by Linda Seger
If you have a story with negative characters, look for sympathetic supporting characters who can give audiences someone to like.
The play The Little Foxes contains a group of some of the nastiest, most deceptive, mean, and cruel characters in any play. Regina and her two brothers cheat each other—and everyone else. There are, however, three sympathetic supporting characters in the story: Horace, the husband who dies when Regina doesn’t give him his medicine; Birdie, who is a victim of her husband’s abuse and has turned to drinking; and Regina’s daughter Alexandra (called Zan). Of these three, clearly Zan is the one that has the makings of a sympathetic major character.
In the film the focus changed from Regina to Zan. We see Regina’s manipulation from Zan’s point of view. We become aware of her decisions. Zan’s emotions of bewilderment, her love of her father, and her final decision to leave her mother and not to become one of “the little foxes who eat the earth” become the positive focus of the film.
The film adds another commercial element by giving Zan a boyfriend. He’s a good man, approved by her father, disliked by Regina (that immediately makes us like him: anyone whom Regina dislikes can’t be all bad), and helps support the positive moral center of the film.
When choosing characters, look first for the sympathetic ones. If you don’t find any, then look for the supporting characters who will capture our attention, fascinate us, engage us, and involve us. If possible, expand the role of these characters. If no one is sympathetic, be wary of the project, since audiences won’t know whom to root for, whom to identify with, whom to like.
LOOK FOR CHARACTER DETAILS
It isn’t enough to have sympathetic characters—they also need to be interesting. Often we are intrigued with a novel, play, or biography because of the rich characters that pull us into the story.
In the book Out of Africa, we are given interesting character details about Denys, some of which were translated into the film.
Denys, who lived much by the ear, preferred hearing a tale told to reading it: … Denys taught me Latin, and to read the Bible and the Greek poets … . He also gave me my gramophone. It was a delight to my heart, it brought a new life to the farm … . Sometimes Denys would arrive unexpectedly at the house. He would set the gramophone going … the melody streaming towards me … would announce his presence to me, as if he had been laughing at me, as he often did.
In White Hunter, Black Heart, writer Peter Viertel (who is also the screenwriter character in the novel) gives us a list of details that dimensionalize the fictionalized director, John Wilson.
He made a career … by continually violating all the unwritten rules that govern the motion picture business. He told his bosses what he thought of them (and he was always right), he publicly abused all the women he was involved with (which is dangerous, for Hollywood is a very moral, middle-class town), he supported doubtful political causes (on the basis of integrity and not because of a romantic, adolescent political conviction), he drank in excess (and he certainly became less charming when he did so), he made a great many wonderful pictures, very few of which made any money at the box office (which is the most dangerous thing a man can do in Hollywood), and he spent all his money (which is a dangerous thing to do anywhere) … . Actors, writers, and even producers have occasionally tried what he did day in and day out and they have all ended badly: … Perhaps they lacked his talent, but I don’t think that is it. I think they lacked the magic, almost divine ability he had to land on his feet.
Other character touches from films come to mind: John Merrick’s love of Shakespare in The Elephant Man, Claire Zachanassian’s collecting a pet panther and husbands in The Visit, or Ouiser’s devotion to her dog in Steel Magnolias.
IDENTIFY THE CONFLICT
Since conflict is essential for drama, most films focus on conflicts between two people. The most dramatic conflict you can have in a film is a conflict of action. Many of the most commercially successful adaptations focus on actions where one character has to outwit or outshoot another. We see these kinds of actions in films such as Die Hard 2, Total Recall, Jaws, or Silence of the Lambs.
But conflict does not always need to be between two people with different behaviors or actions. It may occur between two people with different attitudes and philosophies. These attitudes can be about child rearing, how to handle a situation, whether to take a new job, or whether and whom to marry.
In Out of Africa you may remember a discussion between Karen Blixen (better known as the writer Isak Dinesen) and Denys Finch-Hatton about marriage. She thought they should get married. He saw no reason for marriage. This conflict was expressed in the book Silence Will Speak by Errol Trzebinski, which was one of the original source books for the film.
The dream that held [Karen] captive and of which she would never be able to speak, was the eternal hope that one day she would become Denys Finch-Hatton’s wife. But Denys belonged to the wild nomadic world and he never intended to marry anyone … . Anyone who attempted to rein him in or set limitations to his freedom would lose him.
This conflict in the film was acted out in a static but rich relational scene around a campfire.
KAREN
Do you ever get lonely?
DENYS
Sometimes.
KAREN
Do you ever wonder if I’m lonely? … Bror has asked me for a divorce. He’s found someone that he wants to marry. I just thought we might do that someday.
DENYS
What? Divorce? … How would a wedding change things?
KAREN
I would have someone of my own.
DENYS
No. You wouldn’t … .
