by Paul Ashton
aren’t worth spending that amount of time with. So, think again.
KNOWING WHERE YOU ARE GOING
I don’t know any professional writers who write scripts without knowing
(or without having a very strong feeling for) where they are going. They
may not know at the exploratory outset while the idea gestates and develops,
and while they gather together their material – but by the time they start
writing an actual script they should, because otherwise they will waste a lot
of time and energy working out where they are going as they go. They change
their minds. They get it wrong. And they still get lost down high ways and
byways. But they fundamentally know where they are going in dramatic and
emotional terms because the idea they have gestated and the characters
they have created have a meaningful existence, purpose and direction.
DIRECTION AND PURPOSE
The clearer you are about who the characters are, why they do what they
do, why we are watching them, why it is important to see them go on this
particular journey over this particular length of time in this particular way,
THE BEGINNING 73
the better grasp of story you will have. Details may change. You may change
your mind. You may still get lost. But you should know why you are travel -
ling in a particular direction and taking us on a particular journey. You
should have a purpose. The better you know and see this direction and
purpose, the clearer the story, the more necessary the beginning and ending
you choose – because for the story to work, the beginning and end must
have a necessary, causal, consequential relationship. Beginnings and end -
ings are not plot – they necessitate plot, they motivate and define the
getting from A to Z.
I have read many scripts that feel as if they begin or end in the wrong
place – or both. It is usually a lack of thorough understanding about who
the characters are at their heart that makes writers not know where the
narrative best begins and ends, and ultimately what their story is.
Don’t try to fit story (or plot) around character. Your character must
necessarily generate story and plot as a consequence of who they are, how
they think, what they feel and what they do.
Know your characters to know your story.
Know your story to know where you are going.
Know where you are going to know where to begin.
This way you won’t get as lost, distracted or confused as you otherwise might.
FOCUS
Knowing your story is about focus. So what about M*A*S*H, Crash, The
Wire, EastEnders? I’m not saying you must have only one main character
focus. But that however many characters you believe your story is about,
the audience also has the necessary character focus at any given time.
Which is to say – whose story is it at any given time? In this episode
of EastEnders, whose story is it? M*A*S*H* was about an ensemble, but it
was more about a core few than it was equally about everybody. Which is to
say, it was more often from their POV than from other POVs.
POINT OF VIEW
POV is a technical film-making term that denotes the viewpoint of the
camera and /or a particular character’s physical standpoint. But it’s crucial
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for all stories in all forms. Not simply so you can feel sure about whose story
it primarily is, but also so you can, scene by scene, work to put the audience
in the shoes of particular characters – emotionally, psychologically, physic -
ally. For stories to really work, you need to know what the POVs are and
put your audience in their shoes.
POV can be literal, as in a camera position. But more than that, it
should be dramatic and emotional in that we might go into a scene knowing
what has preceded, motivated and necessitated it, and with the knowledge
of what might be achieved or what might be at stake. With this in mind, we
can see dramatic consequences unfold and their emotional effect on char -
acter. (Non-linear stories are necessarily different in that we do not see the
chronological order of consequence – but this doesn’t mean you are dis pen-
sing with dramatic causality, only that you are rearranging and manipul -
ating our viewing of it.)
So the key thing is to let an audience in on what matters to your
characters and to follow that through. You need to make the audience see
the world through your character’s eyes. Everyone sees the world differ -
ently – some slightly, some extremely. You need to develop your characters
with a clear sense of what they see when they look out at the world, and
look out at any given moment and situation. The same scene told from a
different character’s POV is fundamentally a different scene because people
see things in different ways. If you don’t think about character POV early
on, then the audience might remain outside the story, observing it rather
than inside it and experiencing it.
Strong POV can utterly and brilliantly define what your story is by
defining whose story it is and what we therefore feel about that definition
and focus. Andrea Arnold’s films Fish Tank and Red Road have an unswerv -
ingly tight focus on the POV of one character; we see the world from the
POV of the female lead in both films to the extent of following them so
closely (via hand-held camera) that the proximity is almost oppressive. The
story is their story – it never really belongs to anyone else.
MOVIE ENSEMBLES
Lots of screenwriters wish to emulate films like M*A*S*H*, Short Cuts,
Gosford Park, Magnolia, Crash. The simple fact is that the multi-strand single drama is an extraordinarily difficult genre to do well – a challenge to
THE BEGINNING 75
the greatest minds and practitioners, never mind aspiring ones. Think hard
about whether you yet have the material, the ability and the dexterity to
pull this off.
