Clips from THE HERO'S 2 JOURNEYS with Michael Hauge & Chris Vogler

your hero must have suffered some wound at the beginning of the film must have already suffered it when the story begins now what I mean by wound is simply an unhealed source of continuing pain a wound is an unhealed source of continuing pain something in other words must have happened to your hero before the movie began before the novel began or in the very first scene if you have kind of a prologue opening as in twister where she sees her father kill Dorian in contact where she sees her father killed as a little girl and it creates identification because it's undeserved misfortune and then we jump ahead in time to meet the grown-up who is now still suffering at least subconsciously from this wound the pain has never fully healed and as a result of suffering that wound that is going to create a fear in that character now this wound could be an event such as seeing their fathers die in those two movies I just named but very often it is an ongoing situation it is something that occurred through their childhood or for some extended period of time so in the firm what was his wound it wasn't the one day something traumatic happened it was that he grew up in a trailer park with an abusive stepfather an alcoholic mother and a brother who went to jail and that existence that he led at the began how is affecting him now and through the course of the movie now the wound may not be revealed right at the very beginning notice that the scene where that is revealed is most clear first in the interview we can tell he's lying about not having any brothers or sisters but even more so when when a be his wife says to him this is about not about making money and it's certainly not about doing anything for me this is about a brother you pretend you don't have and a mother in a trailer park see that pain of growing up in that dirt poor in his response is it's easy to say you know what it's like to be poor when you never have been he is still feeling the effects of that wound or in Shrek it isn't revealed until the clip that comes almost actually well past the midpoint of the movie when donkey says to him what's your problem Shrek and Shrek says I'm not the one who's got the problem it's the world who has the problem they see me coming and they turn around and run away now think of the pain that he is expressing that he has never even allowed himself to say up to that point it must be time for something I hear a beep going off I hope I hope my time isn't up I'm just getting going think of the pain that he's expressing he's saying all my life because I've been an older people run away from me so out of those wounds that those characters have grows a fear and that is a fear that they would be subjected to that same kind of pain again that if Shrek is terrified that if he allowed himself to get close to other people to the fairy tale creatures are to donkey or certainly to the princess my god that's unthinkable there's this wonderful moment the animation is spectacular in this because it conveys these things visually so well there's a wonderful moment when she says donkey says what's this you think Shrek sure true love and she said well yes and donkey starts to laugh and then Shrek starts laughing real hard but it takes him a beat because it's not funny he's laughing to protect himself from that wound from the pain of that wound of course he's going to pretend it's funny but it's really terribly painful because just the thought that he might be entertaining that he could get close to her would be terrifying because whenever he got close to people before they turned away turn around and ran away in Rain Man Charlie Babbitt the Tom Cruise character he had three people he was close to as a young child a brother a mother and a father brother was taken away mother died father abandoned him my god of course he screwed up who could get close to people after suffering that kind of wound so he's terrified if I get close to somebody I'm going to do that that pain could occur again okay at the beginning in what I call the ordinary world there is a sense of limited awareness that's the word here limited awareness the person often is conscious of their limitations but they don't know how to get out of it or they're so attached to their crutch or their dependency or their coping mechanism that they can't imagine ever escaping from it what we're talking about here both for the audience and for the character is consciousness you are attempting to raise the consciousness of your hero otherwise why tell a story if somebody is just as unconscious at the beginning as they at the end as they were at the beginning then nothing has happened and same for the audience the audience wants to go through some kind of shift maybe not a total 180 reversal of their belief systems but a shift of one degree maybe there's something called the law of small differences that is is a truth that that a lot of things that we do in our lives to change ourselves are not about these drastic things where you decide to move to the outback of Australia and lose a hundred pounds and you know do all these you know to get Botox and the other do everything to completely rearrange your reality life actually is about tiny increments of change about the 1% difference that you make in your diet or your daily writing habits or whatever and those are the ones that generate the big change it's it's really out of those little tiny increments that the major shifts in life happen anyway we're talking about consciousness so at the beginning there's either no consciousness at all that there's any problem they're just living in a dream world or there's a very tiny limited awareness next thing that happens is this call to adventure and that is a big loud trumpet call that says to the hero hey you need a little more awareness you need to change something needs to happen or you at least to address the challenge maybe you Eltham utley are not going to change but at least you know it's on the agenda it's being put forward on the agenda the next thing would be the typical reaction to that challenge which is to experience fear express fear or show some reluctance to change now we all have some resistance to change because we like things to be comfortable and familiar but there's also strength in the resistance and a lot of the tension in the story comes out of the fear and the pushing back and forth and some conflict that can come out of these these emotional scenes it's so wonderfully efficient in such skilled screen because what is your first job as a screenwriter at the beginning of the movie it is first of all to draw the reader in I think of the reader of your script or your novel if you're writing that or pull the audience in to the hero and the world you've created and the character and create identification with that character and so what do we learn immediately about Erin Brokovich first of all remember what the keys to identification are what are the keys to identification sympathy jeopardy likability or again I agree with Chris I meant to say I don't mean a hero needs to be likable I mean making them a good person is one Avenue toward identification not necessary but an option so a good person in jeopardy sympathetic funny good at what they do so what do we see right off the bat she's in a job interview how many people have had a fun job interview in your life know you immediately feel sorry for