Every Great Story Begins With A Core Wound - Peter Russell Tribute Video

hi this is peter russell of university of story i am a story doctor in hollywood i also teach at ucla and pepperdine but at my own school university of story you can find what i'm talking about today i'm going to be incredibly handsome and charming he was kind of james bond he had a little arrogance right he's brave as hell i'm gonna make a ton of money i'm gonna be the most suave sophisticated guy you could ever meet muhammad ali says he was a better boxer than he was he's self-righteous he was a rebel he's a risk taker he's a superhero he's using his bravery for light but remember he's got a core wound all great heroes do every story is about that personal wound it always it always has been it always will be i always ask my class stand up right now and tell me the most embarrassing thing about yourself you could ever tell anyone the thing that would make you cringe horribly if anybody knew it can you stand up and do that of course no one will so i do i stand up and i say look at my face and when you look and i don't want you to shout this out but when you look at my face tell pick out the worst feature in my face on the best feature don't tell me because i did a korean television interview a little while ago and the guy goes you have a giant mole on your cheek and i'm like well i didn't really want to know that but just tell me but just have it in your head what's my best feature and my worst feature okay now most people pick one thing out and then the other and then they start telling you oh i don't want to tell them i know what it is now i say okay now i'm going to tell you a secret about myself something really embarrassing when i was a teenager i had this problem and it's it was a very embarrassing problem i had something called body dysmorphia and it i don't know if you know what that is but it makes you feel like you either have something too big or too small about your appearance i had a wound when i was a teenager my mommy didn't love me and so because of that i had body dysmorphia i thought my lips were the size of mick jagger and that was how my core wound manifested itself so you can say well so what peter that's for a therapist couch so that when i would go into a room i thought everyone was staring at my lips they were huge i'd knock people over with them i wouldn't kiss a girl in high school because i was afraid my lips would get wet and then they would look even bigger so here's what i did about that all these things came out of that wound in high school for me one i wore white chapstick okay which made me appear i was wearing lipstick now i had long hair and i was in a band so every time someone would look at me i'd be thinking they're looking at my lips they're huge no they were looking the fact that that dude says long hair he's wearing lipstick he must be gay that's not what i thought i would also eat my lunch in the bathroom because i didn't want people to see my wet lips so you see that this one wound oh by the way i got therapy i'm over it now but this one wound was motivating all these things they did i wouldn't have a girlfriend actually i was a pretty good-looking guy in high school but i couldn't do it because i actually did have some but it was a horrible experience because every time i kissed them i'd have to use the white chapstick so you see where i'm going when i tell people this story they're like first of all they're sort of uncomfortable and then they kind of want to laugh and then they're just interested because it's true anything you tell about yourself that's true that's embarrassing is fascinating to an audience each one of those compensations for my core wound is a great scene in a movie you can see me hiding in a bathroom unable to eat in front of other people you can see me turning the lights out to kiss a girl you can see me putting on white lipstick chapstick because i wanted my mouth to be smaller so if you can't think of interesting scenes for your movie or your television show you gotta go into what wounded you and what you're doing in secret to compensate for that we all have secret lives and they're all about compensating for our wounds that's the action that will make a great story whether it's film or television we're not going to be interested in good looking perfect people who have like making a lot of money and they're great and everything they do who gives a we want to see people that we can identify with because that's not us we've got problems right what makes you like someone when they show you the vulnerability when they show you they are screw-ups just like you this is what great stories do immediately i've got problems right i want to see my problems and somebody else with problems dealing with problems okay embarrassment truth ask yourself and you can do it alone in a room write down on a piece of paper the 10 most horribly embarrassing things secrets in your life you would never want anyone ever to know now we all have them you write down 10 of them you don't ever want to show this to anybody you don't have to but those 10 embarrassing personal secrets will fuel almost all the stories you're ever going to tell in your life because every story you tell is going to come out of one of those horrible embarrassments because they are what's wounded you and they start when you're little and it's usually our parents who wound us sometimes it's a dirty old uncle you know sometimes it's a neighbor but it's usually our parents so if you can understand what those wounds are you're going to be able to write 10 compelling characters all having behaviors that are compensations for that wound every great story starts with a character wounded like this unless it's a superhero that's a that's a separate genre that has their own rules but most of the movies you love have a hero who's wounded and it comes from the writer himself and the wounds that he has and how he tries to compensate for those that's the physical manifestations in the story of his behavior and it makes us empathize with this weird weird guy because we're all weird right we want to know our heroes are weird in story because it means they're real the truth about yourself on the page is the most important gift you have as a writer i did an exercise in class where i had said i will give you twenty dollars if you take your camera and go take a picture of your bathroom right now without moving anything or take a picture of your bedroom without moving anything the real bedroom no one will do it because it looks awful their real bedroom but if you put that up on facebook people would love it because that's how you really live so real stories are about not the fantasy facebook but the compelling stories would be if you took a picture of yourself when you just got up you took a picture of your bathroom the way it looks right now that's fascinating and the best storytellers give you those personal wounds and i say every storyteller is wounded and they're trying to tell a story to heal that wound we all have a dozen core wounds i i'm ugly my mother didn't love me um i i'm i'm uh i'm badly uh uh socialized uh no one understands me i go to a party i i can't talk to anybody no one will listen to me i'm lonely i'm alone um i can't reach out i'm married but i'm i'm not happy because i really can't be myself there's all these wounds we all have and we carry them inside ourselves that's really what we're always writing about always and this is true for untherapized writers who are very successful even if they have never looked at a psychologist's couch and they laugh at this when i work with them turns out what they're writing about always is their core wound so ask yourself as a storyteller what do i what am i interested in what are the movies i love i guarantee you when you do that you'll find out that is your place where you need to start when you first see a character you have his wound now what if you're wounded as a person what have you done what's your first of all ask yourself what's your biggest wound okay emotionally what's your biggest embarrassment now what have you done to compensate for that in your life let me ask you what's your deepest most personal embarrassing secret i'll tell you on the camera there's there's exactly one exactly but if you were to tell me now i would love hearing it why my