Louis Vogel
EPQ
Commentary & Evaluation
16 March 2018
How can one create an engaging true to life screenplay?
Introduction
For my creative writing EPQ I chose to write a screenplay based off my real experiences as a teenager in London. The plot focuses around one 16-year-old boy, Casper, who falls out with his group of friends after he kisses a girl he shouldn’t have. The story shows how this group of friends falls apart as a result of this, and we watch as they all go their separate ways. In the screenplay I hoped to tackle the themes of depression and drug addiction, as it’s something many of my close friends have had to deal with.
This, however, was not the project I started with. Originally I wanted to adapt William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies into a horror film. I wanted to create a very graphic piece centring around the book’s key theme; death of innocence through violence. After two weeks of work I realised that I wanted to create my own story — so I decided to start a new project. In 2001/2002 Gary McKinnon hacked into NASA, the Pentagon and several US Military sites, all from his ex-girlfriend’s aunt’s basement in North London. In 2002 he was caught, and for ten years battled against American lawyers to prevent his extradition to the US. In August 2008 Gary was diagnosed with Autism, which sparked off a huge debate about his human rights as a disabled person. I named the screenplay after his hacker alter-ego; SOLO. After several weeks of work on this script I chose to give up on it as I struggled to get into the mindset of an Autistic person, however through working on it I learnt a lot about character development. I then decided to start a smaller, ‘test run’ project. I wanted to write something just for the fun of it — so I wrote a play script about the creative clash between a Hollywood producer and a Hollywood writer and the work they were producing — it was called Anderson. This was performed in my school drama competition, for which it won best original play. I finished this script in just under three weeks, and was happy with it. So, sticking with the theme of ‘writing scripts that I wanted to write,' I started writing Everything’s Just Fine.
In order to answer the question how can one create an engaging true to life screenplay? I think I should firstly set out some criteria to show if I’ve successfully done that. I thought about it like this; If I was reading a book entitled “how to create an engaging true to life screenplay," what do I think they’d say in it? After a discussion with my EPQ tutor I came up with three questions you should ask yourself in order to determine if you have, in fact, created an effective true to life screenplay.
Have you gotten to know your subject?
Have you effectively transformed life into screenplay?
Have you established and maintained a constant tone?
The first question, have you gotten to know your subject? Is an important one, and is often described by McKee as the principle of author, authority, authenticity. He says that in order to create a convincing dialogue between characters, it is first necessary to truly understand your subject matter. To grant yourself the title of author you must have a deep understanding of your work and subject matter, and if you have that you will speak to his audience with such confidence that you will gain authority. Once an author has authority he has a true power over the audience, and they are unable to break themselves away from the illusion of reality. This grants the author’s work authenticity. McKee uses the example of Alien. In the first scenes of Alien we see the crew of the Nostromo awaken from stasis and gather at the mess table. We see pieces of their lives clutter their living spaces as they smoke and drink coffee. What do they talking about? — not about missing home or the dangers of space travel — but about money. “Will this unscheduled stop get them a bonus?” This scene perfectly encapsulates what it’s like to ride in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. Teamsters take little bits of home with them when they travel, and when they break all they talk about is money. The screenwriter Dan O’Bannon understands this psychology, and so when watching these opening scenes the audience realises that the characters they’re seeing aren’t spacemen like Han Solo or Flash Gordon – they’re interstellar truckers. This subconscious understanding pulls the audience in to the reality of this world, and grants the work authenticity. In the next sequence we watch as Kane investigates an alien growth; suddenly, something which looks like a huge crab springs up and covers Kane’s face — forcing a tube down his throat and into his belly. When they try to saw the creature’s legs off to weaken its grip we see its flesh spit out a viscous substance; acid blood. The blood eats a hole through the floor and the crew rushes to the deck below, where they see it’s continued down through that decks floor. They rush down another level and it’s continued on. Finally, three decks down, the acid peters out. At this point in time the entire audience had the same collective thought, which is described by McKee as being; “these people are in deep shit”. O’Bannon researched his alien, asking himself questions like what is the biology of this creature? what are it’s weaknesses? He must’ve thought up dozens of character traits before finally deciding on acid blood. To truly create this authentic piece of work the writer, director, and every other member of the creative team endeavoured to truly understand the lore of what they were creating. It is for this reason that, in order to write an engaging and true to life screenplay, it is necessary to ask yourself the question; have you gotten to know your subject?
