by Robert McKee
Pace begins in the screenplay. Cliché or not, we must control rhythm and tempo. It needn’t be a symmetrical swelling of activity and shaving of scene lengths, but progressions must be shaped. For if we don’t, the film editor will. And if to trim our sloppy work he cuts some of our favorite moments, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We’re screenwriters, not refugees from the novel. Cinema is a unique art form. The screenwriter must master the aesthetics of motion pictures and create a screenplay that prepares the way for the artists who follow.
EXPRESSING PROGRESSION
When a story genuinely progresses it calls upon greater and greater human capacity, demands greater and greater willpower, generates greater and greater change in characters’ lives, and places them at greater and greater jeopardy. How are we to express this? How will the audience sense the progressions? There are four primary techniques.
SOCIAL PROGRESSION
Widen the impact of character actions into society.
Let your story begin intimately, involving only a few principal characters. But as the telling moves forward, allow their actions to ramify outward into the world around them, touching and changing the lives of more and more people. Not all at once. Rather, spread the effect gradually through the progressions.
LONE STAR: Two men searching for spent shells on a deserted rifle range in Texas uncover the skeletal remains of a sheriff who vanished decades before. Evidence at the scene leads the current sheriff to suspect that his own father may have committed the murder. As he investigates, the story spreads outward into society and back through time, tracing a pattern of corruption and injustice that has touched and changed the lives of three generations of Texan-, Mexican- and African Americans—virtually every citizen in Rio County.
MEN IN BLACK: A chance encounter between a farmer and a fugitive alien searching for a rare gem slowly ramifies outward to jeopardize all of creation.
This principle of starting with intimate problems that ramify outward into the world to build powerful progressions explains why certain professions are overrepresented in the roles of protagonists. This is why we tend to tell stories about lawyers, doctors, warriors, politicians, scientists—people so positioned in society by profession that if something goes haywire in their private lives, the writer can expand the action into society.
Imagine a story that begins like this: The President of the United States gets up one morning to shave and as he stares in the mirror, he hallucinates about imaginary enemies around the globe. He tells no one, but soon his wife realizes he’s gone mad. His close associates too. They gather and decide that since he has only six months left in office, why spoil things now? They’ll cover up for him. But we know he has “his finger on the button” and a madman in this position could turn our troubled world into universal hell.
PERSONAL PROGRESSION
Drive actions deeply into the intimate relationships and inner lives of the characters.
If the logic of your setting doesn’t allow you to go wide, then you must go deep. Start with a personal or inner conflict that demands balancing, yet seems relatively solvable. Then, as the work progresses, hammer the story downward—emotionally, psychologically, physically, morally—to the dark secrets, the unspoken truths that hide behind a public mask.
ORDINARY PEOPLE is confined to the family, a friend, and a doctor. From a tension between mother and son that seems solvable with communication and love, it descends to grievous pain. As the father slowly comes to realize he must choose between the sanity of his son and the unity of his family, the story drives the child to the brink of suicide, the mother to reveal her hatred of her own child, and the husband to lose a wife he deeply loves.
CHINATOWN is an elegant design that combines both techniques, reaching simultaneously wide and deep. A private eye is hired to investigate a man for adultery. Then, like an oil slick, the story moves outward in an ever-widening circle that engulfs city hall, millionaire conspirators, farmers of the San Fernando Valley, until it contaminates all the citizens of Los Angeles. At the same time it plunges inward. Gittes is under constant assault: kicks to the groin, blows to the head, his nose split open. Mulwray is killed, incest exposed between father and daughter until the protagonist’s tragic past repeats to trigger the death of Evelyn Mulwray and throw an innocent child into the hands of an insane father/grandfather.
SYMBOLIC ASCENSION
Build the symbolic charge of the story’s imagery from the particular to the universal, the specific to the archetypal.
A good story well told fosters a good film. But a good story well told with the added power of subliminal symbolism lifts the telling to the next level of expressivity, and the payoff may be a great film. Symbolism is very compelling. Like images in our dreams, it invades the unconscious mind and touches us deeply—as long as we’re unaware of its presence. If, in a heavy-handed way, we label images as “symbolic,” their effect is destroyed. But if they are slipped quietly, gradually, and unassumingly into the telling, they move us profoundly.
Symbolic progression works in this way: start with actions, locations, and roles that represent only themselves. But as the story progresses, chose images that gather greater and greater meaning, until by the end of the telling characters, settings, and events stand for universal ideas.
THE DEER HUNTER introduces steel workers in Pennsylvania who like to hunt, drink beer, and carouse. They’re as ordinary as the town they live in. But as events progress, sets, roles, and actions become more and more symbolically charged, building from the tiger cages in Vietnam to the highly symbolic scenes in a Saigon casino where men play Russian Roulette for money, culminating in a Crisis at the top of a mountain. The protagonist, Michael (Robert De Niro) progresses from factory worker to warrior to “The Hunter,” the man who kills.