only sense would be because then you could measure your own against what i'm telling that's right and then go i guess i'm not that bad after all maybe only or i'm not alone okay i'm you're you're in pain so am i now i understand you now i empathize with you now you're you're like me now it's a story about me it's not some wonderful person who's leading a perfect life that i might fantasize about and enjoy as a reality show or a kardashian show but it's the deeper part of our lives which is i'm in pain i i don't have everything i want are you like me oh my god you are thank you now i'll follow you because if you can get better i can get better empathizing with the character is all about confession if you'll notice in a great story confession of your core wound or showing the core wound is something that happens almost immediately in great stories you want to show the character's wound and his compensation often in the first 10 minutes of the show in a movie that's certainly true the quicker you show it the better the empathy will be for it for the audience don't hide it guys if you want to give us sympathy for your hero show his core wound or her core wound immediately show it in the first minute of the story if you've ever gotten a note that says your hero isn't sympathetic it's because you're not showing their core wound what makes you like someone not because they're rich or famous or strong that doesn't want what makes you like someone when they show you the vulnerability when they show that they are screw-ups just like you this is what great stories do immediately and this is what core wounds always do this is why it's the nuclear reactor of a great character there's three kinds of action heroes there is the rights of passage hero who heals his wound for the course of the movie this is iron man there is the uh there is the superhero this is leonidas in 300 he never really has an emotional change by the way that can also be a villain superhero like jake uh johansen and don jake jones he's a comic [Laughter] or it can be the kind of villain that you have with jake gyllenhaal in nightcrawler he never really changes he just gets stronger and stronger as a villain you also have a third kind of action hero and that is the hero we're going to talk about today the anti-hero now he's the guy who starts out good but becomes evil for sympathetic reasons sympathetic is actually more important than likability if you look at tony soprano he's a good example um it's old now but i think it's the most brilliant television ever made i i think if you haven't seen sopranos you should watch it okay because it's still the most burly just like shakespeare tony soprano is a murderer he's a horrible human being and yet we love him why we love him because he's got this deep wound in him and it comes from his mother and the entire first season of the sopranos is about this horrible mother and how awful she is to tony and even though when he tries to kill her on the gurney when she's they're rolling her out of the out of the nursing home and everything she's going he's trying literally trying to get it with a pillow our sympathies are with tony why well here's a big secret of the anti-hero which i'll tell you which i talked about earlier anti-heroes are great guys who turned bad for sympathetic reasons right for sympathetic reasons michael corleone becomes a horrible man why he's saving his dad he's saving his family right tony soprano is a horrible guy but we like him why because he wants to save his family he wants the first season of tony's palace we've seen him he's the ducks are leaving his pawn his kids are leaving the nest right he's trying to get his mom saved into it into a home she's like ah leave me alone you're a horrible human being so the great secret of an anti-hero is to make the villains and the people around them worse and less likable than the hero themselves so tony soprano's mom is the most miserable horrible human being ever conceived on television and she says that he's based on his own mom but so we love tony because his mom is just so awful and we thank god poor guy no wonder he turned into a murdering psychopath his mom is awful so that's the critical thing about making someone sympathetic and and also likeable yes it's important but to make them sympathetic you simply make uh the other people around them worse michael carlioni had to save his dad nobody else would do it his brother couldn't do it he had these terrible villains around him that were shooting his entire family he had to save his family and in doing so he eventually lost his family right just like tony soprano tony said ends up killing his nephew ends up killing the people all around him probably ends up having his with somebody shot in that final restaurant seen around him but we have great sympathy for him because we see his wounds the wounds are everything wounds are why we love a character and if when you first start out writing a story you should show me your hero or your character's wounds the second they get on screen the second they're on screen show me the wound that's how you get somebody to be likable you get the note your character's not likable which you get all the time from a producer that's how to make them likable show them bleeding whenever you get a note like he's not sympathetic what it really means is he's not believable why are we sympathetic to a character because we understand him that's why confession's important but having sympathy for a character we can sympathize with a complete a-hole but it has to be believable right so when somebody gives you a note character's not sympathetic don't understand what they're really saying is they're boring again figure out why they're acting the way they do and look at why they're damaged give yourself five ways a character is compensating for their wound that's always a way to make them believable to make them deep the secret of great story is to make us empathize with someone who's doing bad things all great story comes from these kinds of confessions i call them this is a device you use to make your hero compelling it's a confession of some embarrassment that you had in your life we love to see that because we're all embarrassed we all feel these wounds we all have them and we see them in a story we recognize them as real and we love that person and we want that person we're rooting for that person but it's compelling to watch someone confess confession is riveting whenever i confess a personal wound of mine in a classroom everybody's going i've been talking a long time everyone just stops there's total silence in the room they're looking at me they want to know and this is why you can't lie about your core wound because that's what people want to do oh geez i can't say the truth so i'm going to make something up let me see uh yeah okay my mom molested me when i was four you can't make it up why because we have infinitely good detectors as audiences we will know i can always tell in a story when someone's telling me something isn't true or isn't their experience we know immediately you've got to tell the truth or audiences will be bored so whatever your pain is you can't lie it's the truth that makes people want to watch you oh you're going to tell me something that's gossip oh i want to hear why because it's embarrassing it's true and it's weird that's every great story every scene's about the core wound and about how you're either curing it or making it worse and every character in a movie is only ripping at the wound or healing it that's all it is movies are just uh think of think of a movie story as a a boxing ring and the hero jumps into the ring but he's bleeding he starts out bleeding and the whole movie is just people jumping in with bandages to help him heal or people jumping in with knives to rip it wider open in a television story that just continues for season after season but it's the same thing oh usually only one wound um people often think that they can they get excited about the whole idea of a core wound which they should because it really gives you an original character but when we in real life by the way we have a dozen wounds right i mean you know let's talk about mine or not but everybody has more than one wound sure but movies and to some extent television all they have more lead are simple okay so you want to sort of see