by Charles Harris
Many otherwise excellent film projects don't find finance - or if made don't find an audience - for reasons that the film-makers completely fail to understand. The answer - very often - is genre.
To most film-makers, genre is something that is beneath them: they think it applies to a western film, or a horror movie, and a second-rate one at that. The truth is that genre is one of the most valuable tools a film-maker has in working with the screenwriter, as well as financing, making and selling any movie - from Coen Brothers to Godard.
When you clarify your genre, you are clarifying - for yourself and for your audience - what type of film you are making. However "type" need not mean stereotype or cliché - although ironically film-makers who don't take account of genre are more likely to make cliché movies than those who do.
What kind of film is it?
When it comes to genre, there are three main traps that a script - and a film - can fall into.
The first is that your film doesn't know what kind of film it is. I see many scripts which are otherwise well written, but leave me confused. What am I supposed to be reacting to? Is this a comedy? A tragedy? How am I supposed to come at this story?
With a completed film, the problem becomes critical. We all make decisions about which films we want to see, and a vital part of that decision is based on what kind of film we're expecting to pay for. And genre is a key element of that expectation.
Do you feel like a light-hearted film this evening? Or something deeper? Are you going to munch popcorn while watching aliens blown away, or nibble carrot-cake contemplating the latest Spanish surrealist hit? Even that crucial ingredient, word of mouth, often comes down to genre.
But a film that raises no expectations, risks getting no audience!
The second trap is to raise the wrong expectations. From the first line of your script, or the first frame of your movie, you are raising questions in the audience's mind. Like it or not. A man gets out of a car with a gun. Is this a gangster movie? He lights a cigarette with it. No, it must be a comedy. Then has a deep heart-to-heart with his son. A coming of age movie, perhaps....
As the genre becomes clear, so the audience begins to expect further developments. Each genre has its own requirements. If your audience expects a romantic comedy, and you don't deliver any laughs, you'll be roasted. No good blaming the audience for getting it wrong. No good pointing to how strong the romance was. What about the comedy?
To avoid this, you have to examine what you did, that led them in the wrong direction to begin with. Or what you didn't deliver, that you ought to have done. This is not as easy as it seems, as it can be surprisingly difficult to work out what the genre of your film might be.
You need to do your homework. Watch as many films as you can, which are working in the same area as your own. Note down what makes them tick, and in particular what patterns begin to emerge.
Read and research as much as you can on the standard genres and their subgenres.
Let's say you're developing a detective movie. Detective movies are a subdivision of crime stories. A serious crime has been committed, usually murder. The detective is the hero - usually detecting is his/her job, sometimes there are other reasons why they want to find the criminal. The setting is generally urban and contemporary.
Conflict is usually settled in a physical and violent manner. However, the detectives themselves must use their brains as much as their guns to solve the mystery. Usually the detective hero shares surprising traits with the villain. They live in the same subworld and share values that perhaps they would prefer not to share.
However, the detective plot is also potentially one of the weakest structures - as the detective hero is not so personally involved in the outcome as in other types of story. So the creator of a detective film will go to great lengths to make the search personal. Perhaps the detective was close to the victim. Or her job is on the line. Or this is her first case. Or her last.
The job of the writer is to deliver on these audience expectations, or to face rejection by that audience.
Surprise, surprise...
However there is a third and opposite trap: being too predictable. Audiences are very sophisticated nowadays. Giving them all the expected genre riffs without variation will result in a film that feels old-fashioned and flat. People want to be given what they expect, but also to be surprised. Well, I never said it was easy.
A clever film-maker will ensure that expectations paid off with a twist. Old clichés are made new and fresh in unexpected ways. "The Name of the Rose" is a detective film, but instead of the inner city, it is set in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, all the genre conventions are honoured, even within this twist. Even the setting, while remaining historically accurate, yields a very gritty, hard view of the Middle Ages, with a very ironic modernist slant.
A particularly good way to surprise audiences is to combine two genres. Romantic Comedy, Comedy Thriller, Intellectual Gangster... the potential combinations are almost endless, and are also usually great fun.
Audiences love the tease of an adept film-maker playing with genre, and nowadays almost every film is cross-genre - from "Sixth Sense" (therapy-horror) to "Lord of the Rings" (fantasy-epic).
However there are two golden rules to making such marriages of genre work.
First, ensure that both genres are introduced early. It won't work if your serious horror movie suddenly changes to satire in the last half hour! By all means make them think it's a straight horror film at the start, but make sure that the comedy is introduced within the first ten minutes or confusion will reign.
Second, mixing genres doesn't mean you can sell either of them short. You haven't lost half a genre, you've gained a whole new one - and both sets of genre expectations must be delivered for the audience to be satisfied. Sometimes, this may be difficult as the two genres may raise contradictory promises of future action.
"Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" cleverly combined the two genres of gangster and farce. Gangster movies - like detective - are energetic, starting with high tension, and ending violently. They are urban, gritty, realistic but stylised at the same time. Disputes are settled violently and nastily.
Farce has some similarities, but also has some differences. Farces are generally even more energetic than gangster films, but highly unrealistic. Characters are also far less rounded than in gangster films - more caricature than real. Instead of violence, the main threat is social or sexual embarrassment. And conflicts are resolved through verbal and physical humour. The start is slow, as the many subplots are set up, and then the energy builds to a dizzy, comedic climax.
The film-makers solved the contradictions partly through realising that violence and comedy have much in common. In Lock Stock, the violence becomes comedic and the comedy violent. They also settled on a heightened realism, that combined grittiness with unreality in an effective way. They constructed the story carefully, so as to build to a climax that delivered both the gangster shoot-out and the high-speed comic twists that are demanded of farce.
However, they never quite solved the problem of the opening - which is too slow for a gangster film. And the paper-thin characters of farce feel lightweight in a crime story setting.
Nevertheless, despite those flaws, on balance Lock Stock shows how intelligent understanding of genre can create a film which is entertaining, and different.
This article first appeared in the February 2002 edition of New Producer.
© Charles Harris 2002
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