Curiosity, Concern, Mystery, Suspense, and Dramatic Irony
Robert McKee’s ‘Story’ seminar summary
What is a story?
Story is a metaphor for life.
Facts are neutral, they have no meaning. Abstractions are neutral either.
Truth is why it happens.
Music, dance, story have much in common — they are about tempo & rhythm.
Form expresses the meaning, content creates the meaning.
Biography is fiction, autobiography is fantasy.
Stories can be told in any form, language is just one form.
Life story has social, personal, psysichal and inner conflict aspects.
Story is a series of events selected from the life story and composed into a strategic sequence to express from your point of view, arouse specific emotions, and create specific meaning.
Story structure
40–60 events (scenes) in a feature film — ideally every scene is an event of some magnitude, a turning point
Remember: locations are not scenes.
Scenes create minor changes, that could be reversed.
Inside of the scene is a beat; means change not in value but in behavior, like teasing, insulting, threatening to violence.
Scenes build the sequence — it’s a series of scenes that bring about change that has more impact than previous scenes, it goes deeper and wider.
One sequence is from ‘X has no job’ to ‘X got a job’.
Series of sequences build act — the climax of the last sequence creates act climax, they create major change.
Series of acts create absolute, irreversible change.
An event means meaningful change expressed in terms of value achieved through conflict; stories values binary oppositions like love/hate, hope/despair, wisdom/stupidity and others.
If nothing changes, nothing happens (it’s some sort of exposition).
Ask yourself: what is the core value of my story that will undergo the change from the negative to positive or positive to negative? That creates the arc.
Types of story design
Classical design: closed ending, all emotions are satisfied, external conflict & values, single protagonist, active protagonist, continuous time (could we sort events in time after watching?), causality, consistent reality, unity of action.
Minimalism: open ending, a question or two are left over, incomplete emotional experience until they question them, internal conflict & values, multi-protagonist, passive protagonist.
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Anti-structure: discontinuous time — we are confused of what happened before, coincidence, inconsistent reality, thematic unity of fragments being held together by a certain idea.
Your character is your destiny, you will act out of who you are, life is a dramatization of your character.
Audience apply principles of classical design to other films.
Setting
Setting is a sense of time and place.
Setting makes creative limitations.
Cliché is an excellent idea that someone had 50 years ago.
Create relatively small complex world.
If you cannot write it down, you don’t know it.
Get knowledge beyond experience.
Genres set conventional values, settings, worlds, characters.
Nobody can be hurt in comedy — it’s a convention.
The audience is smarter than you, collective IQ +20.
Primary genres (what — like lovestory) + presentational (style — like comedy)
Genres evolve with changing attitudes of society.
Character & characterization
Characterization is what a person appears to be, true character goes underneath the surface; the only way to express true character is a choice under pressure.
The story is there to put heroes in the situations of pressure in order to reveal true character, deep true nature in contrast to characterization.
Types of genres
You can change person’s mentality for better or worse.
education genre — from meaningless to meaning or vice versa
You can change person’s morality
redemption genre — from bad guy to good guy
degeneration genre — from good guy to bad guy
You can change person’s humanity.
maturation/evolution plot — from less human to complete humanity
devolution plot — vice versa
Ask yourself — what can force your characters to use their humanity in a complete way? — This is an inciting accident.
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Meaning
Plot-driven stories are when characters don’t control events and have to react to them. Character-driven stories are when characters cause events.
Controlling idea — everything should work on express that idea, everything should contribute to it.
Story is non-intellectual.
Life separates meaning and emotion, but art combines it.
Story is the acting out of an idea, a living proof without explanation.
Idea and counter-idea — positive and negative sides of the same idea.
Positive idea comes as a meaning with climax, all scenes on a negative should give a powerful persuasive expression.
In order to create a suspense, the positive and negative forces should be equal.
Meaning could be expressed in one single coherent sentence:
- Value — look into the heart of the story and say what is the one core value (i.e. honesty/dishonesty) How is this value charged positive/negative in climax?
- Then ask how and why these character’s lives changed from positive to negative or vice versa? Generally it should be one big cause (like cause he is more violent than criminals).
Meaning is value + cause.
Idealistic meanings like ‘Love enriches life when we conquer intellectual illusions and follow our feelings’ or ‘Goodness triumphs when we outwit the devil’.
Pessimistic meanings like ‘Passion will destroy you when you lose control of your emotions’ or ‘Evil consumes us because human nature is evil’
Ironic meanings (Idealistic + Pessimistic) like ‘Love cuts both ways’ but there is no ambiguity in irony, but you should say it in that way not to neutralize both messages
Story canvas
Your responsibility is to express the truth.
