by Robert McKee
In other words, a film cannot send its audience to the street rewriting it: “Happy ending… but shouldn’t she have settled things with her father? Shouldn’t she have broken up with Ed before she moved in with Mac? Shouldn’t she have…” Or: “Downer… the guy’s dead, but why didn’t he call the cops? And didn’t he keep a gun under the dash, and shouldn’t he have…?” If people exit imagining scenes they thought they should have seen before or after the ending we give them, they will be less than happy moviegoers. We’re supposed to be better writers than they. The audience wants to be taken to the limit, to where all questions are answered, all emotion satisfied—the end of the line.
The protagonist takes us to this limit. He must have it within himself to pursue his desire to the boundaries of human experience in depth, breadth, or both, to reach absolute and irreversible change. This, by the way, doesn’t mean your film can’t have a sequel; your protagonist may have more tales to tell. It means that each story must find closure for itself.
The PROTAGONIST must be empathetic; he may or may not be sympathetic.
Sympathetic means likable. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, for example, or Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in their typical roles: The moment they step onscreen, we like them. We’d want them as friends, family members, or lovers. They have an innate likability and evoke sympathy. Empathy, however, is a more profound response.
Empathetic means “like me.” Deep within the protagonist the audience recognizes a certain shared humanity. Character and audience are not alike in every fashion, of course; they may share only a single quality. But there’s something about the character that strikes a chord. In that moment of recognition, the audience suddenly and instinctively wants the protagonist to achieve whatever it is that he desires.
The unconscious logic of the audience runs like this: “This character is like me. Therefore, I want him to have whatever it is he wants, because if I were he in those circumstances, I’d want the same thing for myself.” Hollywood has many synonymic expressions for this connection: “somebody to get behind,” “someone to root for.” All describe the empathetic connection that the audience strikes between itself and the protagonist. An audience may, if so moved, empathize with every character in your film, but it must empathize with your protagonist. If not, the audience/story bond is broken.
THE AUDIENCE BOND
The audience’s emotional involvement is held by the glue of empathy. If the writer fails to fuse a bond between filmgoer and protagonist, we sit outside feeling nothing. Involvement has nothing to do with evoking altruism or compassion. We empathize for very personal, if not egocentric, reasons. When we identify with a protagonist and his desires in life, we are in fact rooting for our own desires in life. Through empathy, the vicarious linking of ourselves to a fictional human being, we test and stretch our humanity. The gift of story is the opportunity to live lives beyond our own, to desire and struggle in a myriad of worlds and times, at all the various depths of our being.
Empathy, therefore, is absolute, while sympathy is optional. We’ve all met likable people who don’t draw our compassion. A protagonist, accordingly, may or may not be pleasant. Unaware of the difference between sympathy and empathy, some writers automatically devise nice-guy heroes, fearing that if the star role isn’t nice, the audience won’t relate. Uncountable commercial disasters, however, have starred charming protagonists. Likability is no guarantee of audience involvement; it’s merely an aspect of characterization. The audience identifies with deep character, with innate qualities revealed through choice under pressure.
At first glance creating empathy does not seem difficult. The protagonist is a human being; the audience is full of human beings. As the filmgoer looks up on the screen, he recognizes the character’s humanity, senses that he shares it, identifies with the protagonist, and dives into the story. Indeed, in the hands of the greatest writers, even the most unsympathetic character can be made empathetic.
Macbeth, for example, viewed objectively, is monstrous. He butchers a kindly old King while the man is sleeping, a King who had never done Macbeth any harm—in fact, that very day he’d given Macbeth a royal promotion. Macbeth then murders two servants of the King to blame the deed on them. He kills his best friend. Finally he orders the assassination of the wife and infant children of his enemy. He’s a ruthless killer; yet, in Shakespeare’s hands he becomes a tragic, empathetic hero.
The Bard accomplished this feat by giving Macbeth a conscience. As he wanders in soliloquy, wondering, agonizing, “Why am I doing this? What kind of a man am I?” the audience listens and thinks, “What kind? Guilt-ridden… just like me. I feel bad when I’m thinking about doing bad things. I feel awful when I do them and afterward there’s no end to the guilt. Macbeth is a human being; he has a conscience just like mine.” In fact, we’re so drawn to Macbeth’s writhing soul, we feel a tragic loss when at climax Macduff decapitates him. Macbeth is a breathtaking display of the godlike power of the writer to find an empathetic center in an otherwise contemptible character.
On the other hand, in recent years many films, despite otherwise splendid qualities, have crashed on these rocks because they failed to create an audience bond. Just one example of many: INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE. The audience’s reaction to Brad Pitt’s Louis went like this: “If I were Louis, caught in his hell-after-death, I’d end it in a flash. Bad luck he’s a vampire. Wouldn’t wish that on anybody. But if he finds it revolting to suck the life out of innocent victims, if he hates himself for turning a child into a devil, if he’s tired of rat blood, he should take this simple solution: Wait for sunrise, and poof, it’s over.” Although Anne Rice’s novel steered us through Louis’s thoughts and feelings until we fell into empathy with him, the dispassionate eye of the camera sees him for what he is, a whining fraud. Audiences always disassociate themselves from hypocrites.