one big uh wound uh but then yes many sim desires come out of that you know um tony soprano had one big one my mommy hates me what do we do when we have a core when we compensate and we do it in bad ways but a bunch of desires came out of that you know i love prostitutes i love working at a strip club i love hurting people i love to be violent um you know i i love to run things i love being a boss you know i love being a dad so so you can have many desires just know that all the desires come out of the wound and they're often unhealthy okay they're often unhealthy desires that's what you want to see if they were healthy there'd be no show so especially in television you get wounded then you do a lot of unhealthy things i bet there's something you did in the last 24 hours that you would hate any of us to see some terribly embarrassing thing about yourself some pain about yourself you need to write about the pain and pleasure and the dreams you have of your own life don't say that's a cliche every great movie ever made comes from that passion comes from the writer's passion and love for that story there's only seven stories in the world they've all been told a thousand times the only thing you've got as a writer is your passion your love your experience that's what makes you different than anybody else and what makes your story different from anybody else and people can people i see hipsters who go now that's not true i'm going to make them i'm going to make a cool story about violence it's just about guns it's just about knives it's about the cool stuff that happens and i'm going to say you're going to fail that's not going to succeed tarantino doesn't make movies like that he makes movies that speak to him from his heart that are from his secret desires our secret desires our secret pleasures our secret pains that's what motivates all great story always and it always will that's all you've got as a human being that's the way it's been that's the way it's always going to be but now we return to the a story which is this everybody gets told you suck at the beginning and most people hear it and go you know what i guess i do and they quit everybody gets told it though even the ones that are really talented get told it but the ones that don't hear it or the ones that just go yeah i don't i don't suck i'm good that arrogance that confidence or whatever you want to call it it might be you know it might be a neurosis maybe it's because they're sick i don't know but that's in my experience when i look at who succeeds they've got this rhinoceros hide and they persist they persist when most sane people would say hey go back to missouri you know you've got credit card debt you've been trying for boom years right you're never gonna make it right listen to your cousin listen to your mother listen to your accountant who's been telling you for years what a stupid thing it is you're doing go back home you're done those people go back home and guess what they're done but the person who doesn't listen hey they might end up under a bridge too because you do need talent it it this is not a job for someone who has no talent but most people i i think and i'm not sure about anything in life but for my observation most people fail because they don't persist now here's but you have to actually do the work i know several people who have failed because they want to be writers but they don't actually write they think about writing every day and they say they're writing a script but they don't actually sit down and write every day now those people they can fail too because they're really not trying they have a dream but they're not trying peter so how do i get an agent how do i get a manager right that's a question you get asked all the time and i think the greatest way to answer that is why don't you ask yourself how do i be good okay how do i be a good writer because if you become a good writer then you can probably get an agent or a manager you should never write to the market the market will always horrify you right now it's selling our superhero stories to the studios but if you don't like writing superhero stories you shouldn't say oh well i'm going to write one anyway because you'll fail you have to write from passion in my experience um yes even writers who are professionals i have to say my um my my lovely bride susie's a very successful writer in south africa and uh we can cut this if she doesn't want me to tell this story but she's very successful in south africa as a writer she has a column and she's created her own voice i mean she came here and she started um studying television and oh gosh she's frowning at me i probably shouldn't say this anyway she's saying my god this is hard and and and it is hard so film and television structure is difficult you're not a genius you just are obsessed that's that's what that's what i did for for seven years i was a script reader which is a great way to learn how to tell a movie and television story because you breaking it down and your analysis i teach this at ucla and at my own school peter russell scriptdoctor.com that's peterrussellscriptdoctor.com for all your story needs and the story has just begun but this one uh i'd love to play it for you if you don't mind sure okay great great i know this feels like a senate hearing but it's not i just i just i didn't do anything criminal good i remember that i got my lawyer here anyway okay no this is about we'll keep it on screenwriting here and we have a great clip to play so here we go whoops and that i'm no good at it um the reason that i'm a teacher and a consultant and a story doctor is that i my big secret is i don't enjoy writing screenplays i tried for a while to do it but it's not my thing i i if poetry paid i'd be in the chips because i'm a poet that's what i love to write and i also like to write novels but years ago the reason i became what i am is um i failed to complete a screenplay it got huge interest and i realized at the end of it says i don't like this form it's just not for me i love analyzing it i love understanding how it works i love helping other people do it but i don't enjoy sitting down every day and writing in the screenplay form it's not my thing okay yeah great so that was four years ago and what i found from from an email from you is that you've actually completed a historical tv series yeah and i still hate writing okay i'm always gonna hate it okay i was just telling susie yesterday god i hate this um but i'll tell you yes i've had some success and what's great about that is is that it's here here's the really great thing because when you're a teacher you don't really know for sure my stuff actually helps it actually turns out to work the stuff i've been teaching actually has helped me which is a huge relief because when you're a teacher you're often up there and it's easy to pontificate and say oh do this in this form try this tool and but most some of my tools were terrible but a lot of them actually worked but i still hate writing and i i that's always probably going to be the case and i think maybe there are some writers who don't hate writing who they just love it and they get 10 in the morning and i can't wait to get to the desk but i'm always going to loathe it um but it is i guess i'm good enough at it now to get paid and so i'll do it it's it's actually fun to get paid yeah and it's fun to know that your stuff's actually gonna be out there it's two opposite things needing to fulfill a very rigorous disciplined structure and having the personality of a rebellious miscreant who hates convention and can't stand following the rules right those two elements are often necessary for a creator and it's why creators are all crazy right because those are opposites you know i mean rebels and rule followers are usually on the opposite end of a scale so to be able to combine those two that makes you crazy i i see it all the time i i think it really is true that a lot of people in this business are insane i'm kind of insane myself uh i think it i think it's almost required to have a kind of schizophrenia to be a successful creator a commercially successful creator it's it's not it's not easy and so many of my students are rebels and so when they come into this process and i'm start showing we start showing them tools like yeah that's going to make my story a cliche and and the