How Screenwriters Create Characters

behindthecurtainfilm.com Become a better writer by learning from the best Creating three-dimensional characters is one of the most challenging aspects of screenwriting because no character is ever actually three-dimensional. They're all only literally two-dimensional on a screen and you're just tricking the audience into thinking that these are real people and I think that the way to trick the audience is to put a little bit of yourself in every character and not in the sense that like every character should be some sort of autobiographical portrait or something like that but I think I as a writer don't find a way to personally connect to all of the characters that I want the audience to personally connect to then that's when you start having characters come across as caricatures or as stereotypes you're really just tricking people into thinking that you have three-dimensional characters in your movie because what you're actually doing is trying to create an emotional thread that connects each audience member to the characters that you want them to and it's people's own three-dimensionality and they're relating to these sort of mirror character mirrors on the screen that creates that three-dimensionality there's no movie that starts with a three-dimensional character even the greatest movies of the last 20 years you know you meet daniel plain of you and he's a silver miner Paul Thomas Anderson pretty efficiently starts to build out the three-dimensionality of Daniel Plainview in the sense that he you know he's willing to crawl across a desert with a broken leg in order to stake his claim and he's also willing to abandon an entire literal spouting fountain of oil because the town is too much of a clusterduck ;) form and your start now you're starting to get a sense of who the character is but at first he's a two-dimensional character everybody you meet is a two-dimensional character in a movie when you first meet them and it's the process of telling the story that feeds that three-dimensionality so the initial impression that the audience makes it has with the character is just your starting point you don't have to worry about making sure that the audience relates to the character the moment they meet them or even in the first 10 minutes that they're following them you just have to have the audience interested or curious. I think a lot about them before I start writing. I mean for Schofield I knew that he would have been a poet so I read all the war poets um and so like I couldn't tell you where he grew up because that wasn't important to me but i could tell you how he would react to something or what kind of line of verse would make him cry to me that was more interesting than he he was born in whitby b because that would never have appeared in the script and didn't matter to me so that was the kind of thing and then for blake you know i knew he was young he was green i knew that he wanted to be a hero i thought that he would have read the lone ranger because they came out the time they were big books at the time or like you know through manchu and so i would read stuff like that and think oh this is how blake would react to stuff this is this is the kind of hero he dreams of being and then when i'm writing characters this is going to sound insane but i'm everyone in the script so i i'm trying to understand the logic of how they'll behave and so i think well how would i behave in this scenario because i think ultimately what you're trying to do is you're trying to write people that the audience understand and you can only do that if they behave the way people behave and so i'm like either it'll be me or someone i know and i'm like well this is how they this is how they react under stress this is how i do it this i do it and so i don't think i don't write with actors in mind i write with people in mind if that makes sense you know one of the things that i think of is when you're when you're working on a script is you want to look at every character as if um in the movie where that character is the lead you know so so each each major characters and even the minor ones has their own point of view on what the story means to them and one one way to kind of refine characters is to think okay if this guy was the lead in this movie what would his story be that's one way i think about that and the other thing about hear a hero is you can define them by what opposes them and sometimes what opposes them as a person and sometimes what opposes them is a force or a society or something so that's that's one way to construct i think some a character that you can root for which ultimately is is what a hero is i think people do talk a lot about being likable that's a huge part of the process people talk about all the time and i think there is this difference between being likable you can be likable and be flawed um but it's you know it's you really just want to be with the characters you want to feel like you're you're on their side even if they're not making great choices creating characters is simultaneously the hardest and the most rewarding part of the process because i learn a lot about myself as i get to dig into the different characters even if the characters are antagonists villains um far-right conspiracy theorists we all share a certain biological humanity and i don't think i'm that different than most people so i think that most people that i try to write about i think i can find a means to connect to them and if i can find that means to connect to that character all i have to do is recognize that means of connecting and figure out how to put it into the language of cinema so that the audience can use that same connecting thread that i found an anti-hero isn't a villain but if you're gonna write an anti-hero you can't judge that character as the writer you have to be able to defend that character and you have to write that character like they're making their case to god why they should be allowed into heaven you can think of people in your life who you don't like and yet who whom to whom you are emotionally tied there are moments when you say to yourself this guy's a monster and yet a human monster i mean he's never gonna be anything other than human because as we all do when we write characters we have to wear them like overcoats we have to see through their eyes we have to know what it feels like to be them even for you know the few hours it takes to write a particular scene because we want the scene to live and breathe we want to give something to the actors that they're able to really inhabit it seems so obvious now but it took me the longest time to figure out that nobody thinks of themselves as a bad guy because we all feel this way we all feel like we're pretty much in the right you want human behavior first and foremost most crucially to be believable you want people to behave as human beings as we as we know and understand them because we are all excellent judges anyone out there writer or not is an excellent judge of human behavior