I’ve seen a lot of such scripts try and fail because there’s no defining
focus in their story. In M*A*S*H, the wartime emergency scenario pulls the
characters together. In Crash and Short Cuts it is the way unconnected
characters overlap with dramatic effects. In Magnolia it is the tenuous
connections that make isolated stories build together to a shared climax of
a biblical shower of frogs (and in Short Cuts there’s an earthquake). In
Gosford Park it is the murder mystery and class divides within one country
house that connect the disparate characters. In each there is a meaningful
reason why so many POVs can coexist. In each you are seeing storytelling
at its most difficult and remarkable and auteurist. The multi-stranded
separateness still must be focused and tied together.
The other option, of course, is to make a TV show out of your multi-
stranded idea instead. Which is exactly what they went on to do with
M*A*S*H (and usually it’s the TV show people tend to recall).
HOOK
The stronger the sense of character focus and POV, the clearer the dramatic
and emotional hook will be. The ‘hook’ is the thing that justifies us watching
– the thing that says it’s worth watching th
is story because it will take
Character X on a journey from beginning to end. It’s the premise – the con -
flict, the dramatic question, the character’s need and desire, the purpose –
that will keep us hooked. It’s the question that requires an answer that will
only be delivered by watching through to the end.
POV TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN
So that’s how it’s supposed to be. Then there are the wild, maverick excep -
tions – the ones where storytellers do something weird, radical, upside
down. Here are some favourite films that do it well:
In Psycho, we begin following Marion Crane as she robs her boss,
leaves town, checks into a motel – and then is suddenly, shockingly killed
off. Then Norman Bates takes over the POV. Hitchcock’s mastery of sus -
pense and tension was the ultimate play on expectation and POV.
76 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
In Fargo, we spend the first third of the film wondering whose story it
is, who we’re supposed to connect with, who occupies the moral centre of the
world. And we struggle badly, faced with an awful father, his awful wife,
their awful child, his awful grandfather and the awful kidnappers who turn
up on the doorstep. That is, until Marge the plain, pregnant, small-town cop
arrives. The Coen brothers push to the n th degree our sense of finding an
emotional heart and POV. (They also tell us their film is a true story and a
thriller, neither of which is true.)
In Memento, we follow a man who can’t form new memories in his
quest to find out the murderer of his wife, only to be ultimately told that
there is no killer, that his quest is an invention to give meaning to a life
that can have no meaning because nothing more in it can be remembered.
Except that this bombshell might not true. We don’t know. The hero doesn’t
know. The whole story might be a falsehood, a fabrication. But in that
moment we are closer than ever to the POV of the hero and the hopeless -
ness of a future in which nothing new will be remembered.
In The Usual Suspects, we spend an entire film intrigued about and
terrified by the neo-mythical Kaiser Soze, and then in the mother of all
twists we realise we’ve been watching him all along, pretending to be
someone else, hearing the tale from his POV, but one that apparently is
someone else’s. Or have we? It is one of those rare films where the twist and
ambiguity either works for you or doesn’t. The writer and director simply
did not know until they saw it in a cinema with an audience whether the
twist would work.
In all these films, our connection and engagement with a focus and
POV is given a unique and genre-bending treatment. They are all also
‘thrillers’ (except of course Fargo, which says it is – but isn’t really). There’s something about the intrigue, surprise, twists, turns and manipulation of
expectation of this genre that can allow for – perhaps even demand – a
different under standing of what character focus means. The point of this
diversion is to show that even in genre-driven but also maverick and
utterly distinct films like these, character focus remains crucial to what the
story is and means at its heart of hearts.
In these films the drive towards the ending is utterly crucial and cen -
tral too because it fully expresses the story: of a young man whose sinister,
complex relationship with his dead mother has turned him into a monster;
of a man who can’t form new memories realising for only a moment (that
THE BEGINNING 77
he will soon forget) that his life possibly has absolutely no meaning; of a
policewoman who simply cannot understand why people do such bad and
stupid things for the sake of money; of the ultimate truth over whether a
petty criminal is in fact a mythical criminal or the mythical criminal is
invoked to help the petty criminal escape the law.