fact is the most rebellious rule-breaking directors uh like like tarantino they they use these tools the subjects they write they show are where they rebel they show subjects that are crazy that you wouldn't ever really be interested in but the tools they use are classical are are powerful are rigorous and they employ them with the precision of an engineer in other words long story short not anymore but i really can use my tools to solve story problems that i'm getting paid to solve so when they work i'm so excited i'm so ecstatic it means all the 20 years i've spent doing this is actually paying off for me and also now i have a little bit more credibility in when i teach right because the wrap on teachers is well you can teach what you can't do right yeah that's what you're teaching you're not doing okay i get it well now i'm doing so i i can say okay well yeah but these tools actually do work so shut up shut up i i i did it [Laughter] we have a structural tool called the bmoc which is beginning middle obstacle in climax these are the four points in any great story where the heroes ask to change and they're in every great story whether it's star wars or the fault in our stars or a fast and furious tokyo drift i found this out years ago analyzing all movies that it was equally emc square moment for me there are four crescendos in a movie where the heroes asked to change and asked to learn the theme of the movie and ask to learn how to heal all the things i talk about the big things i talk about healing learning the theme um stopping bleeding all that there's four times in a movie story inevitably that that happens at a crescendo it's at 30 pages in 60 pages in 90 pages in and about 108 pages in those i call the beginning middle obstacle climax the bmoc right now that's a structure that is in every great movie practically you've ever seen it's not in a goddard movie okay if you're writing a french wave movie i'm sorry i won't be able to help you that's just a french guy peeing in an alley for two hours and that's great right i love those movies but but in a in a hollywood film structure is invariably in the story and if it's not there's usually something missing it'll be superseded someday but that's what's operating now now that bmoc operates in everything why does structure matter so much in television it matters because people in television have a short attention span and you need to give them many different story plots because they're also arguing with their girlfriend they're also looking at their cell phone their dog wants to get out and they're also in a bed that they're uncomfortable in and they're probably emailing somebody right all of that's happening when you watch television it's not true in a movie theater just like a pop song no matter how cool or hipster has a chorus a bridge a verse structure right kanye does and you know uh rykuter does they all do why because the human brain is wired to have a certain set of beats in any narrative form there's three levels of story plot okay stay with me guys this is a little complicated but you need to know this because mr robot has them all and the reason they have them is the mystery thriller audience wants to be baffled you ever seen anybody who loves to do crosswords they're looking at the new york times crossword puzzle and what are they doing they're going oh oh my god oh my god i don't think i can solve it oh peter i don't think i can solve it oh my god what is that that's the adrenaline that comes from for you looking at a puzzle not being able to solve it then when they do solve one what do they do they go ah they get a kind of a dopamine high it's a kind of an orgasm because they have now solved the mystery that's all mystery thriller does for you it poses a mystery and then it lets you solve it okay not my genre when i went to inception i was like what the hell's happening i'm gonna go i'm gonna leave the theater but the mystery thriller audience loves that mystery now that means they crave a complicated story so there's three stories in mr fillers there is the distraction plot that is what you see quickly in act one that looks like the real crime that's going on in the story but it's actually just a distraction the second plot is the emotional change in the hero that helps him solve the crime and the third plot is the real crime what's really going on that does not get revealed until act five in the story now it's hidden people say ah hollywood so formulaic is they're looking at bad unimaginative stories with characters you've seen a thousand times with situations you've been in a thousand times with care with within a world you've seen a thousand times set but the structure the commercial structure is there because it's beautiful the bones are beautiful you can take different bones out put other bones in but there's an appeal below the surface of beauty if you look at what we consider to be beauty if you took a a skeleton you'd see there was a conformity to the bone structure now you can put whatever you want on top of that bone structure you can make uh the person uh a tunisian you can make them indian you can make them american indian you can make them whatever you want but the bones below that determines whether or not they're beautiful i think structure of story is like the bones beneath the the the face it's what we're instinctively drawn to as human beings and that doesn't change but what changes what makes things unique are is it a new world are these characters we haven't seen before is this guy have a wound that we haven't seen before and remember we have three plots and a mystery filler i know i'm talking a lot about this i know it's confusing you can watch this several times the plot in a mystery thriller that's really critical is that there's an emotional change in the hebrew throughout the story that helps him solve the crime that's the key in all great mystery thrillers whether it's movies or television if you don't have good news bad news raising stakes and and uh ticking clocks on every page of your story your story's gonna be boring guys we're not gonna have time today to talk about the four act structure in television but it's important you know what it is it's seven different beats per act the a storyline has 15 to 16 of these beats the b has seven to eight the c has three to four and the d has why do i talk about this if i'm not really going to talk about it because you need to look at my television lecture or somebody else's television lecture to make you understand that every act every hour-long drama has this same structure no matter how crazy you are and how much you want to break the rules the reason it's there is to entertain the audience in a rhythm like a pop song has a bridge a chorus a verse even the craziest ones right they all do because it entertains the audience so we're not going to talk about that all now but you need to understand that's true and each beat has a hero an antagonist and a fight inside the beat a beat is two to three minutes long it is a single dramatic act and there's 28 of them in a hour-long television show and they're cheap tricks by the way it's good news uh i'm giving you 20 bucks bad news i'm slapping you ticking clocks is just a bomb a bomb ticking down it's a gun pointed at someone these are not sophisticated tricks they're simple but the greatest artists use them in all of their best work in california we have these these uh uh vanity license plates right and and in a vanity license plate i think you get seven letters right and in that seven letters you've got to be witty okay you can't go oh man you know what it's such a cliche to have seven letters my vanity plate's gonna have 42. because if you take if you make the vanity like 42 characters long it's not going to be funny when you say you know if you have a seven letter word that says let's say you're driving a corvette and your seven letters are two inches right okay that's funny got me to laugh if it was a 42 letter plate you'd go hey i drive a vet because i have a small penis is that funny no no no because the form is too big so commercial form is what we delight in we wanna the limitations of commercial form produce the the entertainment right the fact it's a half an hour means you must cram certain things in it and the delight of an audience in a commercial art form is how are they going to