The film’s Controlling Idea is: We save our own humanity when we stop killing other living beings. If the hunter spills enough blood, sooner or later he runs out of targets and turns the gun on himself. He either literally kills himself, as does Nick (Christopher Walken), or more likely, he kills himself in the sense that he stops feeling anything and falls dead inside. The Crisis sends Michael in his hunter’s garb, armed with a weapon, to a mountaintop. There, on a precipice, the prey, a magnificent elk, comes out of the mist. An archetypal image: hunter and prey at the top of a mountain. Why the top of a mountain? Because tops of mountains are places where “great things happen.” Moses is given the Ten Commandments, not in his kitchen, but at the top of a mountain.
THE TERMINATOR takes symbolic progression in a different direction, not up the mountain but into the maze. Opening with step-down imagery of commonplace people in commonplace settings, it tells the story of Sarah Connor, a fast-food waitress in Los Angeles. Suddenly, the Terminator and Reese explode into the present from the year 2029, and pursue Sarah through the streets of L.A., one trying to kill her, the other to save her.
We learn that in the future robots become self-aware and try to stamp out the human race that created them. They nearly succeed when the remnants of humanity are led in a revolt by the charismatic John Connor. He turns the tide against the robots and all but stamps them out, when the robots invent a time machine and send into the past an assassin to kill Connor’s mother before he’s born, thus eliminating Connor from existence and winning the war for the robots. Connor captures the time machine, discovers the plan, and sends back his lieutenant, Reese, to kill this monster before it kills his mother.
The streets of Los Angeles conspire into the ancient archetype of the labyrinth. Freeways, alleyways, cul-de-sacs, and corridors of buildings twist and turn the characters until they work their way down to its tangled heart. There Sarah, like Theseus at the center of the Minoan maze battling the half-man/half-bull Minotaur, confronts the half-man/half-robot Terminator. If she vanquishes the demon, she will, like the Virgin Mary, give birth to the savior of humanity, John Connor (JC), and raise him to lead humanity to deliverance in the coming holocaust. Sarah pro
gresses from waitress to goddess, and the film’s symbolic progression lifts it above almost all others in its genre.
IRONIC ASCENSION
Turn progression on irony.
Turn progression on irony. Irony is the subtlest manifestation of story pleasure, that delicious sense of “Ah, life is just like that.” It sees life in duality; it plays with our paradoxical existence, aware of the bottomless chasm between what seems and what is. Verbal irony is found in the discrepancy between words and their meanings—a primary source of jokes. But in story, irony plays between actions and results—the primary source of story energy, between appearance and reality—the primary source of truth and emotion.
An ironic sensibility is a precious asset, a razor to cut to the truth, but it can’t be used directly. It does us no good to have a character wander the story saying, “How ironic!” Like symbolism, to point at irony destroys it. Irony must be coolly, casually released with a seemingly innocent unawareness of the effect it’s creating and a faith that the audience will get it. Because irony is by nature slippery, it defies a hard and fast definition, and is best explained by example. Below are six ironic story patterns with an example for each.
1. He gets at last what he’s always wanted… but too late to have it.
OTHELLO: The Moor finally gets what he always wanted, a wife who is true to him and who never betrayed him with another man… but when he finds that out, it’s too late, because he just killed her.
2. He’s pushed further and further from his goal… only to discover that in fact he’s been led right to it.
RUTHLESS PEOPLE: The greedy businessman, Sam (Danny Devito), steals an idea from Sandy (Helen Slater) and makes a fortune without paying her a cent of royalties. Sandy’s husband, Ken (Judge Reinhold), decides to kidnap Sam’s wife, Barbara (Bette Midler), and ransom her for the two million dollars he feels his wife is owed. But when Ken abducts Barbara, he doesn’t know that Sam is coming home to murder his shrewish and overweight wife. Ken calls Sam demanding millions, but the gleeful Sam puts him off. Ken keeps lowering the price until at ten thousand dollars Sam says, “Oh, why don’t you just kill her and get it over with.”
Meanwhile, Barbara, held captive in the Kessler basement, has turned her prison into a spa. She’s following all the exercise programs on TV, Sandy’s an excellent natural foods cook, and as a result, Barbara loses more weight than she ever did at the best fat farms in America. Consequently, she loves her kidnappers. And when they tell her they’ll have to let her go because her husband won’t pay the ransom, she turns to them and says, “I’ll get the money for ya.” That was Act One.
3. He throws away what he later finds is indispensable to his happiness.
MOULIN ROUGE: The crippled artist Toulouse-Lautrec (Jose Ferrer) falls in love with the beautiful Suzanne (Myriamme Hayem) but can’t bring himself to tell her this. She accompanies him as a friend around Paris. Lautrec becomes convinced that the only reason she spends time with him is that it gives her the opportunity to meet handsome men. In a drunken rage he accuses her of using him and storms out of her life.
Some time later he receives a letter from Suzanne: “Dear Toulouse, I always hoped that some day you might love me. Now I realize that you never will. So I have taken the offer of another man. I don’t love him, but he’s kind and as you know my situation is desperate. Adieu.” Lautrec frantically searches for her, but indeed she’s left to marry another. So he drinks himself to death.