The second question, have you effectively transformed life into screenplay? Is probably just, if not more, important. Real life is boring, and so when basing a screenplay off of true events, it’s necessary to turn this boring reality into something better. Turn the mundane into exciting, the dull into invigorating, add or remove characters and events to make the story more fitting for the cinema. Aaron Sorkin, in my mind, is one of the greatest film writers in history. His script for the Social Network was as riveting as it was fascinating — but a lot of that true story was, in fact, fabricated by the screenwriter. In the film one of the closest things we get to an antagonist is the true character of Sean Parker. He’s a maybe-statutory-rapist cocaine addict with more personality problems than the entire population of Beechworth Asylum. But is that anything like the real Sean Parker? Of course not. This character has been created by Sorkin to bring more depth into the plot, and it works. The opening scene to the film insinuates that the creation of Facebook was a direct result of Mark Zuckerberg breaking up with his girlfriend. Then, later on, we watch as Mark’s obsession with final clubs tears his relationships apart and ultimately costs him millions of dollars and the only friend he ever had. Both of these details were made up by the screenwriter to make the story of Facebook more cinematic. It’s this seamless morphing between fact and fiction that creates a truly riveting true to life film, and is also why it’s necessary to ask yourself; have you effectively transformed life into screenplay?
The final question, have you established and maintained a constant tone? May be the hardest one for a new writer to achieve. When writing any screenplay, be it fact or fiction or anything in between, you must understand that tone is everything. I realised this when comparing the plots for sci-fi thriller Avatar and kids animation Pocahontas. In one of them we see the story of a man who joins up with oppressed natives to learn their culture but with the secret goal of exploiting them. He ends up falling in love with their way of life — and with one of their women — and leads them to victory over those trying to take advantage of their resources. Could you tell which movie I was referring to? No. These two films which are supposedly complete polar opposites of each other are in fact extremely similar. Their biggest difference? Tone. The tone of a film is a representation of how it makes the audience feel. Whilst a scene in Avatar might make your pulse race and jaw drop, the same scene in Pocahontas will make you dance and sing along with the characters on screen. This understanding of your film’s tone, and its influence on the story you tell, is critical for writing a true to life screenplay. You must understand that when writing from a true story, unlike when writing fiction, you are not in control of the tone. Hacksaw Ridge was based off the true story of Pfc. Desmond T. Doss, and it works excellently as an action-drama, but if screenwriters Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight had instead chosen to write it as a buddy-comedy, it wouldn’t have worked. True stories have their tones inbuilt into their plot, it’s your job as a screenwriter to find that tone. It’s for this reason that when writing a true to life screenplay you must ask yourself; have you established and maintained a constant tone?
Part 1
Have you gotten to know your subject?
When I started writing SOLO I had no idea how much research I would have to do over the coming weeks. In total I read about 100 articles from 11 different newspapers, and I still didn’t have enough information to properly structure the screenplay. Getting to know your subject means so much more than a knowing the chain of events, you can’t just say what went down that day in 2001 and hope to have a good script; you have to have a deep and truthful understanding of the characters you’re portraying.
My favourite scene in the Everything’s Just Fine script is the party scene where Lucas knocks Casper out. I like it because I feel as if it’s an honest depiction of teen mayhem — if not a little exaggerated. From the get-go I wanted to convey teenage drama in a sharp, brutish way. I wanted the audience to really see the magnitude of emotion that comes from being a teenager. Here it is;
I like this scene because I feel like the moments of intensity are really brought out by the short, meaningless conversations that come between them. It feels honest. The way the characters talk, the words they say — it feels real… and that’s because it is. A lot of the dialogue I used in the script was actually verbatim. The conversation in Lucas’ house before the party — where Johnathan’s asking if the others think particular girls are hot — is actually based off a video of my close friend Roman asking me about all his different girlfriends. I feel like this is a good example of me getting to know my subject. I know that getting into the mindset of a teenager is fairly easy for me to do (considering that I am one), but the process is still the same — before your character says anything ask yourself this; what does this person want?
When I wrote the script for Anderson I used this method to its full extent. The play was short and had a very limited cast, and every character was different. This helped when writing dialogue because every character had a different goal that distinguished himself from others.
Mendel wants to make a film that will make money
James wants to write a story that he’s passionate about
Saul wants to survive and doesn’t care who has to suffer as a result of that
William wants to be accepted
This short extract of a conversation between Mendel and James shows the two characters differing aims; Mendel wants a script that will get funding from Paramount, but James cares more about his artistic integrity.
This simplicity of ‘role, aim, role, aim’ was a lot harder to execute when it came to writing the screenplay for Everything’s Just Fine and SOLO.