cram something we've never heard about and is witty into this limited commercial form that's what commercial art does mentors heal heroes core wounds that's what they're for and that's what he's going to start doing now in television they don't heal completely but they heal a little bit what we want to see in a story is a hero learning to heal and even if he doesn't heal completely because he doesn't in tv he's still going to go on a journey towards healing a little bit the critical difference between film and television is in tv the hero doesn't heal but he heals a little bit and then at the end he gets ripped open again so every week he's going to heal a little bit and then get ripped open again every week 150 times but the bmoc works at the exact same places in the television hour than it does in a movie there's just an extra m because there's an extra act so let's take a four act television structure the bmoc it's bmmoc the oc the obstacle point is the point when it looks like the year is going to lose and in a movie this is right at the 90 page point let's take a movie everybody knows star wars uh luke gets to the planet the last rebel planet uh uh darth has followed him there with a homing beacon he's got a death star he's gonna blow up the whole damn thing there's nothing luke can do about it there's just a little few star fighters and he's got a death star that's it the movie's over and then of course what happens r2d2 says hey i stole the plans of the death star there's a little hole you can fill a missile in if you really get close and luke you can the only one get that missile in that hole if you use the force not your computer and so the obstacle point is all is lost and the climaxes luke learns the theme of the story luke will you use the force to rescue the princess and save the republic he puts his computer away all the other starfighters used it they couldn't get the missile in he puts his computer away he's learned he hears oh we want to say luke use the force not the computer and he puts the missile in the whole climax so the obstacle point is always lost and the climax is luke you did it in breaking bad the obstacle point is he's making meth in the desert jesse comes back out with the crazy eight and the other uh criminal they're gonna kill them both walt's in his underwear he has no defense he's gonna get shot and killed but then he says i'll teach you i'll teach you how to cook i'll teach you how to cook my recipe and the guy goes really yes and they go in the rv and walter throws poison into the thing whoosh and the climax is he kills them both and becomes the mass murder he's gonna be for the next 150 episodes so that's the climax so the o and the c point and i'm not explaining this well i'm sorry but it's in my lecture online it's a complex little tool but it works so great it's like a little engine that works any television structure you want just like it did in film so what did i learn when i started learning about television everything i learned in movies works every element that i learned about in movies works in television the structure is just a little more complicated that's all does everybody know what a log line is because a long line in television and a log line in movies is very different in a movie log line you're telling the story of how someone changes the hero in television you're simply showing the hero's goals and his obstacles in the way it's a very different log line i urge you if you're writing television to do what we call breaking the a story log line over and over again because it's literally creating your story by asking yourself what is my story and putting it in a frame that's what makes great story well in television if the heroes don't heal then why do we want to watch them because they're going to surprise us with new character revelations anybody remember that great moment in the sopranos when janice and richie who are about to get married are having a quiet evening at home and she's cooking him dinner and they're both irritated but it's just another night suddenly janice starts irritating richie suddenly richie starts irritating janice and suddenly richie hits her he backhands her he's never done that before now they're about to get married that's a big surprise we've never seen richie do that before it's not a change in his character it's a revelation because we have a new conflict she's irritated him and we also can see that this is going to be the way it's going to be for the rest of their marriage he's setting her up to get hit every night and then he sits down to have his dinner and he says what are you gonna do cry now and he starts eating now janice is about to surprise us a lot because janice walks out of frame when she comes back she's got a gun he looks at her and he sneers janice i've got no time for this boom and she kills him right there now that's not janice healing for god's sakes or really even changing she's just showing us a new facet of janus as a badass that is the critical way television heroes give us excitement and it's why we want to watch television not to see them heal or even get worse because we all believe really the world's both that it's got poison in it and it's also got good in it ninety percent of the time um it's about a hero who doesn't have a change or compelling change the hardest job for a script writer and actually for a producer or a director anybody involved in a story is to make a really cool character that you might think is great you might have a really cool setting wow that's neat we're in the south pacific you've never seen that before and this is a cool character but they don't know how to change him how to take him from one place to another so time and again what i do is talk about that point out this guy isn't changing or if he is changing it's not believable um uh and and so when a bad movie is bad often it's because this hero's change is not there it's not real it's not compelling um and sometimes you'll have a wonderful setting and you'll have a wonderful hero but he just doesn't change correctly a movie log line is about a hero who changes it's the entire story of the movie from the perspective of the hero well let's say that her change needs to be let's make it a personal story let's say that she doesn't have love okay so she's wounded most great hollywood movies are about a wounded hero given a chance to change okay that's what they are so let's say that the reason she's wounded is that her wound and it's always about a wound in a story that's any good we all have wounds i call them core wounds our parents usually gave them to us so let's say that her wound is that she can't connect to anybody okay she can't be intimate with anybody she just doesn't feel it so she's a bartender so really she doesn't have to ever have intimate relationships she just has lots of relationships with the people at the bar but they never go any further than that okay if she has uh any intimacy at all well she doesn't and she's not in it with her family either okay so what's going to change her what's going to make her change well you have people who are going to tear her wound wider open let's say that that's the owner of the bar who doesn't want her to change at all loves the way she is and and and tells her now though that hey we're changing our bar our bar's going to become a coffee house and it's going to be really important that you talk to the people who come in that's going to be as a barista i want you to really establish friendships and it's all about that and by the way here comes someone who's a consultant who's going to help you change uh and be more friendly and also more intimate with the clients well she really will hate that she'll hate that she'll want to quit but she can't quit she makes so much money doing this um so then you're going to have also a person on the other side you're going to have a let's call her an impact character who's a relative who says to her hey your sister's getting married and i'm making this a personal story your sister's getting married and your sister wants you to come to the wedding and she also wants you to help me make this card up that it's a whole family and everybody's in it and our our heroine resists that too now i don't want to do that at all i i don't want to be involved in the family i don't even know these people so right there you