by Jim Mercurio
However, even if you make no other changes to the dialogue or action description, you will have created the blueprint for a drastically different film. The reader will have a different experience. And when the film is shot, there will be subtexts between characters and surprises that the filmmakers discover even without changing a line of dialogue.
Don’t be afraid to tell a story, manipulate audiences’ emotions, or pace your story so that it’s attuned to the attention span of modern moviegoers. You are not copping out by writing a genre film. They can be surprisingly intelligent and contain a message while still being fun to watch. Genre films remind us that films should be seaworthy—solid and purposeful—but also see-worthy, i.e., entertaining. The difference between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Or even Maze Runner.
Even what might be considered the “lowliest” of genres, horror, allows for covertly clever ideas. The choice to cast a black actor for the lead role in the original Night of the Living Dead gave the film a political undertone, as it invoked rabble-rousing meditation on racial issues. Later, Dawn of the Dead, set in a mall, became a pointed satire of a society obsessed with consumerism, in much the same way as zombies are with brains and guts. The more recent Get Out provides a dark, satirical take on modern race relations, pointedly skewering rich, white liberalism and cultural appropriation.
In general, when genre is done well—involving some combination of mastery, innovation, and transcendence—it becomes the intersection of art and commerce. If you look at almost any list of all-time great films—especially American ones—you consistently see films that clearly belong to a Hollywood genre or subgenre such as gangster, crime, noir, comedies (including rom-coms and screwball comedy), sci-fi, and fantasy. Genre movies can be a guilty pleasure, of course, but here are some films to remind us that they can be guilt-free, too:
Comedy
• It Happened One Night
• Groundhog Day
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Crime/Noir
• The Godfather
• The Maltese Falcon
• Fargo
• Training Day
Sci-Fi
• Blade Runner
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
• Inception
• Wall-E
Action
• Die Hard
• The Hurt Locker
• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Aliens
Thriller
• The Sixth Sense
• The Usual Suspects
• Three Days of the Condor
• North by Northwest
Western
• Unforgiven
• Searchers
• Shane
• Stagecoach
Fantasy
• The Wizard of Oz
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• Big
• Frozen
Sports
• Rocky
• Breaking Away
• Raging Bull
• Million Dollar Baby
Masterpiece
• Lawrence of Arabia
• Citizen Kane
• Schindler’s List
• Taxi Driver
The final category, masterpiece, has a unique distinction in that it is both a genre and a description. Serious-minded movies, dramas that win Oscars, and classic foreign films, whose craft, literary, and aesthetic worth hold up after decades often fall within the masterpiece genre: Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis, La Dolce Vita, Casablanca, and City Lights.
However, sometimes “masterpiece” refers to movies—even mainstream and genre films—that are masterfully done. In addition to their genre (thriller, crime, sports) they are considered masterpieces, such as Chinatown, The Godfather, The Hustler, No Country for Old Men, Bringing Up Baby, and Vertigo.
If you want to use genre as a pathway to the more personal sense of voice, you must still balance your personality with skill. Regardless how much of your attitude or personal perspective springs from the page, it must nearly always be accompanied by an underlying honesty and craft. Are the characters relatable? Is their plight and resulting theme universal? Strip away all of the quirkiness from Harold and Maude, and what remains is a misunderstood kid who wants to find love and a passionate zest for life.
A high-concept body-switching comedy such as Being John Malkovich has a more peculiar, “out there” premise than Freaky Friday, but the core craft challenge is the same—exploiting the clever concept at the scene level. However, high-concept movies with more idiosyncratic setups, such as Memento, Dead Ringers, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or How to Get Ahead in Advertising, provide a better opportunity to merge the voice of the script with your own personal voice.
Managing Expectations
Disciplined creativity and the ability to color within your own lines are essential to create the uniform follow-through that guarantees a script accomplishes what it is intended to do. If it does, its setups are not necessarily personal or insightful about you, the writer. And the resulting spin-offs aren’t faithful to you, but rather to the script’s foundational pillars of concept, theme, character, and location. This creates a unified voice in the script.
To bend that voice toward the more romantic notion of your personal voice, controlling merely the payoffs isn’t enough. The setups of your story, often including how you tell it, must be more unique to you. You will need to master underlying expectations that encompass more than the elements of the story itself. You will challenge the prevailing limitations of both the classic narrative paradigm and even the status quo of the real world.
However, the process of managing expectations will remain an essential process in imbuing your script with your personal voice, which we explore in the next chapter.
14
PERSONAL VOICE
Writing in your personal voice is like ripping out your heart and holding it in your outstretched palm for all to see. You are trying to give the audience an unfettered connection to what you want them to see, feel, experience, and understand.
Audiences actively seek a piece of themselves on the screen. Even when it’s there in the most subtle or implicit way, it creates an intimate connection that can magically transform them: teach them how to be, remind them of who they are, and make them feel not so alone in the world. That’s why you have a moral obligation to strip falsity from your storytelling and to create something authentic and true.