and you know when to call bullshit on behavior that seems writerly and seems made up just in order to hit a certain plot point every single person wants something often many things often conflicting things understand this about your characters and yourself i think a really important part about making a character human is to make him a hypocrite and because that's what we all are right we judge people but we don't want to be judged we'll we'll attack people but we don't want to be attacked and and and so we're aggressive with people we have violent thoughts or whatever but but we don't want to be around anyone that's aggressive or has violent thoughts and so i think like um to really make your character believable to me to really make your character resonate um hypocrisy is a big is a big key to that it doesn't have to be so much about relating like you're saying it's just about understanding thank you as long as you get why they did this right right i think then you can get away with things because it's like this is who the character is you if you build that character up in a way that you understand their decisions even if they're really bad decisions you get it because you understand them i mean people always say like you know acting is listening but i think for me writing is listening too i spend a lot of time listening to what my characters are trying to tell me about who they are and um and they're always telling you and it's the mysterious part of writing where you you have all this craft and you spend all this time making it as good as it can be and then at the same time your unconscious knows more than you do and you have to kind of keep that channel open rather than kind of tell the audience uh uh who a character is i like to show the audience what a character wants uh and it it all boils down to intention and obstacle somebody wants something something standing in their way of getting it uh it they they want the girl they want the money they want to get to philadelphia uh uh it doesn't matter but they have to want it bad if they can need it uh uh that's even better something formidable uh is standing in their way and the tactics that that character uses uh to overcome the obstacle is going to define uh uh who the character is it's it's like having a christmas tree and then hanging on i sometimes try writing dialogue when i'm not ready and i don't know how to do it i can't figure out what these people would say but then there is stuff later that kind of that starts to come out and how people talk and i learn things about them and it gets exciting and i get sort of get a sense of of characters that way but it's kind of like a it's almost like a sauce on top of the other stuff that i've already done which is thinking about what they are and what they need and what they're trying to get and you know what they've been through you mentioned that you have this exercise where you interview your characters talk a little bit about that so i did do interviews with all of the three major characters now the character interview what you want to happen is there's only one ground rule and this is you know as if there were a divine power and you're really interviewing another real human being but the divine power says you have to answer the question that's the rule now it doesn't mean immediately so what i do is i warm up with some cursory stuff might even be boring then i try to get into you know what's the worst moment what's the best moment when did you feel the most embarrassed when did you feel the proudest when did you feel the most ashamed who did you hurt and why who did you help and why who do you envy what what is your sex life like um and how good are you or how bad are you or where are you bad where are you good anything goes now the character can deflect and evade and make jokes and all that they don't have to answer immediately they just have to answer eventually and the reason that that's good is you start to get an interplay that's kind of like a scene between you and the character oh wait a minute that's not really the real answer to that question of course it's not i was being sarcastic you moron you know so it starts turning into the scene and it feels like it's a real person you hope to get to know your characters and you hope to trust that if you start writing something that they don't want to do that they'll fight back they feel like there will be blood let's hope you hopefully try to write a scene where daniel suddenly kind of becomes a really nice guy you know and starts donating money to charities or whatever or he learned sign language for his son or something like that and you know you should do dude you should try to write that scene you should try it on your character and just see how long they let you do it to them before they reach out from inside your typewriter or computer and just smack you across the face and say we're you're fucking kidding yourself let's get back to what we were meant to be doing and you talk to people that like if you're writing about whatever cop or whatever it is a scientist you talk to like the real people and that's where you get all the stuff that's not in books you know that's when you hear about the stress and and the friction of their jobs and or their personal lives because of their jobs or and that's where you get dialogue too honestly you hear their voices and that's like your characters right there you know i just i i'm working on just this rewrite right now uh that involves a detective and the director put me in touch with a swat detective for the lapd and man like i learned i just went for one day on the station with him and he just blew my mind and like i've stayed in touch with him when i'm working on scenes like does this make sense does that make sense and a lot of times you'd say like that's how a bad cop would do it this is how a good cop would do it a lot of them you'll find want to talk about themselves or they feel like what they do is underappreciated so they want to tell you about it um or what they do is very appreciative but they're tired of seeing it on movies and people doing it wrong and so like i think that a lot of people out there whether they're lawyers or detectives or doctors or mailmen whatever and they're excited that maybe something that they do for a living is gonna get depicted on film they they're gonna want it to be seen right so don't be shy about that stuff but yeah don't be shy with the research that's like the best part and that actually the more research you do with like that kind of uh method the less writing you have to do because it writes itself like you'll learn so much about writing by just talking to real people you

Channel: Behind the Curtain

Views: 90,819

Keywords: film, video essay, screenwriting, lessons from the screenplay, quentin tarantino, coen brothers, damien chazelle, how to write a screenplay, masterclass, masterclass aaron sorkin, masterclass martin scorsese, character development

Id: 7bmKc97wDTI

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020