have this personal setup where you have a girl with a core wound who's i can't be intimate and you have her put in a position where she's going to be forced to have to be intimate or she's going to wind up in a tragedy and then you give a villain into the story and the villain is a guy who is just as disconnected from people as she is and he tells her you know what let's just have sex nothing else no intimacy at all and she says great that's fantastic oh i finally found the person of my dreams but as we get into the second act she begins to fall in love with this guy and she also begins to realize when she's in that bar that she's beginning to feel the lack of intimacy and and it's hurting her that she can't connect to people so she's learning from this person who's there as a consultant how to connect because she's bonding with her at the same time she's falling in love with this villain who is gonna now tell her when she reaches out to him i don't want to be with you in fact i've got a family so goodbye that's going to push her to change to heal to reach out to understand she needs intimacy so in the third act the third act will be all about her helping her sister's wedding reaching out when her sister say goes into crisis and says suddenly i have cold feet i don't want to get married now our heroine's going to have to minister to her and say wait a minute i think you should because intimacy is good i've just learned it's good i'm gonna tell you one of the times in your life you've been happiest haven't they been with other people so she's actually learned through pain and learned through the fact of being rejected by someone just like her a mirror that she does need intimacy that she does need to reach out and be with people now that's a very small story very emotional intimate story in the end she reaches out to her family but she doesn't have to fall in love this is an indie movie this is a cool kind of movie all she has to have is a small change toward understanding i need intimacy i need and in fact that's the story of up in the air that's a very famous movie with george clooney it's all about and it's a character study it's just about this guy who's disconnected from people who by being pushed by villains and also pushed by helpers learns how to become connected to people that's now if it was a superhero story um or if it was a tragedy in the end she wouldn't learn that she wouldn't have a change she'd try to change but then because she fell in love with someone who was a bad teacher she would be so crushed that in the end she retreats and decides she's not going to love she's going to go back to the bar and there's no movement at all that's a tragedy in fact that's the story of the wrestler that was a a great movie a few years ago tries to change looks like they're gonna change but has a mentor that's so bad that when the mentor uh uh rejects them and moves away they simply fall back into their old patterns and in the wrestler he goes back to wrestling and he dies so you can build the story either way it's all about who's there on the journey with them impacting them that tells you and shows you and them whether or not they're going to be able to heal and change or if they're going to fall back into a tragic end come on baby get in the siraglio do it our way you can still be original [Laughter] most riders have strong suits and and suits that aren't as strong and character change has to be at the heart of almost every kind of movie unless you're making a superhero movie where the hero doesn't have a change and other things have to happen there but so it's a long-winded way of telling you that to change your character in a story is everything and that's what i do if it's not there but the superhero is huge now and so the superhero model involves a very particular tool we can talk about at some point i don't know if you might go into it now but what i decided was because several people had taken a pass at jack johnson and i think someone actually is uh making a movie i'm not very big but and i don't think i'm giving away anything here secrets wise um a superhero the reason a superhero is fun to watch is not for the same reason most heroes are fun to watch most heroes are fun to watch because they're wounded and they've got some big bleeding wound and and we're going to watch them heal it we're going to watch that's the story superheroes know superheroes are not wounded they're superheroes um often the old-fashioned superhero the uh in three hundred leon zack snyder's 300 leonidas he doesn't have a wound it's like oh my mommy hurt me and i i gotta figure out how to do that no in 300 he's an old-fashioned superhero because all the reason we want to watch an old-fashioned superhero is to see if he can lift the bigger weight that the villain's putting on him at the four crucial points of the story the villain just gets bigger and says hey you could lift that 300 pounds huh think of the villain in a super as a deranged trainer at gold's gym and and you he said all right so you're gonna lift 300 pounds all right or you did that okay so at the 30 page point you lifted the 300 pounds okay 60 page point we're going to put 900 pounds on there can you lift that so the superhero secret of the superhero story that kind of superior story there's several kinds is that can he lift the bigger weight the villains put on that rack that's it it's not about psychology it's not about core wounds what does that tell us remember i said that a hero is misusing his superpower at the beginning of the story and sometimes your superpower and in television that's another thing you need to know usually in television your hero has a super power and usually that super power especially at the beginning is being used for wrong reasons bad purposes for instance don draper and madman has a superpower he's insanely seductive okay he and he's seductive as a womanizer and he's seductive as an ad man but it comes from the fact that his mommy didn't love him right he feels unlovable so all the things he does he uses his superpower for bad reasons because he's wounded he seduces women right he he does ad campaigns for cigarettes and horrible things and he's amoral as an ad man because he's misusing the superpower but the superpower came from his wound if he hadn't been wounded i'm not lovable he would have never become a great seducer he wouldn't have needed to so the the super power is related to the wound but the dis but the but the the things he wants come out of the unhealthy desires uh of him trying to make the wound go away trying to feel better about the wound in a story it's about people's flaws and their embarrassments and their pain there's nine questions i always ask when i'm when i'm first talking to someone at their tv show first of all what does stevie do it gives us a great world we need a great world because we're going to be in it for 150 episodes right so what's a great world right i would do an exercise where i say to you you give me a great world and don't tell me it's new york city i i want to know a specific neighborhood of new york city what's the great world because great television is always about a great world now uh if you want to talk about new york then give me a specific world in it like there's a show called billions and this show is brilliantly written it's probably the best television out there right now and it's all about billionaires how they make their money and how they live their fascinating lives right uh another fascinating world the assassination of gianna versace that was a world of versace uh fashion world in miami and then this guy who became a serial killer his world and never seen it before um so carbon black is this really cool sci-fi show it's about a cool to the future where people can change bodies right so they have sleeves they call it so your world you want to ask yourself what is the world of your show atlanta is probably the coolest show on television right now and it's all about this african-american milieu of middle class lower middle class atlanta and this sort of slacker guy in it and how he's gonna survive in this slacker world never seen it before stranger things that's the world of the 80s and that's big nostalgia for kids that are 20 30 right now people on their bikes without helmets television sets that were tubes with rabbit ears so the world there