Chapter 13 showed you can establish the voice of the script merely by laying a foundation of specific and solid setups and following through with surprises/payoffs that are sufficiently novel and integrated. But if you want to write something that captures your personal voice, the payoffs aren’t enough. You must begin and end with yourself. In addition to the payoffs, you must have fuller and more intentional control over your story’s setups (underlying assumptions and premises) and often how it’s told.
Building on the previous chapter, you will manage expectations, however, they will be beyond story choice elements—concept, character, theme, location. You will find and challenge deeper foundational assumptions such as the nature of the medium itself as well as its historical, political, psychological, sociological, and societal conventions.
To write in your personal voice, eliminate anything that impedes your ability to reveal your world, characters, story, or yourself with nuanced complexity and humanity. What are these obstacles? Whatever is not you, or what everyone else does. Avoid the status quo—anything that feels “been there, done that”—such as clichés, shortcuts, stereotypes, or bland, worn-out conventions.
Embrace even one personally meaningful divergence from the status quo, and you can leave an indelible imprint on your entire script.
Pick Your Poison
Probably the most influential experimental filmmaker ever, Stan Brakhage, was immersed in deep depression regarding h
is career and its toll on him. His desire to make films was preventing him from supporting his family. One day, he observed the way moths were attracted to a light bulb and how it led to their eventual death.
He identified that his own deadly obsession to filmmaking paralleled that of the moths. Filmmaking was the light that was attracting him but was also simultaneously killing him.
He took elements of the dead moths as well as other translucent elements from nature—including flowers, petals, and grass—and placed them between adhesive editing tape to make a nonnarrative collage film, Mothlight. When run through a projector, the result was a poetic series of collisions: bursts of shape and color that created an entrancing rhythm.
The ghost-like images seemed to bring the moths back to life. He turned dark to light, death to life. He rejected the notion that film had to be narrative. Heck, he even rejected the more primal, seemingly ingrained notion that film had to be film. He removed the camera and photographic process from the equation.
Mothlight was not empty rebellion. It was personal. He did what he needed to do to tell his story.
You must do the same. Do what you have to do to tell your story.
Begin with introspection. When watching a movie or writing yours, what frustrates you? Enrages you? Bores you? Think about the nature of film and storytelling narrative as a collection of assumptions and conventions. Meditate on and expand this necessarily incomplete list of core “rules” and expectations embedded within the fabric of Hollywood American filmmaking:
• A narrative form with goal-oriented stories that usually have a happy ending.
• The protagonist evolves, and his growth forms a character arc that is usually rewarded with love, the attainment of the romantic interest, and the achievement of the goal.
• Most protagonists and characters in movies are male and white.
• Film is a visual medium, and dialogue tends to be somewhat sparse and quippy, especially in expensive, male-oriented, action-driven genres such as thrillers, horror, action flicks, and comic book movies.
• Independent films and comedies that rely on an abundance of talk or quirky dialogue do not translate as well overseas and therefore suffer in the international box office.
This process helps you to discover additional expectations that you must manage to be able to tell your story.
You won’t always be attacking such foundational conventions of the medium as Stan Brakhage did in Mothlight. However, taking control of—by eliminating, reworking, or subverting—even a single status quo assumption of commercial cinema can create surprisingly personal expression and channel your personal voice.
Let’s see this in action.
Assumption: Movies aren’t all talk.
Filmmakers who have been able to distinguish their voice with dialogue include Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Aaron Sorkin, David Mamet, Paddy Chayefsky, Nora Ephron, Neil Simon, and Billy Wilder. If you have a knack for dialogue, you can, too.
Take inspiration from movies adapted from plays, whose voice comes from their dialogue-heavy, theatrical roots: Glengarry Glen Ross, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Frost/Nixon, The Goodbye Girl.
If you can turn talk into action and let your characters’ escalating battles play out in dialogue, then you can skip the stage play and go directly to the script for a film similar to My Dinner with Andre, 12 Angry Men, Before Sunrise, or this generation’s Clerks.
Assumption: Mainstream cinema doesn’t make silent (dialogue-free) movies anymore.
Okay, but did you watch the first half of Wall-E? Or hear of the Oscar-winning French film The Artist?
You probably won’t write an entire feature script without dialogue, but check out Up and its six-page wordless flashback sequence that lyrically chronicles the relationship of Carl (Ed Asner) with his wife. The script uses the recurring image of the “rural hillside” to track their relationship. It illustrates their romance stage and their desire to have children as they see the clouds in the sky as babies. Then, the film cuts to their nursery, where Ellie has painted a mural of a stork over the crib. Later, the sequence returns to the hill to depict the fateful moment of the onset of Ellie’s illness that leads to her death.
EXT. RURAL HILLSIDE - AFTERNOON
Carl hurries excitedly up picnic hill. He hides the airline tickets in his basket.
Behind him, Ellie falters and falls. She tries to get up but falls again. Something is wrong.
