EXT. SCRIPT TIPS. VARIOUS

By Carlo Kureishi

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir

Rooting Your Characters

A certain richness and authenticity is gained by writing your characters into real historical events. To be clear, this is not a recommendation to write about real events, although of course this too is a can be a good idea.

What I mean is to say is that your characters should have backstories, and that writing real events into these otherwise fictional former lives can lend something to a character, can root them in the world.

This is because real world events – whether it’s a significant protest, a terrorist attack, a day of ceremony, and so on – carry with them a whole range of sociohistorical signifiers. When a character talks about these events, or we are told about a character’s relationship to them, a lattice of personal ideas and emotions are triggered in the audience.  

There is that great scene in Jaws where the character of Quint, played masterfully by Robert Shaw, delivers his monologue about surviving the deadly sinking of the USS Indianapolis in 1945, a real event in which a United States Ship was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine. The men that didn’t die straight away would face the deadliest mass shark attack in human history.

Howard Sackler, the screenwriter, says of writing the speech: “Quint needed some motivation to show all of us what made him the way he is and I thought that was the Indianapolis incident.”

Watch it here: Quint's speech

But Quint’s relationship to this event reaches beyond telling us that he is simply a war veteran with a revenge-complex about sharks (and likely the Japanese) – it also transmogrifies Quint into Moby Dick’s monomaniacal Captain Ahab, imbuing him with all that Ahab represents in the popular consciousness, his obsession and his deadly fate.  

As well as being a brilliantly written speech, it both roots Quint in the real world and mythologises him, fixing him to literary archetype.

Our Characters are products of the world we create, but can live in the real world as well. This technique should be used sparingly.

Odd Beats

Audiences are smart. If you’re writing a thriller, or a mystery, or something psychological, and want to conceal plot points and create a certain unpredictability in your structure, or perhaps most importantly, command attentiveness in your audience, it might help to play with exactly what beats of your story you choose to reveal to your audience.

For example, rather than writing the scene your instinct tells you to write, say, a showdown between a warring couple – the eruption of an argument - you instead write the scene that comes afterwards, the one in which the couple clean up broken glass in silence.

Now, the audience are playing catch up, they’re drawing inferences from the images on screen, trying to work out what has happened. They’re concentrating; the scene is mysterious, the broken glass and the silence are jarring.

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part One uses this technique to great effect, turning a domestic drama into a psychological mystery.

Lee Chang-Dong’s brilliant and unsettling Burning is also notable, an arthouse, social realist film that might also be described a noir, a puzzler.

And Michael Haneke’s Cache, a film the critic Roger Ebert describes as a “a thriller, so it is, but a thriller that implodes, not releasing its tension in action but coiling it deeper inside.” Haneke makes his audience work for clues, the camera is there to observe, not to tell or instruct.

In these films, we are constantly thrown into scenes and have to make up ground and work out where we are. In many ways, these are films consisting of scenes that a more straight forward film would have condemned to the cutting room floor.

In music, they call it syncopation, when a rhythm or set of rhythms are played off the common pulse of a piece.

In your writing, experiment with scenes that come before or after the one that you would typically write, the scenes that play off the common pulse.

Carlo Kureishi