Screenwriting character is the toughest challenge for a screenwriter. Well, that's my feeling about the endless debate about the relative importance of plot and character.
If you have a character but no story, the character can create one. If you have a story but no character, you can drop a character into your story, but you'll have to fit him into it.
Now I'm sure there are plenty of successful screenwriters out there that say they will start with a story. But for me, the kind of movie I'm most interested in is where the story is powered by the emotional needs of the character.
It's the character the audience is going on the journey with, and he or she had better be compelling, intriguing, maybe disturbing, unsettling, perhaps even unlikeable. It's the character's emotions we must be engaged with throughout, and the more complex those emotions the better.
Don't Be Afraid of Ambiguity
Innokenty Smoktunovsky in the film Hamlet. Written by William Shakespeare, Boris Pasternak and Grigori Kozintsev. Director: Grigori Kozintsev.
He's enthralled, baffled and disturbed people in their millions for over four hundred years across the whole world. Forests the size of large countris have been used to provide paper for the billions of words that have been written about him.
No one has ever been able to pluck out the heart of his mystery.
How is it that Hamlet has exerted this extraordinary fascination for so many people across the globe?
Well, I'm not going to try to answer that here. It's a question that has obsessed psychiatrists, academics, playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, artists, composers and theatregoers for centuries.
But Shakespeare's towering tragic hero is always worth going back to for any writer starting to create a character.
The one thing Hamlet shows us for sure is that a character who is ambiguous tantalizes.
You may not want your character to be so enigmatic, but for a character to be at all interesting, it's wise to make sure you don't give the audience the whole picture.
Whatever a compelling character has to do, he or she has to keep an audience in suspense to some extent. We don't want to know everything there is to know about them.
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Actors Love Ambiguous Characters
One of the most crucial aspects of screenwriting character is to resist the temptation to spell everything out for the audience.
They want to tease out the aspects of the character for themselves.The most intriguing characters are ambiguous. When an audience can't quite make up its mind about a character, it means they stay hooked.
Good actors love ambiguous characters, because it means they have to stretch themselves and dig deep. And they know the audience will be compelled to watch them.
Screenwriting Character - Digging Deep
Daniel Day-Lewis in his Oscar-winning role, Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. Screenwriter/Director Paul Thomas Andersen. Ghoulardi Film Company. Paramount Vantage. Miramax Films
Here is a clip of Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood.
The scene is a flawless example of how to reveal character. A perfect fusion of screenwriting, acting, and direction.
For his role as Plainview, Day-Lewis won Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Screen Actors' Guild, NYFCC, and IFTA Best Actor Awards. He dedicated his Screen Actors'Guild Award to Heath Ledger.
And here is Day-Lewis being interviewed on The Michael Parkinson Show. The actor is famous for keeping in character off the set - he broke two ribs playing the role of a severely handicapped character in My Left Foot because he had insisted on sitting in a wheelchair off set as well as on. Day-Lewis won his first Oscar for this role. Here talks about his attitude to his work and 'living a life not mine'. What he says about acting seems to me powerful advice for screenwriters.
Screenwriting character is about inhabiting the outer and inner life. One thing I've found really useful is to to try to see my character as a actor would.
What makes your character complex and interesting? Think about how your character might perplex the audience - get them wondering what they're going to do next.
The reason a screenwriter has to dig deeper and deeper into his or her character, is so that, ideally, you're getting the audience to dig deeper and deeper.
Think of screenwriting character using the onion analogy - the audience must be put into a position where they are peeling back the layers of the character by degrees.
Always imagine what your audience is feeling towards your character at any moment in the script. Open the script at random - then ask this question.
If your character is a baddie, how have you made the audience care about what happens to him or her?
If your character changes from good to bad how have you maintained the audience’s interest in character's transition?
Compare your character at the beginning of the story with him or her at the end of the story. There should be a significant and meaningful change. Something deep. Not some pseudo-philosophical platitude.
It could be that the meaning you want to express is that your character doesn't change, and that this is part of what your script is 'saying'. But there has to be something that has happened through the course of the story to make the audience's journey with your character mean something.
It is mostly from this last moment of your character's journey that your audience will be leaving the theatre thinking about the movie they've just seen. (Has it provoked a deep emotional response, stretched their minds?)
Have you been able to suggest elements of this back story without using ‘on-the-nose’ dialogue? And without clumsy exposition?
An extreme example of on-the-nose speech is when a character tells another character what the second character would already know. Another eg would be something like: ‘Didn’t I meet you in Peru in 1998, when I lived there, before I married?’
Keep Asking: Would I Want To Know More?
As you start to explore the potential for your characters, keep asking yourself: Would I want to find out more about him or her?
As the character's needs show you where the story is going, how is the character changing?
This can be an emotional reaction which sets in motion something which causes another emotional action. How are the other characters reacting to your main character at every point? If your character isn't doing much in the way of driving the plot, it's going to be difficult to sustain the audience's interest in them and their story.
Plot doesn't mean 'Action' with a capital 'A'.
The Power of Stillness
At times, plot can be driven by a character NOT doing something. But it's when a character's 'not doing something' means they're actually not doing anything to add to the story you just have a hole in the narrative which the audience has nothing to fill it with.
Juliette Binoche in Three Colours Blue. Screenwriter/Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Screenwriting Character To Move The Story Forward
That's why the main character shouldn't be passive. Again, whatever going on under the surface should have the power to prevent this. Why it's important to keep thinking about the character moving the story forward.
It's how you do it that will be the difference between screenwriting character in a formulaic, derivative way and one which is strong, inventive and surprising to the audience.