THE FIRST STEP
When you sit down to write, the musing begins: “How to start? What would my character do?”
Your character, indeed all characters, in the pursuit of any desire, at any moment in story, will always take the minimum, conservative action from his point of view. All human beings always do. Humanity is fundamentally conservative, as indeed is all of nature. No organism ever expends more energy than necessary, risks anything it doesn’t have to, or takes any action unless it must. Why should it? If a task can be done in an easy way without risk of loss or pain, or the expenditure of energy, why would any creature do the more difficult, dangerous, or enervating thing? It won’t. Nature doesn’t allow it… and human nature is just an aspect of universal nature.
In life we often see people, even animals, acting with extreme behavior that seems unnecessary, if not stupid. But this is our objective view of their situation. Subjectively, from within the experience of the creature, this apparently intemperate action was minimal, conservative, and necessary. What’s thought “conservative,” after all, is always relative to point of view.
For example: If a normal person wanted to get into a house, he’d take the minimum and conservative action. He’d knock on the door, thinking, “If I knock, the door’ll be opened. I’ll be invited in and that’ll be a positive step toward my desire.” A martial arts hero, however, as a conservative first step, might karate-chop the door to splinters, feeling that this is prudent and minimal.
What is necessary but minimal and conservative is relative to the point of view of each character at each precise moment. In life, for example, I say to myself: “If I cross the street now, that car’s far enough away for the driver to see me in time, slow down if needed, and I’ll get across.” Or: “I can’t find Dolores’s phone number. But I know that my friend Jack has it in his Rolodex. If I call him in the midst of his busy day, because he’s my friend, he’ll interrupt what he’s doing and give me the number.”
In other words, in life we take an action consciously or unconsciously (and life is spontaneous most of the time as we open our mouths or take a step), thinki
ng or sensing within to this effect: “If in these circumstances I take this minimum, conservative action, the world will react to me in a fashion that will be a positive step toward getting me what I want.” And in life, 99 percent of the time we are right. The driver sees you in time, taps the brakes, and you reach the other side safely. You call Jack and apologize for interrupting him. He says, “No problem,” and gives you the number. This is the great mass of experience, hour by hour, in life. BUT NEVER, EVER IN A STORY.
The grand difference between story and life is that in story we cast out the minutiae of daily existence in which human beings take actions expecting a certain enabling reaction from the world, and, more or less, get what they expect.
In story, we concentrate on that moment, and only that moment, in which a character takes an action expecting a useful reaction from his world, but instead the effect of his action is to provoke forces of antagonism. The world of the character reacts differently than expected, more powerfully than expected, or both.
I pick up the phone, call Jack, and say: “Sorry to bother you, but I can’t find Dolores’s phone number. Could you—” and he shouts: “Dolores? Dolores! How dare you ask me for her number?” and slams down the phone. Suddenly, life is interesting.
THE WORLD OF A CHARACTER
This chapter seeks the substance of story as seen from the perspective of a writer who in his imagination has placed himself at the very center of the character he’s creating. The “center” of a human being, that irreducible particularity of the innermost self, is the awareness you carry with you twenty-four hours a day that watches you do everything you do, that chides you when you get things wrong, or compliments you on those rare occasions when you get things right. It’s that deep observer that comes to you when you’re going through the most agonizing experience of your life, collapsed on the floor, crying your heart out… that little voice that says, “Your mascara is running.” This inner eye is you: your identity, your ego, the conscious focus of your being. Everything outside this subjective core is the objective world of a character.
A character’s world can be imagined as a series of concentric circles surrounding a core of raw identity or awareness, circles that mark the levels of conflict in a character’s life. The inner circle or level is his own self and conflicts arising from the elements of his nature: mind, body, emotion.
When, for example, a character takes an action, his mind may not react the way he anticipates. His thoughts may not be as quick, as insightful, as witty as he expected. His body may not react as he imagined. It may not be strong enough or deft enough for a particular task. And we all know how emotions betray us. So the closest circle of antagonism in the world of a character is his own being: feelings and emotions, mind and body, all or any of which may or may not react from one moment to the next the way he expects. As often as not, we are our own worst enemies.
THE THREE LEVELS OF CONFLICT
The second circle inscribes personal relationships, unions of intimacy deeper than the social role. Social convention assigns the outer roles we play. At the moment, for example, we’re playing teacher/student. Someday, however, our paths may cross and we may decide to change our professional relationship to friendship. In the same manner, parent/child begins as social roles that may or may not go deeper than that. Many of us go through life in parent/child relationships that never deepen beyond social definitions of authority and rebellion. Not until we set the conventional role aside do we find the true intimacy of family, friends, and lovers—who then do not react the way we expect and become the second level of personal conflict.