GETTING INTO CHARACTER
TEST OF CHARACTER
Strong characters that we want to engage with, spend time with, root for,
cry over, laugh at, fear for, from whose POV we see the world, are the indis -
pensable heart of all great scripts. They are also often the central problem
with scripts that don’t work. The big test of all scripts is ultimately whether
the characters are strong and compelling enough to carry the story, idea
and audience along with them.
We’ve all heard the popular cliché of an actor ‘getting into character’
– whether that’s psyching up before a performance or a method actor ‘living’
the role. It’s something we like to sneer at: doesn’t so-and-so take them -
selves seriously? But it is deadly serious. If you haven’t created a character
worth ‘getting into’ then you are already in deep trouble. There are plenty
of things you can get wrong, or at least that can be fixed – plot, structure,
narrative, dialogue. But if your characters don’t live, your whole story is
dead. Neatly crafted, coherently plotted, perfectly formatted, market-ready
scripts are meaningless if they don’t have great characters at their heart.
I have read many carefully wrought thrillers that push every neces -
sary button but are forgettable because the character doesn’t stay with you;
the difference between Die Hard and many a dispensable action flick is the
central character at the heart of it, an ordinary Joe doing extraordinary
things in very individual, personality-driven ways. I have read a much
smaller number of messy, flawed, unproducable scripts that have stayed
with me because the characters stand out and stick in the memory.
Characters are the beginning, middle and end of what makes or breaks
a great script and a great writer. With strong, engaging characters, no
matter what other problems you might have, you will always have some -
where to go.
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‘Once I’ve had the headline idea, then the very next thing I’ll explore
is the characters . . . This is the bit I love most. This is the truly
creative part of the process, where anything can happen . . . It’s very
easy for me to get bogged down in the characters . . . But I think the
bedrock of any decent drama has to be character, and devoting time
and energy to getting those right usually pays dividends.’
Toby Whithouse
DRAMATIC VS COMIC
There is a fundamental difference between straight-dramatic and straight-
comic characters. Great dramatic characters can reach anagnorisis, or
awareness – the realisation and recognition of who they are, how they have
changed and the meaning of what they have done. Comic characters tend
to remain blinkered and unchanging, never fully able to comprehend what
it is about their personality that gets them into comic trouble. However,
between these two ‘straight’ extremes is every other shade of character, and
the classic straight comedy characters usually exist only in traditional TV
sitcoms and classic farces for the stage and the big screen. And I think that
you need to invest the same amount of energy and create the same strength
of story wherever your characters sit on the drama–comedy spectrum.
&nbs
p; SPENDING TIME
We must want to spend time with them. We need to feel their desires, soak
up their energy and joy, share their pain, fear for their safety, laugh at their
shortcomings. We must want to see what they will do next – or we will stop
watching and caring. It might be the vicarious thrill in the mania of Frank
Gallagher or the calculation of Iago. It might be the heroic thrill of Billy
Elliot winning a place at ballet school against the odds or Theo keeping the
only pregnant woman in the world and her unborn baby safe. It might be
the comic thrill of Basil Fawlty failing to keep the hotel inspector at bay or
David Brent never quite realising how embarrassingly bad a boss he really
is. It might be the domestic thrill of Angie lying about her terminal illness
or what Dirty Den will do when he realises she is lying.
THE BEGINNING 79
EMPATHY
Whoever they are, whatever they do, we need to empathise with them – to
stand in their shoes and understand what they think, feel, do – regardless
of whether or not we agree with them or would do what they do ourselves.
Empathy isn’t diversion, a take-it-or-leave-it distraction from other
more important things. It is a fundamental compulsion, a need to engage
with another human being (and in stories, with a character), no matter how
unlike us or far from us they appear to be. If it isn’t there, your script is
simply plot without story.
We don’t need to like your characters. Or admire them. Or agree with
them. Or wish we were more like them. Or want to take them home to meet
our parents. Or wish we lived next door to someone like them. But they
must have a human, emotional life. No matter how bad, selfish, arrogant,
blinkered, stupid they appear to be, we need to connect with at least one
part of their personality that is engaging or vulnerable – the chink in their
armour that takes them beyond two-dimensional stereotypes.
Even if your character is not human. I don’t know of any great
characters driving a story or at the heart of a story that are not suffused
with human traits – even robots like the Terminator, Wall-E, Hal or the