Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Waid Wednesdays #17: Wait, What?

Wherever you were yesterday at about 10:00 a.m. PST, if you heard the distant sound of a scream, that was me. I'd gone to bed the previous night having finished the most recent script for IRREDEEMABLE and feeling very good about it--

--and then I sat down the next morning to polish it and realized that it was crap, because I'd forgotten to deliver on one of my fundamental rules of storytelling. Structurally, the script was fine, and the dialogue was good. Everyone served the plot quite well, thank you, everyone acted consistent with his or her established personalities, and there were little moments of shock peppered throughout the story and at least one moment in there that feels like I turned over a rock to show you some squiggly things, so, yeah, check, check, check, but it still felt hollow...

...because, upon re-reading the script with a fresh eye, I found that no one in the story had surprised me.

It was easy to overlook in its absence. I mean, the plot moved, and people were doing interesting things. But overall, the story felt very binary, if you will; in every scene, the characters could have gone in one of two directions, but really only two--and the most arresting moments in stories, the ones that make them unforgettable, are the moments where someone makes an outrageous third choice that you never in a million years could have seen coming.

My all-time favorite example is from the excellent movie Se7en: up until the final few scenes, the plot's pretty much a straight-up police procedural. Yes, there are enough twists and turns throughout to maintain the suspense, but as with all procedurals, the only real question in the back of the audience's mind is "How will they catch the criminal?" because everyone's doing what they're supposed to be doing--the detectives are detecting, the murder is murdering, etc. And that's fine. Thousands of compelling, suspenseful stories have been woven around the simple question "How will they catch him?"

And then, near the end of Se7en, the murderer the detectives have been chasing all this time makes an amazing choice that seems to come out of absolutely nowhere. He simply walks into the station, confesses, and surrenders...and tells the cops he can take them to two final bodies if they'll just get in the car and let him navigate. And they just start driving.

Up to that moment, we in the audience kind of knew where the story was ultimately headed. We didn't know how it would happen, but we knew the cops would eventually catch and punish the criminal, the end, because that's what happens in a procedural. And, suddenly, boom, one character kicks the game board over, and now, for the first time since the opening credits, no one in the audience has the slightest clue where this story is going.

That's what you want as a writer. At least once in your story, maybe more, just when you think the readers might be getting a little too comfortable, you want a character to zig where they were expected to zag--to make a surprising, unexpected choice, the more out-of-the-blue the better. (See also The Frighteners, the most criminally underrated screenplay of all time, for a thousand other examples.) As long as it's a choice that's ultimately in character, then the more shocking, the more it works. I can think of no better way to maintain suspense and keep the story energized, and it's one of my favorite tricks. Try it at least once per script. Make a point of having either your protagonist or your antagonist make a hard, hard left at some juncture where convention and tradition would dictate they turn right, and see where that takes you; you can always undo it. But in my experience, you probably won't want to.

Next: the sister post--the trap of False Suspense and how to avoid it.

62 comments:

Cully Hamner said...

Mark, I sure hope you're planning to compile all these "Waid Wednesdays" into a book. I'll buy one for myself, and at least a few as gifts...

Jon said...

Good post, Mark. Thanks.

Andy Whitfield said...

Yay, someone else who appreciates the Frighteners! Good post, sir.

kkisser said...

The Frighteners definitely has these moments. Most notably, when Dammers the FBI agent rips off his shirt during the interrogation scene to reveal his armor. That one scene takes the movie to a completely different level of weird.

Anonymous said...

John -- did you see that your quote about TLOTR and Ayn Rand was quoted by Peter Segal (of NPR) and is now floating around on the web? I was trying to figure out whether this was from The Nation or The American Prospect or the New Republic or what. And it's from your Blog. Congrats.

Peter

Tracy said...

So..... I love you, and EVERY single time you write something I find another reason why. The Frighteners is excellent for the exact reason you described; thanks for pulling it out and making note.

S. Harlan Cone said...

More love for The Frighteners here. My wife and quite a few friends haven't seen it, so its going on the Netflix que soon.

deepstructure said...

the frighteners? the michael j fox/peter jackson film? that's the film you're saying is so well written? i'd always meant to watch it but never have. but the love for it expressed here is surprising. this is the first i've heard of it being good. and ebert completely panned it.

Mark Waid said...

That's the one. I find the final film itself a little flawed in places, but mostly because of some really not-helpful choices in direction and editing; the story itself is like a Swiss watch, and I took a lot away from it.

Marty Nozz said...

I'm a big fan of The Frighteners myself and also Se7en.

