work. It didn’t allow us to spend enough time with any particular group of characters to ensure that we cared about them. So you really want to get this part right.
IRONY – Usually with big ideas comes the opportunity to inject irony into the characters. And irony is one of the superpowers of storytelling when done well. Look at Guardians of the Galaxy. These are literally the guardians of our galaxy and the leader is not a strong mature natural leader, but rather a zany goofball who makes it up as he goes along. Irony is surprisingly hard to get right outside of comedies. But if you can make it work, it’s the thing that puts your movie over the top.
A HERO WITH A STRONG CONNECTION TO THE IDEA – Your hero and your concept need to be connected, both conceptually and thematically, if possible. If you make a movie about a man who’s forced to tell the truth for 24 hours, you don’t want him to be a farmer who’s thinking of moving to the big city. You want him to be a lawyer who has the biggest case of his life on the day that he can’t lie. If you’re making a movie about Hollywood in 1969, centering it on a struggling actor as opposed to a brain surgeon is probably a good idea.
RELATIONSHIPS THAT NEED FIXING – Emotion is your friend when creating characters. Ideally, you bring people into your story who have some unresolved issue with each other. This is why choosing characters who have history with one another (often family) is better than picking people who have no connection whatsoever. That doesn’t mean you can’t do the latter. But turning that relationship into something emotion-based at some point in the story is a good idea. Maybe your two main characters just met and, over the course of the story, fall in love (Brokeback Mountain). Or they form a friendship (Jerry Maguire and Rod Tidwell). Or they come to an understanding with one another (Fury Road). But to center on a storyline with characters who don’t know each other, and you never breach any sort of emotion-driven character subplots, it’s going to be hard for the audience to invest in your movie on anything other than a surface level. A big reason why A Quiet Place did so well was because it followed a family fractured by the death of their son as opposed to four random people.
SO WHAT’S OUR MOVIE?
Okay, so we’ve identified our criteria for coming up with a full movie concept. What’s our movie about the pandemic going to be?! Here’s my take. The movie will be titled, “Catalina.” It’s been 3 months since Patient 0. The virus, which has an 88% kill rate, has obliterated most of the cities, which have descended into chaos. Catalina Island, a small island just off the coast of Los Angeles, has become the one remaining medical center fighting to find a cure. Getting on or off the island is near impossible due to fear of the virus. The movie focuses on the lead doctor at the facility who finds out that his 11 year old daughter, who’s also on the island, has just tested positive for the virus. Knowing she’ll be killed if found out, he must figure out a way to get her off the island to safety.
Hmmm… it’s an okay idea. I think it could be better though. Feel free to improve it. Or pitch me your best idea for a pandemic movie in the comment section!