Don’t put yourself into your hero’s mind, play him.
Think how can you open the gap between expectation and the results in every single beat.
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Repetitiousness is a great enemy.
Stories are created when the subject of expectation collide with object of reality, the friction they cause generate the energy that drives story.
It’s a ‘Oh shit!’ moment when the world reacts not in a way subjects expects.
Be the God of your Universe.
Ask yourself: what are the politics in my world? The purpose is to eliminate pressure and friction when getting through life, to lubricate society.
What laws of this world, what is right or wrong, what is legal and illegal?
Backstory is not a biography, backstory means previous significant events in the biography of character that author actually uses to propel the story
Design the cast using principles of polarization in such a way that every character has distinctively unique attitude toward life, when thing happen no 2 characters react the same — it maximizes opportunities for conflicts.
Director is not an original creative work, it’s interpretative.
Sustain emotional involvement:
- Create empathy to the protagonist
- Write with an authority
Creativity demands research.
Great movements of story
Inciting incident — first major event in the center plot of the story (not in the backstory) that radically upsets the balance of life. It can happen by accident or by decision. Major question — How this will turn out? — is keeping the audience.
Inciting incident inspires the image of obligatory scene — which promises that protagonist and antagonist will be face to face.
Inciting incidents happens somewhere in the first 25% of the story.
75% is design to events, 25% is to dialogues and description.
Questions: What is the worst possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How can it be the best possible thing that could’ve happened to him? — and vice versa
Conflict is to story what sound is to music, as long as it is building and progressing the audience is carried through story unaware of passage of time.
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When conflict dissipates the audience loses interest; conflict is life, it’s constant in quantity but changes in quality.
Create Points of No Return.
Never repeat the magnitude of action: always progress.
Never accept the first idea on the top of your head.
90% of what you do is not good.
Suffering is no more story than happiness is, story is change
Act design
● Contradiction — use subplot to contradict the meaning of a central plot (irony).
● Multiplot — there is no center plot, what holds the film together is an idea, thematic unity, all stories are variations on one idea.
● Use subplot to set up a central plot.
● Use subplot to complicate, to make the life of protagonist even more difficult.
If your subplot doesn’t use these 4 relationships it can destroy the film.
Remember: audience cannot photograph thoughts.
If the audience hates you protagonist, you’re done.
Turning points
Every scene should be a turning point ideally, they take action based on their sense of probability
Surprise (when the gap opens) — it results in curiosity.
2 characters is boring, 3 is good.
Inciting incident should happen immediately if you have 2 minutes.
By definition 3 min story is trivial.
You cannot enrich civilization by telling 3 minutes stories.
Principle of antagonism
Powers of antagonism make a protagonist an underdog.
Identify the core value in the heart of the story.
Reach the negation of the negation, take the contradictory and you hide it behind the lie (hate masquerading as love, corruption masquerading as justice).
Take what is negative and take it inward and it becomes self-hate, self-deception.
Simple opposites are not the limits of human experience.
Crisis means decision.
Go straight from crisis to climax.
Meaning creates emotions — not decorative photography, not star casting.
An event could be as little as woman putting her hand on the table and looking at you that certain way.
If you can climax subplots in the central climax it multiplies the impact.
Climax should be a combination of spectacle and truth.
Give them what they want, but not in a way they expect.
Key Image — one last image that sums up all the meaning and emotion
Resolution scene — if you have a subplot to bring it to the end.
Coincidence
Coincidence itself is meaningless, but coincidence is life and it can create meaning.
In the midstory stop using coincidence, and never add coincidence in climax (it’s deus ex machina).
Put the story in the characters’ hand.
When the story begins everybody seeks for the center of good, to stick their empathy to his or her.
Curiosity, Concern, Mystery, Suspense, and Dramatic Irony
Mystery means creating intellectual curiosity about expositional facts that the writer teases the audience, hides them and forces audience to guess.
You cannot empathize to those who don’t make mistakes.
Second view is more enjoyable cause it’s not about facts and curiosity, you watch and look more deeply, it’s more about why and how.
80–90% of stories are told through suspense.
Interest through suspense, within the story put the audience ahead of the character (creating dramatic irony) or vice versa (creating mystery).
Exposition
Remember: show, don’t tell
Great exposition is an invisible exposition, you’re never conscious that you learning facts.
Convert exposition to ammunition in the struggles of what characters want in life.
Remember: panning photographs with camera is not showing.
Don’t pack the opening pages full the exposition, give it throughout the whole filmю
Never give the audience any fact they don’t need to know, there’s no point to do that.
Don’t try to explain characters, make your characters mysterious, make audience curious of who they are.
Save the best for last; deep dark secrets of life should come out when they are facing the lesser of two evils dilemma.
