by Charles Harris
Without understanding how scripts work, writers, directors and producers cannot work properly. They flounder, attempting to polish scripts without the necessary craft skills to do the job.
On the other hand, they also need to know alternative approaches - how and when to bend or break the rules in order to bring freshness and avoid being predictable.
First we needed to look at the very word "Rules". The so-called rules of screenwriting should not be seen as fixed instructions so much as recipes.
In cooking, a recipe can be used with many variations. Baking a chocolate cake using a good recipe doesn't make the cake formulaic, because the creation of the cake is more than just the recipe - it is also the quality of the ingredients. the skill of the cook, the subtle variations that are brought in. And a skilled cook can change elements dramatically, so that if you know what you're doing you can change the flavour, the richness, even create a cake that (for example) doesn't need baking.
However, the emphasis is on skill and understanding.
So it is with screenwriting.
First you need to know the fundamentals of script development. Then you can move on to look at ways in which creative producers and directors can have fun - playing with these so-called rules to push the envelope. Take for example, character development.
One of the most crucial issues is that of making characters sympathetic, involving, active, complex, and believable - investigating the role of the characters' inner stories and how they shape the true meaning of a film.
But that is not all. What if a writer wants to develop a character who is unsympathetic, passive, simple or even incredible? Can a film be based on a drunk, a drug-addict, a simpleton, or an extra-terrestrial? Are such characters impossible?
Clearly, looking at the history of the cinema, they are not. But there are traps. Just consider the question of nice-ness. Many screenwriting textbooks will emphasise the importance of audience identification with the central character.
It isn't easy to identify with a drunk, a sadist, a racist or a self-obsessed depressive. And yet many great films have been made with characters who are most definitely not nice. People you would most certainly not want to spend too much time with at the pub.
The central character of Memento is to all intents and purposes a vengeance-filled, violent obsessive. Yet we care deeply about him and his predicament.
None of the character in Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs are exactly the people you'd like to marry your sister. (Well, maybe that depends on your sister).
I'm hard pushed to think of a single character played by Jack Nicholson who isn't some kind of sleazeball. And yet - from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest to As Good As It Gets - we care what happens to them.
I've mentioned men so far, but the history of female parts is equally full of hard-nosed bitches, sleazy manipulators, murderesses and indecisive losers - from Bonnie Parker to Ripley to Bridget Jones. Still we care. Why?
How do these writers break the rules and get away with it?
There are a number of tools that can be used when breaking away from conventional, formula-led cinema.
One of the most important is Compensation. In using this tool, a writer compensates negative with positive, passive with active, repulsive with attractive. To put it simply, you can't break all the rules at once. That's why you have to know the rules in order to break them.
A character with all negative characteristics and no positive, for example, would be a black hole on screen - sucking in the film's energy and giving nothing in return. If you're going to give the audience a character with traits that they don't like - then you must compensate with something they do like - something they can admire, enjoy or even just laugh at.
Ripley (in Alien, and its sequels) may be tough - but she's also straight. She speaks her mind and gains our respect for her honesty and also her bravery. Juan, the con man at the heart of the independent Argentinean film Nine Queens, may come over as a cheat and a second-rate one at that, but he's trying hard, he's eager to improve and he's doing it for his father. All things we can identify with.
Even casting is important, which means the director must be aware of the problem in the first place. In Gastón Pauls, the film-makers have cast an immediately likeable actor - more likeable than most of the other characters in the film - to compensate for those less attractive characteristics that appear on the page.
This tool can become a very powerful one, when applied to all kinds of unusual characters. These tools can also be equally powerful in other areas - whether developing alternative structures or even playing with the conventions of dialogue, sound and visuals.
© Charles Harris
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