by Paul Ashton
about each of the consequent and attendant needs. He tries and he changes.
He is never really in control of the wants and needs. He is not necessarily
always clear or sure about what they are, what he should do, whether it will
work, whether it is worth it. But he always tries and so no matter how mud -
died his developing wants and needs are, they are constantly propelling
him forward towards the ending that was in the beginning – to save Leia
and destroy the Death Star.
MUDDLED CONSEQUENCES
If in the beginning a character says they want something and they then
simply go ahead and get it, there is no drama. If a character struggles to get
what they want then there is drama and story – but there isn’t necessarily
complexity and depth.
In the course of achieving their wants and needs, the most engaging
characters modify, reappraise, examine what they want, why they want it,
what it will mean to get it. The consequences of their actions are not simple
and clear but muddled and complex.
In This Is England Shaun wants to not stand out. He gets a gang of
friends with whom he fits in, but who collectively stand out from the crowd
even more than Shaun did by himself. He embraces this – he wants the
haircut, the clothes, the boots. Now he doesn’t mind standing out if it means
fitting in with a group of people that embrace him for who he is. But he
doesn’t anticipate the shift that occurs when Combo returns and displaces
the warm-hearted Woody. Shaun’s fearlessness marks him out to Combo as
a kid to be trusted, a kid who really means it. And this brings Shaun closer
to the previously unseen danger: racism and violence. Shaun is faced with
a major dilemma that tests his understanding of what he wants and needs.
When Combo attacks Milky, Shaun is the only one left kicking and
screaming in an attempt to stop him. What he wants and needs is to put
the brakes on the gang hurtling down this very wrong, very dark road.
126 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
His wants and needs have changed and developed; the more muddled their
outcomes are as the story develops, the more he must assert himself, be
himself, become the ‘himself ’ that he didn’t realise he could be.
Hamlet is full of muddled consequences: the killing of Polonius and
the sending away of Hamlet; the alienation of Ophelia and her eventual
suicide; the engineered death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for betray -
ing Hamlet; the demise of Gertrude as she drinks the poison to save her
son, futile though that action is. None of these consequences were desired,
planned for, expected or anticipated. All are ultimately a muddled conse qu-
ence of Hamlet’s actions as he tries and for a long time fails to take revenge
for his father’s death. But he gets there in the end. The end is inevitable.
BEYOND THE COMFORT ZONE
When a character answers ‘the call’ and goes past the point of no return,
they are stepping outside their comfort zone – beyond what they know and
understand, even if that comfort zone is not necessarily a pleasant or com -
fortable or happy place to be. Sometimes the danger of the new and
unknown is more unsettling than the difficulty of what a character has
experienced and dealt with in the past.
Beyond the comfort zone, characters cannot simply rely on who they
were or how they dealt with things in the past. They must learn new strate -
gies, new skills, new behaviours, new capabilities, new points of view. And
they will therefore find new flaws and limitations, new inabilities, new
seeming limits to who they are. For great characters, this is the muddle –
where they have for better or for worse chosen to step beyond and take on
the consequences of their actions and decisions. Not knowing necessarily
what those consequences will be is the thrill of our engagement and the
heart of the muddle. The muddle is not just a muddle – it is a consequential
muddle, one driven by want, need, choice, decision, action and trying again
and again until the inevitable ending comes about.
If you keep your characters inside their comfort zone in the middle,
your story will simply run out of steam.
In Withnail and I the comfort zone is a drug-infested Camden – beyond
it is a car journey to Penrith and into the unknown. In Merlin the comfort
zone is the security of being Arthur’s apparently hapless servant – beyond
it is the secret use of magic that is forbidden by Arthur’s father. In Being
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Human the comfort zone is usually the flatshare – beyond it is the three
characters allowing their secret life to come out into the open where other
people might notice. In Closer the comfort zone is desire and eroticism –
beyond it is love, intimacy, trust, commitment, need.
DEVELOPING THE ‘AGON’
The ‘agon’ defines the role of character. Are they protagonist or antagonist?
Pursuing something or standing in the way of that pursuit? But remember
– to the antagonist, their own role as obstacle to the protagonist is in fact
their own protagonism. They are not simply there to oppose another. If they
are interesting, they will oppose another because they have wants, needs, a
POV, an attitude of their own, whether it is towards positive or negative ends.
And therefore the seeming protagonist is from that POV the antagonist.