On topic though, I'm now looking back at my scripts for Mere Mortal feeling like I've dropped the ball in the surprise department.

John Seavey said...

Love 'The Frighteners' (and Ebert, while a very smart man, has his own lenses he views film through), but 'Se7en'? Dunno. Maybe it was that I saw it after seeing the umpteen billion thrillers inspired by it, but the twist you describe never seemed like much of a twist to me, because the movie never seemed like a police procedural so much as a member of the genre I like to call, "The Serial Killer Already Thought Of That".

You know, the movies where every time the cop does something, anything, no matter how unexpected or innovative or useful or whatever, he's actually just fulfilling another part of the serial killer's brilliant master plan. Because this killer is so smart and insightful that he's already anticipated everything you're going to do, and has planned for it to happen.

So while I didn't so much know what would happen in 'Se7en', it was pretty much a given that it was going to be some clever serial-killer-y thing, and that he was totally in control of the situation because he was always one step ahead of blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda.

(I could complain about other things in 'Se7en', such as the fact that the city they lived in was so unrelentingly dark, rainy, and grimy that I kept expecting Rufus Sewell and Kiefer Sutherland to walk past in the opposite direction, looking for Shell Beach, but that'd be digressing too far from the topic.)

For me, the quintessential film along these lines is 'Ransom'. The movie is basically about two very smart guys in opposition to each other, and every twist involves one of them doing something clever and unexpected that alters the playing field, puts the other guy at a disadvantage, and ups the ante all at the same time. A classic suspense film, and I can only imagine how awesome it would be if you didn't see the trailer first. :)

Joshua James said...

I love the script for SE7EN, I even have it somewhere, I think it's a great piece of writing ... I also don't think a screenwriter would be able to get away with it today ...

The twist, the ending you describe, which I also love, would be considered a flaw by many ... a flaw because the capture and end would not be the result of the protagonist's efforts ... in fact, John Doe is in charge right up until the end, at no point to our heroes really make a difference in what happens.

Which is what I LOVE about it, but in also infuriates many of the gurus.

There's the famous story that when the studio was wooing Fincher, they sent him an old version of the script, which had the ending it does now ... and he loved it. And used his pull (and Pitt's) to insure that the ending stayed as it was.

Otherwise, I think it would have ended like many others ... with the heroes figuring out something at the last minute that saved the day.

I'm glad that SE7EN didn't become that movie, I really am.

BTW, I also really dig FRIGHTENERS, the tone was all over the place but what a fun flick.

deepstructure said...

joshua, that story is actually told by fincher himself in this interview:

"So finally, I got a script by a guy who was kind of in my world, and thinking about films the same way I was, and revered the same kinds of movie that I revered – Andy Walker, who had written a script called Seven. He couldn't get it made and had rewritten it 13 times in order to make it more "likeable". [audience laughs] So this script was floating around and my agent, who's very sweet and always very hopeful, said, "You know, New Line is interested in this. You might like this, and they might want to make it with you, so maybe you should read it." So I read it, and got to the end, with the head in the box, and I called him and said, "This is fantastic, this is so great because I had thought it was a police procedural; now it's this meditation on evil and how evil gets on you and you can't get it off." And he said, "What are you talking about?" And I talked about the whole head-in-the-box thing, she's been dead for hours and there's no bullshit chase across town and the guy driving on sidewalks to get to the woman, who's drawing a bath while the serial killer sneaks in the back window. And he goes, "Oh, they sent you the wrong draft." [audience laughs] And he sent me the right draft, and there was a guy driving across town on sidewalks, serial killer sneaking in the back window. And I said that I wasn't interested in doing that. So I went and met with Mike De Luca, who was ostensibly at the time running New Line, and I said that I really liked the first draft, not the 13th draft. And he said, "Me too." So I asked what he was going to do, and I was laying out what I wanted to do on it. And he said, "Close the door." And then he said, "If we develop this and get into a dialogue about changes that could possibly be made to this material, there's no way that we could make this version of it, because I'll have 15 people looking over my shoulder who are going to be reading these pages as they come in. But if you say that you'll make this movie, starting in six weeks, we can make this version of the movie." So I said, "OK, let's go do it. Put the head in a box." And that's how the movie got made."

Jay in Oregon said...

John Seavey:

I didn't watch RANSOM until well after it was on video, so I either never saw the trailer or did not remember it.

And yes, it was a great story for pretty much the reasons you describe.

Elizabeth said...

Thank you for explaining why I so much love the Buffy season two finale.

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