KAREN
When you go away, you don’t always go away on safari.
DENYS
No.
KAREN
You just want to be away.
DENYS
It’s not meant to hurt you.
KAREN
It does.
DENYS
Karen, I’m with you because I choose to be with you. I won’t be closer to you, I won’t love you more because of a piece of paper.
Here is a conflict over attitudes about marriage that helped define and reveal the characters of Denys and Karen.
Sometimes a novel or short story is an exploration of the thoughts and feelings of a character reflecting on a situation. Sometimes conflict is slight, or nonexistent; in such a case you’ll need to create it. This may mean creating new scenes that don’t exist in the book. It may mean looking for implied conflict in the book and creating a scene around it or it may mean strengthening the conflict that is there.
As you’re choosing your characters, look carefully for ones that are essentially dramatic. These are the characters who have a conflict with someone. If the conflict is only within a character rather than between characters, it will create problems in the adaptation, since inner conflict is difficult to show in film.
You can also find conflict by looking for the emotional moments within a story that move you, the moments where characters feel deeply about something or someone. These are the sometimes gut-wrenching moments when characters are hurt, angry, frustrated, or fearful. Such emotions usually imply a conflict with someone. If the characters are hurt, someone probably hurt them. If they’re angry or fearful, they are angry at someone or fearful of someone. Although they may be only talking about these fears and this anger, a scene can be created that expresses these feelings in relationship to someone else.
Emotional moments connect the audience to the character, just as they connect the reader to the story. If characters move you to tears in the story, they may have that ability within the film. If characters are afraid, the audience potentially can also be afraid for them.
I have never yet been able to read Melanie’s death scene in Gone With the Wind without crying. But I can’t get through her death scene in the film without crying, either.
I cry whenever Nettie returns to Celie in the film T
he Color Purple. Although the description in the book may not have this same effect, it does contain emotional words that can be translated into film:
By now my heart is in my mouth and I can’t move. I’m so scared I don’t know what to do. Feel like my mind stuck. I try to speak, nothing come. Try to git up, almost fall … . When Nettie’s foot come down on the porch I almost die … . Then us both start to moan and cry. Us totter toward one nother like us use to do when us was babies. Then us feel so weak when us touch, us knock each other down. But what us care? Us sit and lay there on the porch inside each other’s arms.
IF YOU LOVE THEM, KEEP THEM
When you read a novel or see a play, chances are it is the characters you like, not just a story. That usually means the potential is there for the movie audience to like them too. You will probably still need to transform these characters for film. You may need to make them more active. Or add more conflict. Or bring out the emotions more. Or bring them into relationships they only talk about in the story. You may need to add further character details to fill them out. You may need to cut some characters in order to give focus to the more important ones. Although the story needs to move us, it’s the characters who are going to engage us. The characters that added color and texture to the book or play are also capable of adding this richness to the film.
APPLICATION
The Phantom of the Opera contains strong dramatic characters that have worked well on stage. There are three major characters, Christine, the Phantom, and Raoul, with supporting characters of Carlotta (the prima donna of the opera), the managers of the opera house, Meg (a confidante for Christine), Christine’s father (who is mentioned in the play but never seen), and minor characters such as the police officers, other singers and dancers, audience members, and so forth.
The number of characters is not overwhelming, and since the character focus in plays and films is often similar, the audience should have no problem keeping everyone’s function and role clear.
There is plenty of conflict in the Phantom story. There’s conflict between Raoul and the Phantom, between the Phantom and Christine, between Christine and Carlotta. There is a conflict of attitudes between Christine and Raoul and between Christine and Meg, her friend, in relationship to how they think about the Phantom. There’s Christine’s inner conflict as she confronts her feelings for the Phantom and makes choices, and there’s conflict between her love of Raoul and her compassion for the Phantom.
There’s also conflict between the two managers about what to do with the Phantom, whether to perform his opera, how to run the opera house, how to handle the prima donna. There is no end to the amount of conflict that could be played between characters.
There is considerable emotional weight to the entire story, too, since it is concerned with highly charged emotional issues such as revenge, guilt, betrayal, deceit, anger, frustration, love won and lost, and with emotions within and between characters.
On these levels, the play has everything going for it. So where are the problems? The play shows Christine caught between two powerful men. On the stage (certainly in the production that I saw), the Phantom was a much stronger, more dramatic, more original, more fascinating character than Raoul. Raoul can easily seem like a stereotypical “handsome leading man” with little detailing or uniqueness. Yet the Christine-Raoul relationship is the one the audience must root for. In the adaptation, Raoul needs to be strong enough to balance the fascination we will probably have with the Phantom.
