by Robert McKee
If you must adapt, come down a rung or two from “pure” literature and look for stories in which conflict is distributed on all three levels… with an emphasis at the extra-personal. Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge on the River Kwai won’t be taught alongside Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka in postgraduate seminars, but it’s an excellent work, populated with complex characters driven by inner and personal conflicts and dramatized primarily at extrapersonal level. Consequently, Carl Foreman’s adaptation became, in my judgment, David Lean’s finest film.
To adapt, first read the work over and over without taking notes until you feel infused with its spirit. Do not make choices or plan moves until you’ve rubbed shoulders with its society, read their faces, smelled their cologne. As with a story you’re creating from scratch, you must achieve a godlike knowledge and never assume that the original writer has done his homework. That done, reduce each event to a one- or two-sentence statement of what happens and no more. No psychology, no sociology. For example: “He walks into the house expecting a confrontation with his wife, but discovers a note telling him she’s left him for another man.”
That done, read through the events and ask yourself, “Is this story well told?” Then brace yourself, for nine times out of ten you’ll discover it’s not. Just because a writer got a play to the stage or a novel into print doesn’t mean that he has mastered the craft. Story is the hardest thing we all do. Many novelists are weak storytellers, playwrights even weaker. Or you’ll discover that it’s beautifully told, a clockwork of perfection… but four hundred pages long, three times as much material as you can use for a film, and if a single cog is taken out, the clock stops telling time. In either case, your task will not be one of adaptation but of reinvention.
The second principle of adaptation: Be willing to reinvent.
Tell the story in filmic rhythms while keeping the spirit of the original. To reinvent: No matter in what order the novel’s events were told, reorder them in time from first to last, as if they were biographies. From these create a step-outline, using, where valuable, designs from the original work, but feeling free to cut scenes and, if necessary, to create new ones. Most testing of all, turn what is mental into the physical. Don’t fill characters’ mouths with self-explanatory dialogue but find visual expression for their inner conflicts. This is where you’ll succeed or fail. Seek a design that expresses the spirit of the original yet stays within the rhythms of a film, ignoring the risk that critics may say, “But the film’s not like the novel.”
The aesthetics of the screen often demand reinvention of story, even when the original is superbly told and of feature-film size. As Milos Foreman told Peter Shaffer while adapting AMADEUS from stage to screen, “You’re going to have to give birth to your child a second time.” The result is that the world now has two excellent versions of the same story, each true to its medium. While struggling with an adaptation bear this in mind: If reinvention deviates radically from the original—PELLE THE CONQUEROR, DANGEROUS LIAISONS—but the film is excellent, critics fall silent. But if you butcher the original—THE SCARLET LETTER, THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES—and do not put a work as good or better in its place, duck.
To learn adaptation study the work of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. She is, in my view, the finest adapter of novel to screen in film history. She’s a Pole born in Germany who writes in English. Having reinvented her nationality, she’s become the master reinventer for film. Like a chameleon or trance-medium, she inhabits the colors and spirit of other writers. Read Quartet, A Room with a View, The Bostonians, pull a step-outline from each novel, then scene by scene compare your work to Jhabvala. You’ll learn a lot. Notice that she and director James Ivory restrict themselves to the social novelists—Jean Rhys, E. M. Forster, Henry James—knowing that the primary conflicts will be extra-personal and camera attractive. No Proust, no Joyce, no Kafka.
Although the natural expressivity of cinema is extra-personal, it shouldn’t inhibit us. Rather, the challenge that great filmmakers have always accepted is to start with images of social/environmental conflict and lead us into the complexities of personal relationships, to begin on the surface of what’s said and done and guide us to a perception of the inner life, the unspoken, the unconscious—to swim upstream and achieve on film what the playwright and novelist do most easily.
By the same token, playwright and novelist have always understood that their challenge is to do on stage or page what film does best. Flaubert’s famous cinematic style was developed long before there was cinema. Eisenstein said he learned to cut film by reading Charles Dickens. Shakespeare’s stunning fluidity through time and space suggests an imagination hungry for a camera. Great storytellers have always known that “Show, don’t tell” is the ultimate creative task: to write in a purely dramatic and visual way, to show a natural world of natural human being behavior, to express the complexity of life without telling.
THE PROBLEM OF MELODRAMA
To avoid the accusation “This script is melodramatic,” many avoid writing “big scenes,” passionate, powerful events. Instead, they write minimalist sketches in which little if anything happens, thinking they’re subtle. This is folly. Nothing human beings do in and of itself is melodramatic, and human beings are capable of anything. Daily newspapers record acts of enormous self-sacrifice and cruelty, of daring and cowardliness, of saints and tyrants from Mother Teresa to Saddam Hussein. Anything you can imagine human beings doing, they have already done and in ways you cannot imagine. None of it is melodrama; it’s simply human.