The agon should not remain simple, obvious, clear. The agon – the
conflict – should not remain static. It can shape-shift and develop as the
story progresses. For Shaun, the initial antagonist is anyone who points
him (and his terrible trousers) out. By the end, the antagonist has become
Combo – or rather the pressures and anger and insecurity that have driven
Combo towards an act of racist violence. The conflicts change and develop.
They intensify. They mutate. In a sense, at the climax Shaun becomes the
antagonist to the warped sense of alienation and desire to belong that has
driven Combo to extreme nationalism. At the outset, it was Shaun’s own
alienation and desire to belong that had ultimately and ironically driven
him as protagonist to this point of fighting against a consequence of pre -
cisely that want and need. This is what makes his journey so brilliant, so
engaging, so unique, so complex.
DEVELOPING THE COMPLEXITY
By taking a complex character on a journey forward through conflict, you
make them more complex, interesting and unique. The story gets better
and better. Your story must get better and better.
‘What about action films?’ I hear you say. ‘Are they ever complex?’ The
good ones are. In Die Hard the ordinary-Joe hero does not stay the same.
The journey from entering the besieged building to penetrating the hostage-
takers’ lair is one that tests his character, personality, resolve, ability,
128 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
stamina, desire, intelligence, confidence in increasingly intense increments.
The tests are not just physical but emotional and psychological. It’s not just
about guns and explosions and fist-fights. Poor action films ditch any sem -
blance or shr
ed of complexity for complication and base sensation. They are
only about guns and explosions and fist fights.
NEW WORLD, NEW CHARACTERISTICS
By taking a leap into the unknown or the little known, what new sides,
facets, hidden depths and characteristics will your characters discover and
uncover about themselves and other people? Are they new? Surprises?
Unwelcome developments? Do the characters even see and recognise the
changes at all? Are they new characteristics that only we and/or other
characters notice?
From the isolated, lonely, uncool, irascible, grudging, miserable kid in
the beginning, we come to see in Shaun a physical transformation, a confi -
dence, a humour, a sense of place and worth, his first kiss, and a growing
consciousness that the extreme nationalism he is seeing for the first time
is wrong. Shaun blossoms and flourishes and matures but he also isn’t able,
strong or mature enough to prevent some things happening as the story
climaxes. His personality doesn’t fundamentally alter – but it grows and is
given the opportunity to truly be itself rather than masked by a sense of
unhappiness and anger as it is at the beginning.
QUALITIES
As your characters follow the call and their chosen pursuit, which specific
qualities are altered, or newly appear, or even disappear altogether? What
qualities do the characters consciously aspire towards? Which do they begin
to acquire, whether desired or not, conscious or not? What are the acciden -
tal effects on personality?
Hamlet aims to become an avenging force, though not before he is
confident that vengeance is a true and justified path. He attempts to put an
‘antic disposition on’, to pretend to be mad, so that he can draw out the
truth without anyone realising that is what he is doing. But the more his
behaviour becomes unhinged, the more eyes are on him, and ultimately the
harder his task. His unhinged behaviour isn’t just this ‘act’ – he become as
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genuinely unhinged, irascible and rash as he does vicious, dismissive,
suspicious, calculating, deceptive; the way he rejects Ophelia; the way he
‘tests’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; the way he puts on a play to reflect
an accusing mirror back at Claudius; the way he fails to take revenge as
Claudius guiltily prays; the way he unleashes disappointed venom at his
mother; the way he stabs Polonius without apparently knowing who the
victim is (yet surely aware that his actions are extreme whoever that victim
might be); the way he escapes the captors who are taking him to his death.
Although there is complexity in the qualities we see in him at the begin -
ning, there is much greater complexity and extremity and variation in the
qualities we see him display in his actions throughout the middle.
CAPABILITIES AND FLAWS
Are any of the things that your character can and can’t do severely tested
in the middle? And how aware of this are they? For Billy Elliot, physical
capability looms very large in the middle – can he learn to dance well enough
to get a place at ballet school? But his journey is much more complex than
this. Does he have the capability to do this in secret? Or does he have the
strength finally to admit the truth and show his father what he can do,
whatever the consequences? Can he steer his way past the temptations of
a girl who fancies him? And can he rise above the inverted cultural snob -
bery that says to be a ballet-dancing boy must mean he is ‘gay’? And when
his best friends ‘outs’ himself as gay, how will Billy cope with that revela -
tion? Does he have the ability to get beyond the loss of his mother? And
when he does finally get the big audition and has danced his heart out for
the panel, does he have the ability to express in words what dancing means
to him and dispel any lingering doubts that his assessors might have?