Don’t write California scenes in when 2 people who don’t know each other tell each other deep painful dark secrets
You don’t need to have any exposition.
Start in the middle of the story (in medias res) — come as late as possible.
Avoid table-dusting scenes — avoid line of dialogues when characters tell each other things they already know just to make an exposition.
You can create turning point only by action or revelation.
Reserve powerful revelation to major turning points, use the backstory to turn story.
Flashback is just another way of getting expositions into the story. Do not flashback to a static information scene, flashback to a little mini drama to its own.
If you wrote narration but you can cut the narration out then keep it. It’s a counterpoint narration.
Text and subtext
Text is the surface, what is said.
Subtext is inner life, thoughts and feelings that subconscious that can’t be expressed, it’s what underneath.
Actors work with subtext.
Your in deep shit when characters say what they actually deeply feel and mean it, it’s unactable (like saying ‘I love you’ when they actually mean it — only schizophrenics do that).
Character
Characters are works of art, metaphors for human beings, they are not real people.
You can not copy a person in such a way it will be sufficient to make a great character.
Characterization is observable traits — style of speech, attitudes, clothings, every single element that you just know by observing as if you are invisible. That creates a character that is unique, credible and intriguing.
The only way to express true character is by choice under pressure.
Dimension is a dynamically consistent contradiction in the nature of a character.
Imagine your cast as a solar system, protagonist as a star, and other actors as planets and comets. People do not behave the same toward different people.
Dimensions make a difference between characterization and an important character. One-dimension doesn’t mean flat (think of a Terminator — he’s both machine and human, that’s a contradiction). Give less dimensions to less important characters.
Leave the room to the actor, don’t try to direct it through the page, don’t overwrite.
Fall in love with all your characters, especially villains.
The source of all characters writing is self-knowledge, everybody else will always be at a distance. You’re only human being you’ve been inside of — that’s why we’re essentially alone. Fundamentally we share the same deep human experience.
Everything I know about human nature I learned from me.
Anton Chekhov
Dialogue
Don’t write dialogue when you can create a visual expression. Firstly, think how can you write this scene without dialogue. The more dialogue you write, the less effect dialogue has.
Description is not literature, it’s a blueprint for a movie. Put a film in a reader’s head: what you're describing is a sensation of watching the screen. It’s always now and it’s always action and it’s vivid.
Writer is supposed to be someone with a vocabulary. Write with a most active verb possible. Use the most concrete noun possible. You don’t need literary talent to write screen descriptions. Your descriptions should be photographable. Avoid metaphors and similes. You’re not a fucking poet.
Poetics is the intensification of expressivity. Audience put a connotation to everything. 90% of everything in a world have wrong connotations for you film.
Symbols have tremendous power as long as they are subconscious.
Music is subliminal. Image system is subliminal.
Imagery can be external or internal. External is when an artist brings an existing image that have a symbolic meaning from out of the film to the film. It’s what students do. Internal is when artist brings an image that is given a new symbolic meaning in a context of the film.
In great stories you don’t need to read subtitles, everything is in the subtext and lead visually.
Choices tell you how characters feel, not their words.
Between logic and feeling, choose feeling.
Stage actors project their character from inside out, but cinema actors invite the camera to look inside them.
You can repeat the exposition if you want the audience to remember it.
When things don’t go well, you need a technique to analyze the scene:
- Determine core value/values that is essential to the scene.
- How is this value charged in positive/negative way?
- Who motivates that scene, who makes it happen.
- What does this character seem to want in this scene (desire) — to do this, to win that.
- Add this into the subtext — what are the sources of antagonism?
- Break the scene into the bits — it’s a pattern of action/reaction
What to read:
Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action by Robert McKee
Poetics by Aristotle
What to watch:
My Dinner with Andre by Louis Malle (1981)
Lust, Caution by Ang Lee (2007)
Tender Mercies by Bruce Beresford (1983)
Ordinary People by Robert Redford (1980)
Kramer vs. Kramer by Robert Benton (1979)
Mrs. Soffel by Gillian Armstrong (1984)
Sea of Love by Harold Becker (1989)
Kiss of the Spider Woman by Héctor Babenco (1985)
Chinatown by Roman Polanski (1974)
Missing by Costa-Gavras (1982)
In The Realm of the Senses by Nagisa Oshima (1976)
Leaving Las Vegas by Mike Figgis (1995)
The Reader by Stephen Daldry (2008)
Y Tu Mamá También by Alfonso Cuarón (2001)
Diabolique by Jeremiah Chechik (1996)
Casablanca by Michael Curtiz (1942)
Good screenwriters:
Richard LaGravenese
Paddy Chayefsky
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