As the play proceeds we need to change our allegiance (if we had any) from the Phantom to Raoul. If we want Christine to be happy in love, the play takes the viewpoint that it’s Christine’s relationship with Raoul that can fulfull her. We may not want the Phantom to die, but we certainly don’t want him to kill Raoul and overcome Christine. Yet Christine’s growing love of Raoul could be interpreted as a betrayal. How are we to keep our sympathies with Christine if we think she’s betrayed the Phantom? How are we to sympathize with Raoul if we think he’s unfair, deceitful, or without compassion in his handling of the Phantom?
In the play, the power of the music, the spectacle, and the story line made it unnecessary for me to come to terms with my own attitude toward the Phantom. But the closeness, intimacy, and bigger-than-life aspect of film demands an emotional response from the audience. How are we to think about the Phantom? Are we to be sympathetic toward him because of his deformity, and then change our sympathies as he becomes vengeful? Are we to understand his obsession with Christine, or fear for her because of his obsession? Are we to pity him? Are we to be fascinated or repelled by him?
Christine could also present some character problems. Her belief that the Phantom is the spirit of her father could seem incredible. Her receptivity to the Phantom could make her seem overly naive. Keeping her engagement secret could make her seem like a passive character who allows others to make decisions for her. Her betrayal of him could take sympathy away from her. As a woman, she is a product of her times, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. How is the modern-day woman moviegoer to sympathize and identify with Christine?
Although I could accept Christine as a theatrical figure, I have many questions about her that would need to be addressed for film. How ambitious is she? Is she simply responsive to the Phantom’s help, does she want to play the lead because she loves singing, or is she truly ambitious? Are her feelings for the Phantom entirely a result of her belief that he’s the spirit of her father or do they arise from compassion or fear? Or simply from gratitude for his help?
This is further complicated because Christine is at the mercy of most of the action, rather than effecting the action. Others are active, but she is the passive recipient of their guiding, leading, pushing, and pulling. Although Christine is the focal character around whom and because of whom the action occurs, it is the decisions of Raoul and the Phantom that determine the direction of the action, thereby weakening the central character of Christine.
Christine does make decisions, but when I saw the play I had difficulty seeing them clearly. When I read the libretto, listened to the music many times, and discussed it with others who had seen the play, her decisions became clearer, although they still seemed overpowered by the more active decisions of other characters. Since film usually demands more active characters than a play, some of this adaptation would need to include careful tracking of Christine’s actions, balancing them with the strong actions of the Phantom and Raoul. This would not necessarily mean making her more physically active. It would probably involve, instead, focusing and balancing her emotional conflicts and decisions.
All three of these characters have their roots in nineteenth-century melodrama. Although much more richly detailed, the villain, the hero, and the “sweet young thing” can still be seen. If they are too much within this melodrama mold, the characters can be one-dimensional and we can lose our identification with them. (I felt this was true of Raoul, and somewhat true of Christine in the play.) If they are completely removed from these roots, and they become too realistic, too much like our own age in terms of attitudes and actions, they become characters without a context. Certainly they don’t belong to the modern world, nor is this meant to be a realistic film. The writer would need to find the balance between the nineteenth-century character and the late-twentieth-century audience.
Although the elements are here for strong film characters, some rethinking would need to be done about the characteristics of individual characters and the interactions among Christine, Raoul, and the Phantom. Otherwise it could be a film whose characters seem removed from us, who don’t speak to us.
7
EXPLORING THE THEME
Every good film, novel, play, and story is about something. There’s a theme that winds its way through the material, an idea that deepens the story line and characters.
Novels and plays tend to be more theme-oriented than films. Novels have more time to discuss and explore the theme directly through narratio
n and description that tell us what the story is really about. Plays, with their emphasis on character and dialogue, are often written specifically to explore the human condition. Most successful films, however, tend to be more story-oriented. True, many Soviet and European films place their focus on the theme, not the story. Many Australian and New Zealand films put their emphasis on character. Often these films receive critical acclaim and play in art houses. However, in this book we are not writing about art films, but about films that play to mainstream audiences. Audiences are often impatient with the static quality of thematic or totally character-driven films. Such films may have rich images and great insight into the human condition, but they usually lack movement and direction. The audience response is often that they are slow-paced and tedious, even when they are only ninety minutes long.
But films that are merely story lines also don’t do well with audiences. The best action-adventures or thrillers or dramas or comedies will still contain a theme or underlying idea. The story might be about good and evil, or about justice, or about manipulation, or the integrity of the hero who faces a corrupt system. A comedy might explore the nature of love, or ambition, or the hazards of modern life. A light comedy such as A Room with a View is about identity, about a young woman finding herself. Deliverance contains themes of civilization versus the primitive in the wildness of nature and in human nature. Amadeus is about mediocrity and jealousy, High Noon about integrity, and The Burning Bed about victimization and abuse.