Does Billy have the capability to handle all the complex things that
will help him learn to dance and get to ballet school? What weaknesses and
flaws will compromise and jeopardise those capabilities?
POV, MORALITY, ATTITUDE
Whatever happens in the middle, whatever trajectory your characters’
journeys take, their POV, attitude and moral take on the world will be
tested, challenged, be put under pressure and even altered. If they have
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stepped outside their comfort zone, then they will necessarily be seeing,
experiencing, feeling, understanding, tackling things that are beyond their
usual experience.
In this state of becoming one of four things is likely to happen. Their
POV, attitude and moral sense will:
Diminish and dilute.
Harden and sharpen.
Mutate and shift.
Or appear to remain the same (until the end, at which point all the
pressure that has been storing up will effect a more sudden and
extreme transformation).
If your characters’ perspective on the world does not change, not even the
tiniest little bit, then what you are fundamentally saying is that even in
extraordinary circumstances they do not have the ability to grow. (And if
this is what you really are trying to say, then be prepared for whoever reads
it to come back and say it is a negative, depressing, cynical view of the
world that they don’t want to take any further, thank you very much.)
The main exceptions are those rare heroes whose main function is to
survive, Teflon-coated and immutable, for ever unchanging, like James
Bond – though the character has changed with every new actor that plays
him and every new era in which he exists, and his survival is ultimately
intended to show the ‘good guys’ beating the ‘bad’ ones and so is not nega -
tive and cynical as such. The other exceptions are the true villains who
refuse to acknowledge that what they have done is bad or wrong or anti-
social or antagonistic – such as Iago in Othello or John Doe in Se7en. Many of the worst-seeming baddies do in fact have a death-bed conversion or at
least accept that they have been evil, like Edmund at the end of King Lear.
Utter villains are relative rarities but can often exist in the more comic-
book-like stories such as action and superhero movies. Even Iago isn’t just
bad – what his soliloquies reveal is something inexplicable and complex,
but not something that is simply pure evil.
For every other character, their view and understanding of and beliefs
about the world need to be provoked, challenged, tested, pressurised.
Moon is an extraordinarily unusual, clever and poignant take on a
char acter journey through the middle of the story. It’s rare enough for a film
to rely so heavily on apparently just one character. But when in the middle
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of the story it becomes clear to us and Sam 1 that he is a clone, the life,
history, memory and everything else that makes up his personality unfolds
as a fabrication, a pretence, a meaningless existence. For a man who has
been counting the days and hours and minutes until he can return to a wife
and child he believes he hasn’t seen fo
r three years and who are not in fact
waiting for him at all, his understanding of the world and himself is thrown
completely into existential, psychological and emotional disarray.
The fact that each clone is a somewhat different version of the original
Sam, and the fact that two versions are accidentally thrown together on
this claustrophobic moon base, is a brilliant way of externalising this jour -
ney as physical dramatic action and conflict. For Sam 1 the journey in the
middle is the most poignantly earth-shattering muddle, where nothing is as
it has always appeared to be. For Sam 2, the middle is in fact a beginning
and his ending is something we don’t actually see – which cleverly adds a
layer of narrative complexity. So while the story is ultimately a heroic tragedy
for Sam 1, Sam 2 is able to carry Sam 1’s (and therefore his own) story for -
ward in a unique way at the end, so that their secret cloned existence will
be revealed on earth and not forever be a tragedy.
VULNERABILITIES
Moon is a great example of where vulnerabilities that were not immedi -
ately visible at the beginning are brought into sharp, painful relief in the
middle. In the beginning Sam 1 seems to be going a bit stir-crazy; he is
clearly missing human contact (ironic – since he’s never actually had any),
thinks he has seen a mysterious girl in and around the base, and feels
exhausted. By the middle, it’s clear that his physical longevity as a clone is
running out, he is mentally breaking down, and he must deal with the col -
lapse of his existential, psychological and emotional world. The clock is
ticking on his fabricated life and he doesn’t even have the pull of a home
and loved ones to keep him going, because there is no home and there are
no loved ones to go back to. The only thing he does have to protect the
vulnerabilities that go to the core of his being and circumstances is the
eventual, ironic support of Sam 2 as they try to fight their situation rather
than simply accept it.
For Sam 1 and ultimately for Sam 2, absolutely everything is at stake.
Even though Sam 1 realises he is doomed and dying, he heroically battles