Hey, guys. How do you guys figure out what your characters will be like? How do you make them likable? How much do you just have to leave up to the actor? Those of you who have written both screenplays and prose, how is character work in the two mediums different? Thanks.
Okay, I dug out a bunch of material I wrote about this a long time ago (you can tell because refer to the "recent" movie -- Braveheart) for a course I worked up.
Yet, I think the fundamentals referred to are still relevant.
Take from it what you wish:
I'm going to give you two simple rules about characters on screen.
RULE ONE: Characters are revealed through action.
RULE TWO: Memorable characters are always simple.
Talking about Rule One, I don't mean that Characters should be having fist fights or car chases all the time. What I mean is that we learn what kind of person a screen Character is by seeing that the Character has needs, makes decisions, takes chances, and does things. Action can include dialogue, but not verbal biographies. Dialogue must be a tool by which a Character furthers his needs, needs which you will have to define as you go. This is true not only of the Protagonists but of all screen Characters.
If somebody has no reason to be on screen, get rid of him.
A lot of Writers are told to create biographies and life histories for their characters. I don't care for it. It either becomes just an arbitrary collection of facts or else an exercise in pop psychologizing. My feeling is, unless a character's past has some definite influence on the outcome of the story, who cares about it? It's just something else that a would-be Screenwriter can waste his time on, rather than actually sitting down and writing his script.
The fact is, you don't know what kind of person somebody is by looking at their resume. You learn what someone is like by observing them, as they make decisions and relate to others in ways that can be both surprising and revealing. The audience doesn't know anything about Hannibal Lechter's upbringing in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS written by Ted Tally. Nor would that knowledge be of any use in understanding him. We learn about him by the way others react to him, by the way he responds to Clarice, by the decisions he makes, by the demands he puts upon her, by the way he responds to what she does or fails to do.
On the other hand, we do get to know about Clarice's past, and for a very good reason. Her present actions stem from her underlying need to put her past to rest. And the manner in which those critical bits of the past are revealed is a clear demonstration of good story telling. Lechter insists that she talk about her past. That's his price for giving her information about the serial killer that she's pursuing.
So what could have been static or expository scenes are instead actively serving the needs of the story. The act of revealing herself to Lechter (something that she's been warned NOT to do) moves the story forward by getting Lechter to talk, while simultaneously setting up the internal demon that Clarice is trying to put to rest.
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In real life, we can know people for months or years and only learn gradually what they're all about. You don't have that kind of luxury in a movie. The means by which we come to understand a character is by having that character challenged or tested by the events of a story. Just as we don't know how strong a piece of steel is until it's subjected to stress, so in drama, we come to understand a character by the way in which he responds to stress.
The Protagonist's response to stress must be action of some kind, whether he runs forward or backward, whether he succeeds or fails, he must, at least, do something.
A disease common to student films is the "depressed, introverted" main character. Generally, when these films get shown in class, everybody says that they don't know what the main character wanted and he didn't really seem to be doing much of anything, and the filmmaker stands up and defends himself by saying, "Well that's the kind of person he is. He doesn't show emotion, he's in inner torment but he can't reveal what he's feeling."
That's bullshit.
Dramatization is the "externalization" of the needs, desires, and decisions of the character. If you're developing a Protagonist who never reveals what he's thinking or feeling and never does anything to change his life, my advice is to think again. One of the demands of drama is that you "dramatize" -- you reveal the character's inner life through external action.
Regardless of how you perceive your character, you are obliged, if you want your movie to be understandable, to dramatize what your character feels and desires. And never fall into the trap that so many student filmmakers dig for themselves. Don't assume that it'll all become clear through "performance."
That the actor will do something with his face that'll just make it all work.
No, he won't.
There's a saying in this business, "If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage." Never assume that some significant story problem that isn't solved in your script will somehow be made to work through performance. Actors, like all artists, bring a creative intelligence to their work, but their work is acting, not screenwriting.
You, the Writer, must solve the script problems in the script. You must find a way to externalize the inner life of your characters.
When I talk about externalizing the emotions of a character, I don't mean having a character discourse on his feelings. Nothing is more boring that two people in love telling one another how much in love they are. You externalize characters through behavior and action.
Take a look at REMAINS OF THE DAY, written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and James Ivory, which is a story about a love that never quite happens. Nobody ever says anything about what they're feeling. Nobody ever says, "I love you," but the actions and behavior of the characters make it totally obvious what is actually happening, despite the fact that it's never addressed directly.
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Sometimes a Protagonist is torn between two points of view. This is largely an internal struggle, but it still has to be externalized in order for the audience to understand it. One way that this is done is to make the characters around the Protagonist spokesmen for these opposing points of view.
ON THE WATERFRONT does this very well. Terry Malloy is a character who's torn between loyalty and conscience. On the side of loyalty, you have his brother and the mob boss, Johnny Friendly, who's been a kind of surrogate father to him.
On the other, you have the girl with whom he ultimately falls in love, and the Priest who's trying to clean up the docks. While these are all characters who have their own agendas and their own internal life, they also function as external images of the struggle going on inside Terry Malloy.
And it's only when the balance between the two opposing sides is broken, when Terry's brother turns against Friendly and is killed, that Terry swings over fully to the other side.
If you think about the movies you've seen you'll find that this "good angel/bad angel" strategy is a very common one.
Another common strategy is the use of "totems." Objects, places, or even incidents can be invested with emotion and with symbolic importance. It could be almost anything -- a flower, a song, a home, a picture.
All that matters is that you establish a link between the object and the emotion or the event that you want your character to be thinking about later. Then, when the Protagonist looks at the flower, or hears the song, we now know what he's thinking about. We've made the same link that he's made.