Melodrama is not the result of overexpression, but of under motivation; not writing too big, but writing with too little desire. The power of an event can only be as great as the sum total of its causes. We feel a scene is melodramatic if we cannot believe that motivation matches action. Writers from Homer to Shakespeare to Bergman have created explosive scenes no one would call melodrama because they knew how to motivate characters. If you can imagine high drama or comedy, write it, but lift the forces that drive your characters to equal or surpass the extremities of their actions and we’ll embrace you for taking us to the end of the line.
THE PROBLEM OF HOLES
A “hole” is another way to lose credibility. Rather than a lack of motivation, now the story lacks logic, a missing link in the chain of cause and effect. But like coincidence, holes are a part of life. Things often happen for reasons that cannot be explained. So if you’re writing about life, a hole or two may find its way into your telling. The problem is how to handle it.
If you can forge a link between illogical events and close the hole, do so. This remedy, however, often requires the creation of a new scene that has no purpose other than making what’s around it logical, causing an awkwardness as annoying as the hole.
In which case ask: Will they notice? You know it’s a jump in logic because the story sits still on your desk with its hole glaring up at you. But onscreen the story flows in time. As the hole arrives, the audience may not have sufficient information at that point to realize that what just happened isn’t logical or it may happen so quickly, it passes unnoticed.
CHINATOWN: Ida Sessions (Diane Ladd) impersonates Evelyn Mulwray and hires J. J. Gittes to investigate Hollis Mulwray for adultery. After Gittes discovers what appears to be an affair, the real wife shows up with her lawyer and a lawsuit. Gittes realizes that someone is out to get Mulwray, but before he can help the man is murdered. Early in Act Two Gittes gets a phone call from Ida Sessions telling him that she had no idea that things would lead to murder and wants him to know she’s innocent. In this call she also gives Gittes a vital clue to the motivation for the killing. Her words, however, are so cryptic he’s only more confused. Later, however, he pieces her clue to other evidence he unearths and thinks he knows who did it and why.
Early in Act Three he finds Ida Sessions dead and in her wallet discovers a Screen Actors Guild card. In other words, Ida Sessions couldn’t possibly have known what she said over the phone. Her clue is a crucial de
tail of a citywide corruption run by millionaire businessmen and high government officials, something they would never have told the actress they hired to impersonate the victim’s wife. But when she tells Gittes, we have no idea who Ida Sessions is and what she could or could not know. When she’s found dead an hour and a half later, we don’t see the hole because by then we’ve forgotten what she said.
So maybe the audience won’t notice. But maybe it will. Then what? Cowardly writers try to kick sand over such holes and hope the audience doesn’t notice. Other writers face this problem manfully. They expose the hole to the audience, then deny that it is a hole.
CASABLANCA: Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet) is the ultimate capitalist and crook who never does anything except for money. Yet at one point Ferrari helps Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) find the precious letters of transit and wants nothing in return. That’s out of character, illogical. Knowing this, the writers gave Ferrari the line: “Why I’m doing this I don’t know because it can’t possibly profit me…” Rather than hiding the hole, the writers admitted it with the bold lie that Ferrari might be impulsively generous. The audience knows we often do things for reasons we can’t explain. Complimented, it nods, thinking, “Even Ferrari doesn’t get it. Fine. On with the film.”
THE TERMINATOR doesn’t have a hole—it’s built over an abyss: In 2029 robots have all but exterminated the human race, when the remnants of humanity, lead by John Connor, turn the tide of the war. To eliminate their enemy, the robots invent a time machine and send the Terminator back to 1984 to kill the mother of John Connor before he’s born. Connor captures their device and sends a young officer, Reese, back to try to destroy the Terminator first. He does this knowing that indeed Reese will not only save his mother but get her pregnant, and therefore his lieutenant is his father. What?
But James Cameron and Gail Anne Hurd understand Narrative Drive. They knew that if they exploded two warriors from the future into the streets of Los Angeles and sent them roaring in pursuit of this poor woman, the audience wouldn’t be asking analytical questions, and bit by bit they could parse out their setup. But respecting the intelligence of the audience, they also knew that after the film over coffee the audience might think: “Wait a minute… if Connor knew Reese would…,” and so on, and the holes would swallow up the audience’s pleasure. So they wrote this resolution scene.
The pregnant Sarah Connor heads for the safety of remote mountains in Mexico, there to give birth and raise her son for his future mission. At a gas station she dictates memoirs to her unborn hero into a tape recorder and she says in effect: “You know, my son, I don’t get it. If you know that Reese will be your father… then why… ? How? And does that mean that this is going to happen again… and again… ?” Then she pauses and says, “You know, you could go crazy thinking about this.” And all over the world audiences thought: “Hell, she’s right. It’s not important.” With that they happily threw logic into the trash.
17
CHARACTER
THE MIND WORM
As I traced the evolution of story through the twenty-eight centuries since Homer, I thought I’d save a thousand years and skip from the fourth century to the Renaissance because, according to my undergrad history text, during the Dark Ages all thinking stopped while monks dithered over such questions as “How many angels dance on the head of a pin?” Skeptical, I looked a little deeper and found that in fact intellectual life in the medieval epoch went on vigorously… but in poetic code. When the metaphor was deciphered, researchers discovered that “How many angels dance on the head of pin?” isn’t metaphysics, it’s physics. The topic under discussion is atomic structure: “How small is small?”
