John August

Search Results for: characters

On Dogfooding, and scratching your own itch

Directors, Follow Up, Psych 101

Several readers have written in to ask whether we have plans for Chrome or Firefox versions of [Less IMDb](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/less-imdb). We don’t — not because we have anything against those browsers. We just don’t use them nearly as much as Safari. We built the extension to address our own needs, and shared it with others because they might like it.

When you make something that you yourself use, that’s called [dogfooding](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dogfooding+(to+dogfood)), a contraction of “eating your own dogfood.” That’s developer-speak, but it’s a mindset screenwriters would do well to appropriate.

Aspiring screenwriters will often throw a few loglines at me and ask which one they should write. My answer is always, “The one you would pay money to see.”

That’s dogfooding’s close cousin, scratching your own itch. You’re writing movies you wish existed.

Looking at successful filmmakers — in particular, writer-directors — it’s pretty clear who is doing this. Tarantino makes movies to fill a special shelf at his fantasy video store. Wes Anderson makes movies his own characters would dissect over canapes.

If you have more mainstream taste, great. Embrace that. Scratch your own itch. But forget about “commercial” or “high concept.” If you’re writing a movie you yourself wouldn’t buy a ticket to see, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

Cut a character, save a scene

Words on the page

Last night, I struggled with a scene that went on too long without really accomplishing its aims. The solution ended up being pretty simple: get rid of a character.

Rachel, I love you, but you don’t need to be in this scene.

I say “pretty simple” because getting her out of the bad scene meant revising the scene just before it to explain her absence. But an extra beat before the cut was worth it. The new scene is a page shorter and a lot sharper.

Why wasn’t this solution obvious from the start?

Well, Rachel is a pretty enjoyable character, and we like seeing her interact with the other characters in the scene. But she’s by nature a peacekeeper. When she’s around, the squabbling heroes tend to put their knives away. In real life, that’s a good thing. In drama, it’s non-dramatic.

As a general (and often excepted) rule, you’re better off with as few significant characters as possible in a scene. Each additional body you add is another set of relationships to keep track of, which helps explain this apparent paradox: the better we establish our characters, the fewer we can support in a scene.

It’s easy to write a scene with two principals and eight background players. As an audience, we don’t care about those eight. But if you put five principals in a scene, you’ve made your life difficult. The audience expects all five to contribute.

On the page, here’s an easy to way to distinguish important characters from unimportant ones: only name the characters who matter. Let SECURITY GUARD be just that. The minute you call him JOHNSON or DEBOERS, the reader promotes him from functionary to full-fledged character, with all the accompanying expectations.

How to write romance

Genres, QandA

questionmarkI’m writing a romantic movie, but the last days I have been thinking if the story is credible or not. What do I have to do to write a credible romantic story?

— Stefano Vettorazzi Campos
Uruguay

You have to make us care whether the two lead characters end up together, which is really two requirements:

1. **Characters we give a shit about.** They don’t need to be likable, necessarily, but they need to be compelling. We need to be curious about what they’re going to do next.

2. **A credible reason to keep them apart.** This could be almost anything — war, prejudice, a sinking boat — but if we don’t buy it, you’re toast.

I’d argue that #2 is actually more important than #1.

Cast some attractive actors and we’ll want to see them kiss. But I get angry watching romances in which the hurdles are set too low. If there’s nothing stopping the characters from running off to live happily ever after at the midpoint, why bother?

In Go, would Todd have shot Ronna?

Go, Projects

questionmarkThank you for writing one of my favorite movies. I saw Go at the theater when it was released and it has since been one of my favorite movies. One my favorite characters in one of my favorite movies is Todd Gaines.

There is one part that has always left me wondering. Was Todd really going to kill Ronna?

On one hand, Todd simply didn’t seem like a murderer. A sleazy drug dealer? Yes. Murderer? No.

On the other, in a deleted scene, he did pull a gun on Claire and left Ronna for dead after Adam and Zach hit her with the car.

Todd also didn’t come across as stupid, reckless or naive. It seems if he wanted to kill someone, he would have chosen a better place than a very public party where he likely would have been recognized by his clientele.

This has always been a dilemma to me. I was hoping you could shed some light on it for me.

— Thomas Lehman

todd gainesTodd Gaines never shot anyone, and had no intention of killing Ronna. He wanted to scare her.

Look at events from his perspective: He’d been played for a fool by a cocky teenage girl. Beyond the sting to his ego, she’d cost him money. If word got around out how she’d outsmarted him, other customers might lose their healthy fear of him. He knew where Ronna would be, so he decided to go find her.

When their conversation was interrupted by a poorly-driven Miata, Gaines bolted. I’d consider that fight-or-flight, a self-preservation instinct. When they find a girl’s body, you don’t want to be the guy with a gun.

In conversations with Tim Olyphant before we shot the movie, we discussed that Gaines probably wasn’t a full-time drug dealer. Maybe he went to art school, or worked as a club promoter. For set decoration, we gave him an art table and a bunch of illustrations.

If you met Gaines on a rainy morning — like Claire later does — you might think he’s a pretty nice guy.