Note the recent film, BRAVEHEART, written by Randall Wallace. As a boy, Wallace (the character, not the writer) is given a flower by a young girl at the grave of his father. The boy, who hasn't cried before, begins to cry. Many years later, the now-grown Wallace meets the girl again and later they go walking together at night.
Wallace tells her that he's always loved her. Then, as they're parting, he gives her a folded piece of cloth. She opens it. Inside is the same flower that she gave him all those years before, dried, flat because it's been pressed in a book, but still recognizable.
Would the scene have played without the flower? Sure. But the use of the flower conveys something about the depth of his feelings that no words ever could. It elevates the scene and makes it moving in a way that it never could have been without it.
A Totem can also be an action of some kind that occurs early on in the proceedings and is then repeated, with some critical variation later on. Someone has coffee spilled on him and he throws a fit early in the movie. Later, after all that good story stuff has turned him into a better person, the same thing happens and he reacts in accord with his new and improved personality.
Sometimes the nature of your story requires that we understand the motives or the rationale underlying someone's behavior during some critical confrontation. Very often you can't do it during the confrontation itself. As exposition it tends to stick out and be obvious.
One strategy for solving this problem is to have a "dry run" of the critical confrontation earlier.
One example -- in Disney's THE LITTLE MERMAID (don't sneer because it's a cartoon) there's a critical scene in the Second Act in which Triton stumbles across Ariel's secret treasure -- her collection of human objects, becomes enraged and smashes them all to pieces.
This is an essential story element. He has to be cruel and hurtful because Ariel's decision to seek out the Sea Witch grows out of this confrontation.
The problem is, we also have to like Triton. He's not the bad guy, despite having done this very nasty thing. Nor do the filmmakers want to waste any time having to rehabilitate Triton in our perceptions after the fact. The way in which this is solved is by having a "dress rehearsal" for this confrontation earlier, when Triton is lecturing Ariel about going up to the surface.
This moment establishes a number of things: Triton's feelings about the "surface dwellers," his sense that Ariel is still basically a child, but, very importantly, we establish a critical character trait. Triton is someone who loses his temper easily and then repents afterward.
In this earlier scene he yells at Ariel, she runs off in tears, and then we see that he didn't really mean it and is sorry he did it. Basically, he's not bad. He just has a short fuse. So when we reach the later scene where he does this frankly very cruel thing to his daughter, we're already primed.
We remember, "Okay, this is someone who loses his temper and repents afterward. He doesn't really mean it." And, of course, after his anger is past, we see that he realizes that he's done something terrible. We understand Ariel's feeling completely, but we also understand Triton so we don't really hold what he did against him.
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Whatever approach you use, you should always be thinking about what character information you need to convey in a scene. If you need the viewer to understand what someone is thinking, or what his motive is, then you can't count on performance, you can't count on directors, or on cinematographers. You, the Writer, must find a way to externalize those thoughts and feelings.
* * *
Generally, I don't have much trouble convincing people of Rule One.
But Rule Two is a tough one. It has been so ingrained into us that good characters are complex and multilayered and we should constantly be discovering new things about them, that it's very difficult for anyone to accept the notion that characters should be simple.
But look at memorable characters from movies and literature -- Sherlock Holmes or Scarlett O'Hara, Sam Spade or Vito Corleone, Forrest Gump or Mildred Pierce.
Their respective characters can easily be described in a few sentences. If anything, memorable characters are memorable because they're stripped down to essential, identifiable qualities.
If you read "A Scandal in Bohemia", the first Sherlock Holmes story, you know pretty much everything there is to know about Sherlock Holmes. The same is true for Nero Wolfe, or for Sam Spade. Or for Hannibal Lechter, for that matter. We see these characters challenged, we see how they meet unexpected obstacles, they may show unsuspected sides, but ultimately, they are very simple.
Sometimes Protagonists will change and grow over the course of the story, but other times they don't, and that's okay. That's another thing that surprises novice Writers. Doesn't everyone teach that the Protagonist must undergo a transformation, must end up different from the way he began?
Not necessarily. I'm not saying that they shouldn't. Clearly, many stories demand it. But it's not Holy Writ. Look at most of the movies starring John Wayne. Does any movie come to mind where his character really undergoes any significant changes? The only two that I can think of are REAP THE WILD WIND, which is simply awful, and RED RIVER, in which Wayne's character undergoes an abrupt transformation at the end. Needless to say, RED RIVER is famous for the weakness of that ending. Many people frankly think that that ending ruins an otherwise excellent movie. I'm one of them.
In many movies the dramatic line is the Protagonist's journey from one state of being to another. ON THE WATERFRONT is a good example. Terry Malloy undergoes a transformation, from a bum with no prospects to a hero. But there are a lot of stories in which the dramatic line is one in which a Protagonist is challenged, the challenge is faced and overcome, and the Protagonist is left unbent and triumphant.
Most of John Wayne's movies fall into this category, so do Sherlock Holmes stories, or James Bond movies. These stories aren't about change, they're about remaining firm in the face of change. One kind of story isn't intrinsically better than another.
In either case, simplicity of character is still essential. If you are to understand a character's journey from one state of being to another, you have to have a clear image of what he is at the start and what he has become at the end. To understand where a character is going, you have to know where he starts. Frankly, if the audience hasn't formed a clear image of what a key character is like within a few scenes, you're doing something wrong.
* * *
When I say a character should be simple, I don't mean that characters have to be familiar or predictable, only understandable. In the construction of characters, as in the construction of stories, you have to play fair with an audience. Characters can undergo abrupt changes, or be revealed as something very different from what they at first seemed, and it's perfectly okay -- so long as you establish their starting point clearly and set up the change beforehand.
NMS