someone having to even look for a job okay we will find out she's in jeopardy of starving pretty quick but just anybody who's looking for a job must be in jeopardy of loss of something because they need something desperately we feel sorry for her not just because she's having to go through it but she's just blatantly unqualified for this position she's just pulling at straws complementing his office to try and get you know to to clutch it some possibilities she'll get that but why is she unqualified because she immediately says well I had an ex husband who left so he left me with the kids and my kid got sick so my last job didn't work out and basically she'd had to devote her life to something else so she really hasn't been able to be qualified for this and all that is told in less dialogue than I just spent to explain him and then if that's not enough she goes outside having lost the interview having not gotten a job obviously and she has a parking ticket and then she grabs the parking ticket and breaks a nail and gets in her car and WHAM gets hit by another car which is big action which is nice because the one quality of the interview is it's talking heads and it could low you a bit and I bet most the room has seen that scene and still there's always the same reaction it's like whoa you know I see it and I've seen this movie dozens of times now analyzing it and so on and still it's sort of it just punches you it just hits you and all of that is done in that short period of time but where it really gets magical is clearly the writer in this case writers because this interview part was added by Richard LaGravenese and was not in Susanna Grant's original script the writers know those deeper questions about the character the longing the fear the identity and so on and they start to inform everything about that character from the very first moment we see them when you know your character that well it's not as if you start the first draft putting this in but after a few drafts when you've discovered and your character has revealed herself to you you can go back to the very beginning scene and see the little bits of business that will inform everything the character does it's very much like notorious all those little bits of business about the drinking and the hiding and and all the qualities Chris was bringing out those are the magical things because once you know the deeper elements of your character they're going to be present in every single scene and one of the things I'll be discussing later that I see this movie very much about very much a part of the tug of war for her is is she a mother or is she a career woman and what is the quality that stands in the way of her being qualified for this job it's that she had kids that she had to raise what is it that may get what does she use first and foremost to try and get the job well I have kids you'll learn a lot right there I know about that dipstick for a urine test or whatever she says so right away that her children and her career loss are laid up on the screen immediately and that will be woven through this entire movie and I'll be talking about that a lot as we see those other scenes okay well hard to top that out that that is a very good very good discussion of it just say that what impressed me was this efficiency and how much in information about the character was given out for instance not in what she says but how she says it that she's inappropriate that she's you know dressed inappropriately for an interview and her attempts are desperate you can smell the desperation it's just impressive that that the guy was able to that you know whoever some of it is the actors improvising and this is one of the questions we've been investigating is how much of this comes out of the script but this thing at the end was what bought me over into the script I watched this movie with great resistance it's a date movie I did not want to be sitting there you know and I had my backup about a number of things that I went in with the chip on my shoulder high identity identity and that yes and that that moment where they efficiently get you out of the scene and the scene you know the scene is over at the moment that he says look and she reacts to it is so courageous I mean that takes a certain bravery to do this and confidence and maturity as a writer and a lot of confidence in the people you're writing for that they have to be able to see this it's risky this strategy of starting with talking heads somebody talking to the camera and telling you her backstory while she's not playing cards or you know digging in the garden or something is heresy this is against all the screenwriting rules but the guy has the confidence to do it someone has one of the things I should say I had heard that Richard LaGravenese came in and added all the good stuff to the movie and it just shows you shouldn't believe while you're here in Hollywood because that is just patently or patently I never know how that pronounced that word untrue I mean this script was Susannah grant script and he came and added little touches like this interview scene but her original scene was an introduction of her walking down the street to get the parking ticket emphasizing the legs that never quit and the miniskirt and and the reaction of the guys which is very much a part of her but it wasn't full enough it only presented that one area identification and that one element and this brings up those other qualities much more strongly and I agree about the we won't talk this much about every clip it's just that we both love this particular one I agree about the inappropriate clothing and that does two things one is it gets you to feel kind of sorry for her but at the same time you recognize that is her armor she is like defiantly inappropriate it's it's almost like [ __ ] you if you can't hire me dressed like this because this is who I am and she keeps her distance from people by defiantly taking that role instead of accommodating them in almost any way at the beginning and I'd also point out that that strategy may not be working all that well for her my interpretation of the whole movie is that it's about self esteem and that this is a way of saying to the world [ __ ] you if you're not going to hire me really is a way of saying if you don't hire me well it's because you are too judgmental and it's a defense as your sight exactly it's a low self-esteem you know that she's leading you know she wants to get there ahead of you before you can reject her she's already presenting this please reject me appearance yeah it's it's sort of like the ogre in Shrek it's like you know I'm like I'm going to I'm going to dominate as an ogre before you have a chance to run away I'll push you away and that is the way of Armour that is the way with protection it is always hurting the hero but the hero thinks it is protecting them because it's only protecting them from their fear it is also hurting them in really realizing who they are and what they long for because what she longs for is the inkling of it it's not quite there yet is in this job interview

Channel: Michael Hauge

Views: 33,009

Keywords: Michael Hauge, Christopher Vogler, The Hero's 2 Journeys, The Hero's Journey, Story, Screenwriting, Principles of Storytelling, Opening Scenes, Erin Brockovich (Award-Winning Work), Character wounds, Fear, Awareness, Consciousness, Moviemaking

Id: 4GmwMiehIpY

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 10 2014