He runs to her.
INT. HOSPITAL ROOM - DAY
Ellie lies in a hospital bed. She looks through her adventure book.
Notice the dynamic prose style that propels the story forward without description of unnecessary minutiae. The style mimics the way an editor might build this moment image by image.
Assumption: Narrative is goal-oriented.
Some filmmakers employ an emotion-driven style of storytelling that deemphasizes goals without rejecting narrative completely.
Allison Anders’s fascination with the melodrama genre inspires her personal style of storytelling. Movies such as Gas, Food, Lodging and Grace of My Heart allow the characters’ energy and desires to create the story’s forward momentum.
As does Anders, Sofia Coppola drives her stories by tracking her characters’ inner states, and sometimes even mood. Her poetic style as director complements her writing. In this excerpt from Lost in Translation, notice how she gets out of the scene as quickly as possible. The script spends more time with the ambiance than the banal details of the small talk.
EXT. TOKYO - NIGHT
Shinjuku High-rises sparkle. INT. PARK HYATT BAR - NIGHT
Tall glass walls show the neon and high-rises of the city.
A sad and romantic Bill Evans song plays. Bob sits alone with a scotch at the bar.
Some drunk AMERICAN BUSINESSMEN, with their ties thrown over their shoulders recognize him.
BUSINESS GUY
Hey, you’re Bob Harris -- you’re awesome, man.
ANOTHER BUSINESS GUY
Yeah, I love Sunset Odds!
BOB
Oh, Ok, thanks.
BUSINESS GUY
Man, that car chase --
Bob nods.
INT. BOB’S HOTEL ROOM - NIGHT
Bob comes back to his room. The maids have left everything perfect, his beige bed is turned down, and the TV has been left on to a channel playing a montage of flower close-ups in nature while sad violin music plays. It’s supposed to be relaxing, but it’s just sad.
The cut to Bob (Bill Murray) in his empty hotel room follows the “feeling” of the moment. The description of the meticulously made bed, its drab color, and the emotionally disconnected images on the TV create a mood that mirrors Bob’s ennui.
This deprioritizing of goals and external actions, replaced with a focus on the inner life of characters and mood, might be considered an archetypally female approach. However, male Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai uses this style lyrically to move the story forward in waves of mood and texture, exemplified in films such as the appropriately titled In the Mood for Love. His films have had a powerful influence over a younger generation of filmmakers that include Barry Jenkins, who directed and wrote the screenplay for Moonlight, and Sofia Coppola.
Assumption: Theme is tidy and oversimplified.
Too often, American and mainstream films are limited in their ability to convey complex and nuanced themes. Even without the typical happy ending, the classical Hollywood narrative tends toward a sense of closure; almost all the pressing questions are answered. This is anathema to ambiguity and complexity.
No Country for Old Men succeeded as a modern masterpiece partially because of the way it bucked the convention of this tidy closure. Its disruptive ending shattered narrative expectations by denying the audience the emotionally satisfying, climactic showdown to which it is accustomed. Not only is the protagonist Llewelyn Moss (James Brolin) killed by supporting characters instead of the antagonist, his anticlimactic death happens offscree
n. This rip in the seamless fabric of narrative jolted the audience.
When a film calls attention to itself and breaks the familiar trance its narrative holds on the audience, it encourages them to disengage. With the hypnotic spell broken, they can consider what they are watching with a more critical detachment and perspective. No Country for Old Men encourages reflection on the nature of masculinity and the impact of movie violence.
Frozen River eschews the safer and battle-tested thematic premise of “a mother will do anything to protect her children,” to explore a more complex interpretation of what it means to be the best possible mother. The protagonist, Ray (Melissa Leo), has a chance to avoid responsibility for a crime she has committed, return to her household, and take care of her two sons.
Instead of taking the easy way out, she decides to serve a short prison sentence and leaves her kids in the hands of a capable mother, Lila (Misty Upham). By trusting Lila (a daughter figure to Ray) and inspiring her to gain confidence in her ability to be a good mother, she is displaying a facet of a great mother.
Ray’s actions embody a more expansive and complex notion of motherhood. She teaches her kids moral responsibility: the ends don’t justify the means even in the case of a mother trying to protect her children.
Yes, writing a mini-masterpiece, in which the thematic ideas are wonderfully novel, nuanced, and complex, can set your film apart and help to establish your voice. However, often when ambitious new writers tackle a topic whose only chance to succeed is by the sheer brilliance of its theme, or as a masterpiece, both the process and result can be discouraging.
Beware of what I playfully call the faux masterpiece, in which a story is set against a historically grievous arena such as the Holocaust, slavery, or World War II. The solemnity of the story’s backdrop on its own cannot carry the story and intrigue an audience. When you’re in your twenties or are starting out as a writer, do you possess the wisdom, life experience, and craft to bring new insight to such events of monumental thematic and historical significance? Often there is no middle ground for stories like these. It either succeeds as a masterpiece, or it completely fails.