To discuss psychology, medieval scholarship devised another ingenious conceit: the Mind Worm. Suppose a creature had the power to burrow into the brain and come to know an individual completely—dreams, fears, strength, weakness. Suppose that this Mind Worm also had the power to cause events in the world. It could then create a specific happening geared to the unique nature of that person that would trigger a one-of-a-kind adventure, a quest that would force him to use himself to the limit, to live to his deepest and fullest. Whether a tragedy or fulfillment, this quest would reveal his humanity absolutely.
Reading that I had to smile, for the writer is a Mind Worm. We too burrow into a character to discover his aspects, his potential, then create an event geared to his unique nature—the Inciting Incident. For each protagonist it’s different—for one perhaps finding a fortune, for another losing a fortune—but we design the event to fit the character, the precise happening needed to send him on a quest that reaches the limits of his being. Like the Mind Worm, we explore the inscape of human nature, expressed in poetic code. For as centuries pass, nothing changes within us. As William Faulkner observed, human nature is the only subject that doesn’t date.
Characters Are Not Human Beings
A character is no more a human being than the Venus de Milo is a real woman. A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they’re superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift—just when we think we understand them, we don’t. In fact, I know Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA better than I know myself. Rick is always Rick. I’m a bit iffy.
Character design begins with an arrangement of the two primary aspects: Characterization and True Character. To repeat: Characterization is the sum of all the observable qualities, a combination that makes the character unique: physical appearance coupled with mannerisms, style of speech and gesture, sexuality, age, IQ, occupation, personality, attitudes, values, where he lives, how he lives. True Character waits behind this mask. Despite his characterization, at heart who is this person? Loyal or disloyal? Honest or a liar? Loving or cruel? Courageous or cowardly? Generous or selfish? Willful or weak?
TRUE CHARACTER can only be expressed through choice in dilemma. How the person chooses to act under pressure is who he is—the greater the pressure, the truer and deeper the choice to character.
The key to True Character is desire. In life, if we feel stifled, the fastest way to get unstuck is to ask, “What do I want?,” listen to the honest answer, then find the will to pursue that desire. Problems still remain, but now we’re in motion with the chance of solving them. What’s true of life is true of fiction. A character comes to life the moment we glimpse a clear understanding of his desire—not only the conscious, but in a complex role, the unconscious desire as well.
Ask: What does this character want? Now? Soon? Overall? Knowingly? Unknowingly? With clear, true answers comes your command of the role.
Behind desire is motivation. Why does your character want what he wants? You have your ideas about motive, but don’t be surprised if others see it differently. A friend may feel that parental upbringing shaped your character’s desires; someone else may think it’s our materialist culture; another may blame the school system; yet another may claim it’s in the genes; still another thinks he’s possessed by the devil. Contemporary attitudes tend to favor mono-explanations for behavior, rather than the complexity of forces that’s more likely the case.
Do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behavior. Generally, the more the writer nails motivation to specific causes, the more he diminishes the character in the audience’s mind. Rather, think through to a solid understanding of motive, but at the same time leave some mystery around the whys, a touch of the irrational perhaps, room for the audience to use its own life experience to enhance your character in its imagination.
In King Lear, for example, Shakespeare cast one of his most complex villains, Edmund. After a scene in which astrological influences, yet another mono-explana
tion of behavior, are blamed for someone’s misfortune, Edmund turns in soliloquy and laughs, “I should have been what I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardy.” Edmund does evil for the pure pleasure of it. Beyond that, what matters? As Aristotle observed, why a man does a thing is of little interest once we see the thing he does. A character is the choices he makes to take the actions he takes. Once the deed is done his reasons why begin to dissolve into irrelevancy.
The audience comes to understand your character in a variety of ways: The physical image and setting say a lot, but the audience knows that appearance is not reality, characterization is not true character. Nonetheless, a character’s mask is an important clue to what may be revealed.
What other characters say about a character is a hint. We know that what one person says of another may or may not be true, given the axes people have to grind, but that it’s said and by whom is worth knowing. What a character says about himself may or may not be true. We listen, but then put it in our pockets.
In fact, characters with lucid self-knowledge, those reciting self-explanatory dialogue meant to convince us that they are who they say they are, are not only boring but phony. The audience knows that people rarely, if ever, understand themselves, and if they do, they’re incapable of complete and honest self-explanation. There’s always a subtext. If, by chance, what a character says about himself is actually true, we don’t know it’s true until we witness his choices made under pressure. Self-explanation must be validated or contradicted in action. In CASABLANCA when Rick says, “I stick my neck out for no man,” we think, “Well, not yet, Rick, not yet.” We know Rick better than he knows himself, for indeed he’s wrong; he’ll stick his neck out many times.