Today we discuss the most important scene you will write in your entire script.
Yesterday, we discussed the teaser scene and talked about whether you should include one in your script or not. Now that you’ve decided, we can move on to either the first scene of the script (if you didn’t include a teaser) or the second scene (if you did). This is going to be your main character’s introductory scene. It is not hyperbole to say this is the most important scene in your script.
The reason for that is the same reason I bring up in half the script reviews I do. Just like nobody in real life wants to hang out with an unlikable person, no audience wants to hang around an unlikable character. So the scene must make us like the hero on some level. I know this word “like” is heavily debated amongst the screenwriting community. The way I define it – insofar as what we’re trying to do – is that you must make us care about the main character enough that we want to root for him.
What’s tricky about this scene is that introducing your hero is only one piece of the puzzle. You also want to introduce their flaw. This is because there are two journeys going on in a screenplay. There’s the external journey, which entails all the physical things we see our hero do to achieve their goal. And there’s the internal journey, which is how your hero changes on the inside while all these external things are happening.
In order for a character to change, you will need to lay out what their starting point is. If they are a selfish person, and their inner journey will show them transform into a selfless person, then it’s imperative you let us know right off the bat that they’re selfish.
On top of establishing likability and a flaw, you will also need to make the scene where they’re being introduced entertaining. A critical mistake a lot of writers make is writing stillborn hero introductory scenes. It’s as if they believe that as long as they set up the character, they’ve done their job. No no no no no no. On top of everything else, the introductory scene itself needs to be entertaining.
This is going to be a theme throughout this month. You don’t get gold stars for setting up characters, setting up plot, or establishing backstory. You only get gold stars when you do all of that stuff IN ADDITION TO entertaining the reader.
So how does one do all of these things in a single scene? The most common way is to show your hero at their job encountering a relatively high-stakes problem. The reason you do this is because a problem necessitates choice and action. Your hero will have to make decisions, which will help us get to know him, and he will need to take action, which gives the scene life.
You see this in a lot of procedurals, cop movies, and serial killer flicks. We meet our hero detective as he arrives at the murder scene. The murder is the “problem.” We need to find out who did it. Or at least find a solid clue that will set us on the right path.
There are a lot of things you can in this scenario to achieve your goals. You can make our detective charming to everyone he encounters, which makes him likable. Or we can make him an underdog. He’s the low guy on the totem pole. Nobody wants him here (everybody likes an underdog so we’re immediately rooting for him). And, of course, he can outsmart the other, more seasoned, detectives, finding the clue that everyone else missed. Since audiences love smart protagonists who are great at their jobs, they immediately like this guy.
These scenes also tend to be entertaining because there’s a mystery component to them. When someone’s been murdered, audiences are curious to find out who did it. They like following someone around who’s trying to answer these questions.
The great thing about generating a problem your hero must solve is that it’s a setup that works for virtually any scenario. If your hero is an office worker, maybe they accidentally deleted their speech and have to give the big boardroom presentation from memory. If they’re a sniper, maybe they’ve been ordered to kill a madman but when they get the target in their sites, there are children in the way, which means they will have to kill the children before they kill the target. If they’re a high school teacher, maybe they’re told by the football coach that they have to reverse a failed test score so that the school’s star player can play in the championship game this weekend.
You’re just looking to put your hero in an unfavorable predicament and see how they respond. That’s the opening to everything from Raiders of the Lost Ark (must escape a crumbling cave) to Toy Story (new Christmas toys arrive to potentially replace the current ones) to The Invisible Man (must escape her evil husband’s home before he wakes up) to The Bourne Identity (a bullet-riddled man is rescued at sea but he has no idea who he is).
Introducing some sort of problem your hero has to face is one of the easiest ways to achieve all the things I talk about in this post.
In order to convey what we’re going for, I’ll highlight the best character introduction I’ve seen in the last five years. That would be the introduction of Arthur Fleck, aka The Joker, in the movie, “Joker.”
The reason I liked this intro so much is because the writer had one hell of an obstacle in front of him. He had to take a psychotic weird unpleasant man and somehow make us root for him. Or at least care about him for the next two hours. Therefore, he constructed this clever opening scene that has our hero getting attacked and humiliated. Remember that audiences will always like characters who are bullied, ganged up on, or taken advantage of. So after this scene, we’re Team Arthur all the way.
I’ve noticed some people online point to this scene as over-the-top and trying too hard to make us like Arthur. I vehemently disagree. This character was going to be so unpleasant for such an extended period of time that the writers had to go big with his introduction. They had to make us really really really care for him. This wasn’t some Adam Sandler movie. This was a disturbed character. We had to massively tip the ‘likability’ scales early on to get people on board.
For those who haven’t seen Joker, here’s the opening scene:
I don’t want to pretend like this is easy. Screenplays are weird in that, sometimes, a story works against what the writer wants to do. For example, maybe your hero is a bank robber. What better way to introduce them than robbing a bank? But what if our bank robber also has a wife and a kid who are going to be a major part of the story? And you start thinking, “I can make my hero a lot more likable if I introduce him around his wife and kid first. And the bank robbery will have higher stakes if we know the hero has a wife and kid waiting at home. So why don’t I set the three of them up in a scene at home first, then send him off to rob the bank.”
In other words, you sacrifice the more entertaining scene – the bank robbery – for a family set-up scene. Is that the right call? Maybe. Maybe not. Funny enough, this is exactly the dilemma Joker faced. In the original script, the opening scene was Arthur meeting with a social worker. The scene did a good job getting into Arthur’s head, making him sympathetic because he obviously has mental issues. But the scene wasn’t entertaining enough to open the movie on. Which is why director Todd Phillips opted to go with the sign-stealing scene instead. It was more entertaining AND it made Arthur sympathetic.
If you can do everything in one scene, you should do it. If not, here’s how I would prioritize the three requirements of an introductory scene.
- MAKE US LIKE HIM! – If we love your hero, we’ll be a lot less finicky about plot and story issues.
- MAKE THE SCENE ENTERTAINING – It’s still early enough in the screenplay that a reader is ready to give up on you. So don’t just introduce your hero. Make sure the scene itself is entertaining.
- INTRODUCE YOUR HERO’S FLAW – While I would prefer to know your hero’s flaw immediately, I don’t think it’s as important as making us like him and making the scene entertaining. If you must hold off on one of these three, you can push the introduction of the hero’s flaw back a scene or two.
Join me back here tomorrow when we talk about secondary characters as well as the scenes you’ll write before the inciting incident.
Next Post: Tomorrow (Thursday, March 3)
Pages to write until next post: 1.5