is absolutely about the nostalgia yeah so big question what's your world that's what we want to see fantasy continues to be big um i hate it but zombie is a world that just continues to be true true blood vampires romance continues to be good black comedy world of shameless uh white trash so worlds are extraordinarily important in your show the next question i ask is do you have a um do you have a theme that matters what do you want to say about the world in your television show for instance a a show like um essence of anarchy which is a great world of world motorcycle show the theme is if you have a bad mom or dad you're going to be screwed you need to have a good parent you need to be mentored well he's not and that means the entire show is about how the hero of the show fails because he doesn't have a good mom and dad his dad's dead his mom's horrible and and so this truth about life is often what hipsters ignore when they're writing a story they're like i want to write this story i call it the weed and speed it's going to sort of motorcycles and violence and razor blades and people smoking crack and that and i'm like okay great ten minutes i'll love it then what's the truth about life you're saying sons of anarchy kurt sutter's brilliant writer why because he's got a theme that this hero hero who drives a motorcycle who's tough who does all the things that you're saying you want to see the violence the sex the motorcycles all that stuff but every episode is about this guy struggling with the fact he doesn't have a dad what how do i live my life without a dad or a mom and he never figures it out and he's screwed because of it so theme answers the question and orange is the new black which is a brilliant show what's the theme well you better know yourself piper can't doesn't know if she likes girls or boys and the whole show is about uh do i like guys do i like girls i don't know who am i i don't know you tell me who i am so that's a great theme too so downton abbey has a theme which is that the lower class is rising and we have to understand how it's rising that's the theme of every episode of downton abbey okay so theme is in strudel in in the wire which is probably the most the intellectuals uh a wet dream of a show the wire david simon in his story bible and that's something you should also have when you're pitching a story um his message is this this story i must read this because this is the front page of the story bible this story is about the human condition about it's not just a police show it's a show about how we have taken the urban uh uh underclass and have jailed them and tormented them and torn them apart in our stupid drug war okay that's his theme and it's a social theme and that motivates every every uh uh one of those uh episodes so if you don't have that and it works even in a sitcom you're not gonna have a show that works so what are you passionate what do you believe in i ask my students sometimes what do you believe in like i don't know i mean that's not important i'm going to write a hip story no you're not you're going to bore us the next question is why do we want to watch the show every week okay every week we got to watch a show 100 episodes so you need a great question right in breaking bad what's the great hook question every week how bad's walter going to break what's he going to do this week oh god he's going to be even worse okay making a murderer hey did he do it or not that's pretty good question you know every week we get that orange is the new black is piper ever going to figure out if she likes girls or boys no she's not gonna so but this question continues it's the hook it's the great question of the show mr robot can eliot take down the big corporation okay game of thrones which family is going to win every episode is about that right and what's the theme of game of thrones by the way that's kind of important the theme is do you have to be evil to be a great leader okay that's the whole question for every episode right so that's an important question okay so the next one is genre let's not go into that because i teach that it's a structural thing but you need to stick in your genre uh what parents are your show like in television if you're going to write a tv show you got to ask yourself what are the parents of the show who what shows are like this that you've seen before and my hip students i was like ah peter i don't wanna my show's like nothing else ever on it's like okay well then it's not gonna go it's not gonna get on and even even if you want it to be completely different from everything we need to understand what you're reacting to what did you hate okay you gotta have parents for the show and it'll help you build your show if you do okay so then the next question and this is super important is well how do i say it um what is the question that torments the hero forever that will never be resolved what's the unsolvable dilemma for the hero that will never ever be solved and that is in mad men it's i am unlovable and the things i do to make myself lovable make me so uncomfortable that i run away don draper seduces woman after woman after woman and mad men but every time they fall in love with him they always do he runs away because he hasn't softened his basic dilemma which is i'm unlovable okay so that is the unsolvable dilemma okay even in buffy the vampire slayer it's i just want to be uh alpha and be in high school and be popular no you're a vampire i don't want to be a vampire 150 episodes of that unsolvable dilemma okay um bra breaking bad walt's dying he's got to take care of his family how does he do it he becomes a drug dealer and destroys his family so the thing that makes him want to take care of his family the way he does it destroys his family okay true detective rust versus rust knows the world is meaningless marty believes there's a lot of meaning in the world how do they resolve that well they do in the end because remember it's a mini-series it's like a movie so in the end they do both believe the world's a great place but that's not classic tv okay so will walt protect his family or destroy it um we'll russ view um how can good prevail in a world that's run by the strongest that's game of thrones how can we have a world where there's a good leader when it's the worst people who always win right unsolvable dilemma maybe in the end you know the two people with the ikea rugs on their back they're going to learn how to do it but but for the whole seven eight years they don't have it so what is the irreconcilable conflict in your show what is the dilemma that will never be resolved uh that that that will keep people coming back and obviously that has to do with their core wound so the next question is what's the big core wound in your hero how does that work in your television show um and there's many different ones um and and it's always about that unreconcilable dilemma madman i'm unlovable tyrion in game of thrones i'm unlovable everything he does is because of that walters is i'm weak and my father you say never corner a weak man they'll turn out to be really strong uh wade and deadpool by the way because this is true also in movies i'm ugly a randall in this is us which is a great serial show we haven't talked much about randall is i'm not part of this family right my skin color is there i'm not really part of mine pete and sneaky pete i'm not part of a family great car wound jessica jones and jessica jones i'm not safe this villain can get me he'll always get me so core wounds are the nuclear reactors of your show they really are and they have to have daenerys core wound in game of thrones is i'm powerless and we see the entire first season for daenerys she starts out as this little sex slave for her brother she's given to this warrior as a sex object by the end of the season she's walked through fire and hatched dragon eggs so her powerlessness is beginning to go away but it will continue through the entire run of game of thrones i'm powerless is she getting powerful she's beginning to but that'll take a long time so these are just the beginnings of the questions that i would ask there's many others but this is a start when you're writing television and they are different from film but those those start when i would start talking to someone about their tv show these are the questions i would ask them at the