EXT. SCRIPT TIPS. VARIOUS
By Carlo Kureishi
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
This is great advice Carlo, thank you. Thinking of your Dad with steps I take. Wishing him the movement we forget we have. X
A few years ago there was a TV show called 'Black Sails', that was billed as a prequel to 'Treasure Island'. It ran for four seasons. In addition to the characters created by Robert Louis Stevenson, it included a number of historical pirates, though the writers played fast and loose with what is known about these men and women.
Early on, I assumed that the point of including the likes of Blackbeard and Anne Bonny, in a narrative about fictional pirates, was to lend it an air of authenticity. Later, it became apparent that it was not history that was being dragged into the realm of fiction, but quite the opposite: The point that the show writers were making (or my interpretation of it) is that the history of the golden age of piracy is so riven with hearsay and myth-making, that who is to say that the likes of Long John Silver and Billy Bones weren't also real people? In a show that sometimes strained credibility and erred toward melodrama, it was an unusually subtle piece of meta-commentary.
The boldest example of scene-skipping I have encountered occurs in Cormac McCarthy's novel - 'No Country For Old Men' – which I am about to spoil. If you plan on reading the book, or watching the Coen brother's beautifully-shot adaptation – then you should stop reading.
..........
........
…...
…..
….
...
..
.
The supposed protagonist of the novel, Llewelyn Moss, is murdered off-page at the end of the second act. He is seen alive for the last time, in the company of a young hitch-hiker. The book picks up in the aftermath of his death, as the Sheriff Ed Tom Bell visits the crime scene and attempts to piece together what happened. The transition is even more jarring in the film.
Moss doesn't even die at the hands of the antagonist – an unstoppable force of nature named Anton Chigurh, portrayed on screen by Javier Bardem, who won an Oscar for the performance. Distracted by the girl he is travelling with, he is shot dead by anonymous cartel footsoldiers.
The upshot of this development is the realisation that the actual protagonist of the novel is the afore-mentioned Sheriff Bell – a man who is acutely aware of an escalation of evil in society, but who no longer has any answer for it. It is also the point where the title of the book begins to make sense.
I can't think of a contemporary writer who has explored the nuances of evil better than McCarthy. Chigurh isn't even his best antagonist – that accolade must go to Judge Holden from 'Blood Meridian' – an earthbound fusion of the devil and Prometheus, who builds men and societies up to a point where they bring about their own destruction.