The Calling Card Script

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.

  78 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT

  ‘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.

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  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