photo by Adam Prince
Two men in a cave. They repeatedly hit each other with sticks. This carries on for two minutes. The question... is it drama?The answer is no, of course it's not. It is just conflict, it isn't drama. The same two men, brothers. One of them wants to leave the cave to rescue his wife, the other knows that his brother will die in the attempt. So, they pick up sticks and they fight... one is fighting to save his wife, the other to save his brother. The action is the same, it is still two men hitting each other with sticks, but now the audience understands what is at stake. Suddenly, the same action has gone from being meaningless, to being drama. Regardless of how many times people say it, drama ISN'T created through conflict, drama is created through the audience's understanding of what is at stake at any given moment; conflict is a by-product of drama, not the root cause of it. The key point in that last sentence is "at any given moment." For me, every single line, scene or sequence in a screenplay is defined by the way it shifts the audience's understanding of what is at stake. Every action relates to how that character is being driven by what's at stake or informs the audience of a shift in what's at stake. Every line of dialogue reveals, in the subtext, the character's attempt to resolve what's at stake. In a very real sense, each action and each spoken word is an attempt to diffuse the tensions created by what's at stake. Last week I wrote about how I sometimes use the phrase "the price of..." to help isolate the theme of a story. As you can see, there is a direct relationship between the idea of "the price of..." and the idea of "what's at stake?" However, the intensity of the drama will relate directly to the writer's ability to create significant conflict, though an understanding of what's at stake for each character... and, ultimately how what's at stake relates directly to the theme of the story. I like the phrase, significant conflict. It's a good compass for me as a writer. It gives me a raft of useful questions to test each line of the script for relevance: Is this piece of action significant to what's at stake?Does it inform the audience of a shift in the stakes?
If not, does it help the audience understand the character's attempt to diffuse the tension of what is at stake?
And, ultimately, are the stakes significant enough and related to the theme? One of things that has always baffled me, is why so many people hold up the major studio blockbusters as the pinnacle of the craft of screenwriting? The vast majority of the studio movies are constructed around the lowest common denominator of "what's at stake." The lowest level being, "the hero's love-interest's life is at stake." And that's it... hero, damsel in distress, ninety minutes of chasing and shooting. From where I am sitting, that is the easiest kind of script to write. The stakes are predictable and constant. The heavy lifting in these movies being removed from the script and into the sheer spectacle of the action. (Actually, these movies for me, are no more complicated than two men hitting each other with a variety of sticks, in various locations, until one falls off a building... which is another way of saying they aren't really drama. They are the point at which the writing of cinema and the writing of drama diverge into two separate things. Something worth understanding, when thinking about cinematic writing as a craft. A large part of the industry and the craft is totally unrelated to any classical understanding of story-telling. It is purely cinematic, rather than dramatic). For me, the next level up from that kind of writing is when each character has multiple things at stake, some of them are straight forwards and work in the world, some of them are emotional. Sometimes the character is only dealing with one of the things that is at stake... let's call that the A Plot. Sometimes the character is dealing with the emotional thing that is at stake... let's call that the B Plot. However, it is possible to take the audience on a real journey, if the A Plot comes into conflict with the B Plot. Or, in other words, when the character is forced to chose between two things that are at stake. Where the conflict is internal rather than between two characters. Through-out the writing process, relating what's at stake for everyone to the overall theme, stops the story from becoming incohesive or messy. What this tells me, is that conflict isn't ever just a dynamic between characters, but is created by what's at stake. Two characters can come into significant conflict when what's at stake for them is opposing... or a single character can be in significant conflict when forced to chose between two conflicting needs to resolve the things at stake. Without this understanding of how drama is created by significant, stakes driven conflict, too many screenplays become people shouting at each other for no discernible reason, chasing each other for no discernible reason, and shooting each other for no discernible reason. This is what happens when people can't tell the difference between conflict and drama. Basically, in the movie world, guns don't kill people, what's at stake does.keep writing and viva la revolution
Posted via email from Filmutopia's Sunday Morning Movie Blog