4. To reach a goal he unwittingly takes the precise steps necessary to lead him away.
TOOTSIE: Michael (Dustin Hoffman), an out-of-work actor whose perfectionism has alienated every producer in New York, impersonates a woman and is cast in a soap opera. On the set he meets and falls in love with Julie (Jessica Lange). But he’s such a brilliant actor, her father (Charles Durning) wants to marry him while Julie suspects he’s a lesbian.
5. The action he takes to destroy something becomes exactly what are needed to be destroyed by it.
RAIN: The religious bigot Reverend Davidson (Walter Huston) battles to save the soul of the prostitute Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford), but falls into lust for her, rapes her, then kills himself in shame.
6. He comes into possession of something he’s certain will make him miserable, does everything possible to get rid of it… only to discover it’s the gift of happiness.
BRINGING UP BABY: When the madcap socialite Susan (Katharine Hepburn) inadvertently steals the car of the naive and repressed paleontologist Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant), she likes what she sees and sticks to him like glue. He tries everything possible to get rid of her, but she foils his lunatic evasions, chiefly by stealing his bone, the “intercostal clavicle” of a brontosaurus. (If there were such a thing as an “intercostal clavicle,” it would belong to a creature with its head attached well below its shoulders.) Susan’s persistence pays off as she transforms David from fossilized child to life-embracing adult.
The key to ironic progression is certainty and precision. Like CHINATOWN, SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS, and many other superb films, these are stories of protagonists who feel they know for certain what they must do and have a precise plan how to do it. They think life is A, B, C, D, E. That’s just when life likes to turn you around, kick you in the butt, and grin: “Not today, my friend. Today it’s E, D, C, B, A. Sorry.”
PRINCIPLE OF TRANSITION
A story without a sense of progression tends to stumble from one scene to the next. It has little continuity because nothing links its events. As we design cycles of rising action, we must at the same time transition the audience smoothly through them. Between two scenes, therefore, we need a third element, the link that joins the tail of Scene A with the head of Scene B. Generally, we find this third element in one of two places: what the scenes have in common or what they have in opposition.
The third element is the hinge for a transition; something held in common by two scenes or counterpointed between them.
Examples:
A characterization trait. In common: cut from a bratty child to a childish adult. In opposition: cut from awkward protagonist to elegant antagonist.
An action. In common: From the foreplay of lovemaking to savoring the afterglow. In opposition: From chatter to cold silence.
An object. In common: From greenhouse interior to woodland exterior. In opposition: From the Congo to Antarctica.
A word. In common: A phrase repeated from scene to scene. In opposition: From compliment to curse.
A quality of light. In common: From shadows at dawn to shade at sunset. In opposition: From blue to red.
A sound. In common: From waves lapping a shore to the rise and fall of a sleeper’s breath. In opposition: From silk caressing skin to the grinding of gears.
An idea. In common: From a child’s birth to an overture. In opposition: From a painter’s empty canvas to an old man dying.
After a century of filmmaking, transition clichés abound. Yet we can’t put down the task. An imaginative study of almost any two scenes will find a link.
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CRISIS, CLIMAX, RESOLUTION
CRISIS
Crisis is the third of the five-part form. It means decision. Characters make spontaneous decisions each time they open this mouths to say “this” not “that.” In each scene they make a decision to take one action rather than another. But Crisis with a capital C is the ultimate decision. The Chinese ideogram for Crisis is two terms: Danger/Opportunity—“danger” in that the wrong decision at this moment will lose forever what we want; “opportunity” in that the right choice will achieve our desire.
The protagonist’s quest has carried him through the Progressive Complications until he’s exhausted all actions to achieve his desire, save one. He now finds himself at the end of the line. His next action is his last. No tomorrow. No second chance. This moment of dangerous opportunity is the point of greatest tension in the story as both protagonist and audience sense that the question “How will this turn out?” will
be answered out of the next action.
The Crisis is the story’s Obligatory Scene. From the Inciting Incident on, the audience has been anticipating with growing vividness the scene in which the protagonist will be face to face with the most focused, powerful forces of antagonism in his existence. This is the dragon, so to speak, that guards the Object of Desire: be it the literal dragon of JAWS or the metaphorical dragon of meaning-lessness in TENDER MERCIES. The audience leans into the Crisis filled with expectation mingled with uncertainty.
The Crisis must be true dilemma—a choice between irreconcilable goods, the lesser of two evils, or the two at once that places the protagonist under the maximum pressure of his life.
This dilemma confronts the protagonist who, when face-to-face with the most powerful and focused forces of antagonism in his life, must make a decision to take one action or another in a last effort to achieve his Object of Desire.
How the protagonist chooses here gives us the most penetrating view of his deep character, the ultimate expression of his humanity.
This scene reveals the story’s most important value. If there’s been any doubt about which value is central, as the protagonist makes the Crisis Decision, the primary value comes to the fore.
At Crisis the protagonist’s willpower is most severely tested. As we know from life, decisions are far more difficult to make than actions are to take. We often put off doing something for as long as possible, then as we finally make the decision and step into the action, we’re surprised by its relative ease. We’re left to wonder why we dreaded doing it until we realize that most of life’s actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.