Love Every Character - Love Every Scene

By Lynn Harrod

Ever watch a movie and instantly latch onto some characters, while you couldn't care less about others? Sure, the screenplay has been engineered so that you root for the Hero and despise the Villain, but that's not quite what I'm getting at. Hating a character is actually a good thing. Any emotion is a good thing.

It's indifference that's a killer.

In virtually every movie, there are main characters with unique traits and agendas, accompanied by cliché or bland supporting characters, quickly forgotten. Some sets are striking and memorable, while others are plain ol' living rooms. Why this imbalance?

If you pay attention, observing the movement of the actors and the delivery of their dialogue, you can tell which characters are adored by the Director, and which ones are not. You can tell which settings are important to the Director, and which ones are generic.

Pick up a copy of any script and you'll see some scene headings read INT. SHADY'S SMOKEHOUSE GRILL while others read INT. BAR. That might give you a clue.

Take a look at any script of Robert Rodriguez's early work. You'll see some characters with exotic names and lengthy intro descriptions. In "Desperado," the purpose of the elaborate first scene was to reintroduce the legendary El Mariachi. Turn a few pages and you'll see a character named "Shrug" because all he does is shrug to his boss. You'll also see a boy named "Niño" (boy), a priest named "Priest," and a bartender named "Short Bartender."

Keep in mind, these aren't bit parts, these generic characters have significant screen time. Rodriguez gets away with shallow characters by choosing solid actors and directing with an over-the-top style. It seems to work for him, but my advice to the struggling indie filmmaker is to sharpen your tools at the screenplay level, and not depend on happenstance to make up for a lacking script.

My advice is to love your characters. Same goes for settings.

In Pulp Fiction, who can forget Jack Rabbit Slim's? It's a one-of-a-kind set (it's not a real restaurant as legend would have you believe), populated with colorful backgrounds, extras, sounds, and events. You get the feeling that if you could get into Quentin Tarantino's head, his vision of that set materialized perfectly.

In fact, it's this love for every shot, character, and scene, that gives Tarantino, and any good director, his style. It's what makes him an "auteur." Something as simple as two guys talking over coffee turns into a memorable scene, not just because of the dialogue and acting, but because every nook and cranny of the scene was thought about, cared for, loved.

On some level, when directing a film, you must have some sort of love for everything that will appear on screen. If you don't care about your supporting character, "Freddy," chances are, neither will the actor portraying him, not to mention your audience. If you don't care if the restaurant scene is in a Denny's or a McDonald's or a five-star bistro, the audience may not care, either. Worse, they might be confused, because it's not consistent with Freddy's personality to confront his wife in a Denny's. (Imagine, instead of Jack Rabbit Slim's, Vincent took Mia to a hot dog stand. It would be inconsistent with Mia's personality, and make for a much less memorable scene.)

Whereas Tarantino is an example of a director that loves every tiny bit of his films, Tim Burton is an example of one that does not. He plays favorites in his films, resulting in the audience saying, "I really liked that one scene, and that other scene, but that's all."

Burton loves the surreal, the dark, the fantastic, the scary. For this, I like his work. However, he doesn't care about anything based remotely in reality. It would appear that reality bores him. This is why in "Big Fish," all the fantasy "tall tale" scenes are a marvel to look at. The actors have fun in them. The Production Designer went to town creating them using Burton's input.

The scenes in "reality" fall flat. Notice I use the word "flat." This is because some may argue that he intended to create a stark contrast between the two different realities, the colorful, lively tall tales and the grim, drab real world. But I'd argue that it's possible to direct a simple scene with old Ed Bloom lying in bed and still give it some spark, some unique quality. (For crying out loud, that's Albert Finney lying there!) Instead, those scenes fall flat.

In Burton's remake of "Planet Of The Apes," the ape characters were astounding, not just in their appearance, but in their mannerisms, their depth of character, their personal agendas. The human characters? What's that you say? You don't remember any human characters? I barely do myself.

Even the main character, Leo, played by Mark Wahlberg, had no distinguishing characteristics, other than he was the Hero. This is because he was human. Had he been an ape, he would have had more of Burton's attention, more of his love.

Before this turns into a full-blown film review, let's summarize...

Love your characters. Love your settings. Love every scene, every shot. This all shows in the end product which is, after all, your film. Anything you're not investing your time and heart into, you're taking for granted, and hoping that happenstance makes up for it. That equals lazy filmmaking.

For the struggling indie filmmaker working on his first feature, that might also equal the end of a brief career.

[Lynn Harrod is a filmmaker, a seasoned screenwriter of twelve years. His work has placed in the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship, the Writers' Network Screenplay Competition, the FadeIn Awards, and the Nevada Film Office Screenwriting Competition. Lynn is a staff writer for IFLA.]