beginning products sell because they're great stories sell because the product in it is flawed right that's the big difference this is the most exciting time i think in history for television at least in the u.s why has tv become this explosive golden age susie hates me saying a golden age but i think we are in a golden age of entertainment and it's because now there are no constraints on what you can see in sex what you can say television has no more rules because the stories are getting so much longer and look you can tell everybody is neither a good guy nor a bad guy everybody's got a combination of traits in them right so a movie can't really show you that there's not enough time you're either good or you're bad so what you saw in a in a story like true detective is what i call going from saving a cat to killing the cat because that's where we are now we are reconstructing dark heroes that people want to watch why do people want to watch dark heroes television and the longer form can show both the good and the bad inside of all of us it's a more sophisticated model of human behavior i think we're just getting to be more sophisticated as people to know that people's stories are complex i'm not all good i'm not all evil i'm mostly evil but there's some good in me but that's the mix and so longer form art can give us a more complete picture of what humanity's about nobody's all good and nobody's all bad and that's part of why superhero movies are failing because that's not us we all know as people that we are not only good we're all so bad and so killing the cat simply means showing us dark heroes who are like us we can accept that we couldn't 20 30 years ago television was just about good people and really bad people well now television has become more like the russian novel of the late 19th century where tolstoy was writing where people aren't good or bad everybody's a villain and everyone's a hero so this dark hero is more like us television today i think is is better because it's more sophisticated and actually shows us more of the world than tv did 30 years ago you know movies were cool because they showed us stuff tv couldn't movies were cool in the 70s because we could see nudity we could see violence we could see obscenity we could see adult themes that tv just couldn't tackle right surprise jaime lannister is super evil and he's also banging his sister movies lost its edge over tv because now we can see all those things on tv right that's part of white tv school those rules don't exist anymore and i think when an art form is at its freest it can also be at its best when it's able to show everything about a society now we're not there yet there's still things we can't show on tv television shows a surprise have you ever known somebody for 15 years don't they just get weirder and weirder the better you know them finally they're so weird you can barely take it well you're just learning who they are you're weird too by the way and you don't reveal it to someone at the beginning it's a process that's why television story works so well and why in a lot of ways it's a more sophisticated form than movies television gives us characters who actually are a lot more like us in real life and i think that's another reason tv is powerful in a way is that we don't heal generally all in in a month or two months it's a lifelong process so wounding and bleeding is kind of the way we go through life so television shows us in a way in a way there's more depth in television than in movies although movies has have have real depth too but we can see week after week facets and surprises of characters that we would never have time to see in a movie right when you can't talk about something you can't face it and when you can't face it you can't heal it and so i'm not a big fan of political correctness and i really believe television is at its best when it doesn't have anybody saying oh you can't do that no no no you can't say that no no no that's that's beyond bounds and i think sometimes we have political correctness from both left and right that are keeping our art forms from being free and you can say all you want about hollywood being a horrible place full of awful people and it is there's tons of terrible people here my dad was a southern baptist minister he used to rail against hollywood yeah and i was just telling dad you know what you're absolutely right i've been out there absolutely full of horrible evil people you were totally right talking in the pulpit yeah man i couldn't have put it any better but as milton said in aeropotague you can't praise the cloistered virtue you can't say oh hollywood sucks we've got to shut it down they've done that in so many countries in the world they don't have vibrant tv industries why is our entertainment industry why do we sell all over the world it's not because people love us they hate america you know they think america is awful why does america sell all over the world i think it's because hollywood for all its faults doesn't get its money from government doesn't have a bunch of puritanical judges saying this you can say this you can't say this it gets its power from people paying money to see its product no rules no regulation it's the honestly it's it's the most free market uh product produced by these warm-hearted socialists at the top of every uh economic entertainment company they're the most cutthroat capitalists on earth that's what i love hollywood is it's anarchy at its best it has no rules so story is marching towards more and more realistic ideas of what we are as human beings and none of us are real heroes and none of us are real villains we're all a mixture where you have no rules you have society's gangsters move in right but i think that's where most great art happens and i also think that nobody really knows how show business works so part of the reason i think you guys do with the work you do is so good is everyone's saying how does hollywood work where are the rules i want somebody to give me the way things work and what i think you have to say to people is guess what there aren't any rules in this field this is shadow town this is where you have to make up your own rules nothing's going to be given to you there's no school you can go to little dupont go here you go there's your showbiz degree now you can go get a job here's the field here's the desk here's your office after 20 years you get a pension now this is for chancers this industry is for unhealthy people who are deeply damaged and hurt by life and they want to create story uh for a variety of terrible reasons but i think out of that comes the greatest art i think it's always been that way i don't know which french guy said it but he said art is a sewer and from the sewer emerges gold and i think that's hollywood it's never gonna be a place of healthy people doing things and and i don't know that you should get in it if your goal is to lead a healthy productive life with predictable outcomes where at the end of your life you're going well that's great i've got my pension i'm going to retire now i'm going to go to florida everything's great i've got my health insurance and that's why that this town is not for you and i i think that's just always going to be the way it is art's dangerous and scary and it's made by dangerous and scary people and he says hi elliot we've been waiting for you the real villain has won and the story has just begun this guy's is fabulous television using all the patterns of the mystery thriller and all the patterns i've taught you right now this is what's happening in television today this is why television is so good every desire is an ability is an attempt to supporterize the wound to to to palliate the wound nice oh you're going to tell me something that's gossip oh i want to hear why because it's embarrassing it's true and it's weird that's every great story

Channel: Film Courage

Views: 33,823

Rating: 4.9053254 out of 5

Keywords: Screenwriting tips, screenwriting 101, screenwriting for beginners, screenwriting techniques, screenwriting advice, writing a screenplay, how to write a movie, story structure, television writing, how to write television, la script doctor, Peter Russell script doctor, filmcourage, film courage, interview, bmoc

Id: 6arvROwW-Ds

Length: 75min 48sec (4548 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021