The third circle marks the level of extra-personal conflict—all the sources of antagonism outside the personal: conflict with social institutions and individuals—government/citizen, church/worshipper; corporation/client; conflict with individuals—cop/criminal/victim, boss/worker, customer/waiter, doctor/patient; and conflict with both man-made and natural environments—time, space, and every object in it.
THE GAP
STORY is born in that place where the subjective and objective realms touch.
The protagonist seeks an object of desire beyond his reach. Consciously or unconsciously he chooses to take a particular action, motivated by the thought or feeling that this act will cause the world to react in a way that will be a positive step toward achieving his desire. From his subjective point of view the action he has chosen seems minimal, conservative, yet sufficient to effect the reaction he wants. But the moment he takes this action, the objective realm of his inner life, personal relationships, or extra-personal world, or a combination of these, react in a way that’s more powerful or different than he expected.
This reaction from his world blocks his desire, thwarting him and bending him further from his desire than he was before he took this action. Rather than evoking cooperation from his world, his action provokes forces of antagonism that open up the gap between his subjective expectation and the objective result, between what he thought would happen when he took his action and what in fact does happen between his sense of probability and true necessity.
Every human being acts, from one moment to the next, knowingly or unknowingly, on his sense of probability, on what he expects, in all likelihood, to happen when he takes an action. We all walk this earth thinking, or at least hoping, that we understand ourselves, our intimates, society, and the world. We behave according to what we believe to be the truth of ourselves, the people around us, and the environment. But this is a truth we cannot know absolutely. It’s what we believe to be true.
We also believe we’re free to make any decision whatsoever to take any action whatsoever. But every choice and action we make and take, spontaneous or deliberate, is rooted in the sum total of our experience, in what has happened to us in actuality, imagination, or dream to that moment. We then choose to act based on what this gathering of life tells us will be the probable reaction from our world. It’s only then, when we take action, that we discover necessity.
Necessity is absolute truth. Necessity is what in fact happens when we act. This truth is known—and can only be known—when we take action into the depth and breadth of our world and brave its reaction. This reaction is the truth of our existence at that precise moment, no matter what we believed the moment before. Necessity is what must and does actually happen, as opposed to probability, which is what we hope or expect to happen.
As in life, so in fiction. When objective necessity contradicts a character’s sense of probability, a gap suddenly cracks open in the fictional reality. This gap is the point where the subjective and objective realms collide, the difference between anticipation and result, between the world as the character perceived it before acting and the truth he discovers in action.
Once the gap in reality splits open, the character, being willful and having capacity, senses or realizes that he cannot get what he wants in a minimal, conservative way. He must gather himself and struggle through this gap to take a second action. This next action is something the character would not have wanted to do in the first case because it not only demands more willpower and forces him to dig more deeply into his human capacity, but most important, the second action puts him at risk. He now stands to lose in order to gain.
ON RISK
We’d all like to have our cake and eat it too. In a state of jeopardy, on the other hand, we must risk something that we want or have in order to gain something else that we want or to protect something we have—a dilemma we strive to avoid.
Here’s a simple test to apply to any story. Ask: What is the risk? What does the protagonist stand to lose if he does not get what he wants? More specifically, what’s the worst thing that will happen to the protagonist if he does not achieve his desire?
If this question cannot be answered in a compelling way, the story is misconceived at its core. For example, if the answer is: “Should the protagonist fail, life would go back to normal,” this story is not worth telling. What the protagonist wants i
s of no real value, and a story of someone pursuing something of little or no value is the definition of boredom.
Life teaches that the measure of the value of any human desire is in direct proportion to the risk involved in its pursuit. The higher the value, the higher the risk. We give the ultimate values to those things that demand the ultimate risks—our freedom, our lives, our souls. This imperative of risk, however, is far more than an aesthetic principle, it’s rooted in the deepest source of our art. For we not only create stories as metaphors for life, we create them as metaphors for meaningful life—and to live meaningfully is to be at perpetual risk.
Examine your own desires. What’s true of you will be true of every character you write. You wish to write for the cinema, the foremost media of creative expression in the world today; you wish to give us works of beauty and meaning that help shape our vision of reality; in return you would like to be acknowledged. It’s a noble ambition and a grand achievement to fulfill. And because you’re a serious artist, you’re willing to risk vital aspects of your life to live that dream.
You’re willing to risk time. You know that even the most talented writers—Oliver Stone, Lawrence Kasdan, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—didn’t find success until they were in their thirties or forties, and just as it takes a decade or more to make a good doctor or teacher, it takes ten or more years of adult life to find something to say that tens of millions of people want to hear, and ten or more years and often as many screenplays written and unsold to master this demanding craft.
You’re willing to risk money. You know that if you were to take the same hard work and creativity that goes into a decade of unsold screenplays and apply it to a normal profession, you could retire before you see your first script on the screen.