FRIDAY'S SCRIPT TIP: THREE ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER

A good screenplay is about a person with a problem. No matter what the genre, your story should be exploring character. Yes, even an action script is all about characters dealing with emotional problems. CASINO ROYALE reboots James Bond as a cold blooded killer who never gets emotionally involved... until he meets Vesper. The action scenes are character scenes - serving to show how relentless Bond is through his actions. The parkour chase with the Bombmaker is all about character... as are all of the rest of the action scenes in the film.

When I do my Character First class later this year in London for Raindance, we will start by creating a character then find a story to explore that character. But what do you need to know about your characters? I've seen "character charts" where you fill in the color of eyes, hair color, height and weight. If it helps you to have a visual image of the character, that's fine... but none of that information should be in the screenplay. Casting decides what a character looks like - not the screenwriter. James Bond looks like whatever actor they cast to play the role - when Pierce Brosnan's contract was up, they were in talks with Sharon Stone to play Bond... they settled on Daniel Craig, and purists called him "James Blond"... until they watched that first film. Who knows what they might have said if Stone had been cast!

All stars are interchangeable - Eddie Murphy and Tom Hanks and Kevin Costner may be considered for the same role... along with Sharon Stone! So your character’s eye color and hair color is meaningless... and using those specifics in the script will limit your casting possibilities. The key is not to worry about the exterior of the character (things that change with casting) and focus on the interior. The *character* of the character. What kind of person is this? What's their attitude? How do they act? What makes them tick?

I concentrate to *who* a character is. That comes down to goals & fears & secrets.

GOALS - What does the character want? Not a long Christmas list. Just one thing. The most important thing. Your lead character is setting out to do something. Attain a specific goal. Are the objectives physical? Concrete? A vague goal like World Peace won't work. Film is a visual medium, and the goal needs to be something we can see.

In THE FUGITIVE, Dr. Richard Kimble is searching for the One Armed Man who killed his wife. A specific person. We can see that he has only one arm, and see that he is the same man Kimble fought with at the murder scene. It would not be enough to have Kimble's goal just be to evade the police. That's not concrete enough. Not visual. How can we tell he's evaded the police? The lead character's goal has to be something the Director Of Photography can focus his camera on. Something we can see. One single thing. What is that thing? What is it that your character can't live without? What is the goal that drives them?

FEARS - What are they afraid of? Not a physical fear, like spiders or the dark, something emotional. Does he fear commitment? Is he afraid he's not good enough? Is he afraid that he'll never find happiness? That nobody loves him? That he's not worth loving? That he'll never measure up to his father? That his best days are over? Dig deep to find this fear, because it will become what the whole script is about. This won't be easy, because our protagonists are really ourselves... and that makes their fears our fears. But for most characters, fear is the key.

SECRETS - Secrets are my favorite part of character. Give a character something to hide and it tints every scene. The audience never has to know what the secret is, it's just a subtext. An executive with an inflated resume might make up for it by being strict and demanding respect (in fear that someone will discover he's a fraud). Sometimes the secret has to do with the plot and will be revealed "She's my sister AND my daughter!" (that secret fuels CHINATOWN).

A story is about a character who is forced to deal with an emotional conflict (character arc) in order to resolve a physical conflict (whatever your plot it - and it needs to be a problem we can *see* since this is a movie).