In SOLO I was dealing with a lead character who had a mental disability — he was autistic. Getting into the mindset of a character like that is extremely difficult as it’s impossible for me to truly understand his thought process. We still don’t know today why Gary chose to hack into the Pentagon… was it curiosity? was he looking for something? We can’t understand what he was thinking because our minds just aren’t wired that way. I think if I had researched the subject a bit more then I could’ve written a more accurate depiction of Gary McKinnon – however I decided to give up the project before I could do this.
In Everything’s Just Fine there were more characters, all who wanted different things. Often they wanted more than one thing and their overarching goal changed as the story progressed. Here’s a comparison of my original character notes for the characters of Casper (Everything’s Just Fine) and William (Anderson).
The character of Casper is so much more complex, so getting into his head is a lot harder. I was happy with the characters in Anderson because they seemed consistent — a selfish character was selfish throughout the script. My problem with Everything’s Just Fine was that many of the characters seemed inconsistent in their attitudes to life. In the first half of the script Johnathan seems to not care about Casper, just after everyone’s turned their backs on him Johnathan chooses to be cold and heartless over the phone. Then, in the second half of the script, all Johnathan talks about is making up with him! This inconsistency of character comes from not knowing your subject.
Part 2
Have you effectively transformed life into screenplay?
The key difference between writing a script that’s completely fictional and one that’s based on true events is the way the writer must think about character. In a typical fictional screenplay, character comes first and plot comes after. You think long and hard about who you want to inhabit your world, then build the world around them, then document their journeys through that world. This is not the case for screenplays based off true events. When writing a non-fiction screenplay story comes first, then character. You read and read and read until you understand the story you want to tell then you craft your protagonist with the hope of making that story more interesting. The problem is that you don’t get to choose who that protagonist is!
Aaron Sorkin’s film Steve Jobs is told over the behind-the-scenes events of three of Jobs’ most iconic launches in 1984, 1988 and 1998. Steve Jobs has been reduced by many to two main descriptors; genius and jerk, however in the film we see very little of his genius. This is highlighted in act two when Steve reveals that the sole purpose of creating NeXT was to sell it back to apple, thus ensuring a future with the company he founded. This is a key plot point as it shows that he doesn’t really care about the product — he just want’s his job back. That storyline, however, was made up. Steve Jobs didn’t create the NeXT computer just so he could sell it to Apple – he really did care about what his company was doing and what products they were creating. Aaron Sorkin chose to twist the truth so that the plot of his film was more interesting — it’s a good reveal! You think Steve’s moved on from apple, but for the past 4 years all he’s been doing is plotting his return!
I wanted to have this in mind whilst I was writing Everything’s Just Fine. The script is basically a composite of several teenage mishaps that me and my friends have been through, and every character has been influenced by people in my life. The first half of the story is based off of what happened to me in early December last year, when I fell out with my best mate because of a girl. The Casper-Anna storyline was based off when my friends boyfriend said I couldn’t see her anymore. The difficulty for me was making these stories cinematic. I had to ask myself how I could convey very private feelings of love, hate, anger and sadness through just visuals and dialogue. It was because of this that I chose to include Casper’s voiceover – I wanted to enhance the emotional aspect of the story. My reasoning was that it would be a lot easier for me as a writer to just go out and say how Casper felt, rather than having to subtly hint at it. I wanted to put the audience into the mindset of a teenager growing up in 2017, I wanted the audience to feel the overwhelming presence of technology and the weight of constant socialising. Martin Scorsese is famed for getting his audience identify with problematic lead characters, which he does through the use of voiceover. Examples include Taxi Driver and The Wolf Of Wall Street, but by far my favourite has to be Goodfellas. In one of the most famous sequences in the film we watch Henry Hill’s last day as a free man, and we identify with him despite his drug-induced paranoia.
I was going to be busy all day. I had to drop off some thirty-eights at Jimmy's to match some silencers he had gotten. I had to pick up my brother at the hospital and drive him back to the house for dinner and then I had to pick up some new Pittsburgh stuff for Judy to fly down to some customers I had near Atlanta.
Objectively this sequence is absurd, but his matter-of-fact tone seems to contradict this in our mind. He mixes every day tasks e.g. having dinner with his family with criminal tasks e.g. picking up drugs. This is want I wanted to emulate. I wanted you to be so closely bound to the characters you’re watching that you feel their stress, paranoia, happiness and anger every step of the way. Here’s an extract from Everything’s Just Fine – it come’s just after Anna doesn’t show up at Gloucester Road, and Casper thinks she’s abandoned him.
That moment there was my breaking point. Three hours, two packs of golds and five ignored messages later, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Every second I wasn’t talking to her was as second lost. And it hurt.
This extract achieves its primary aim of conveying Casper’s emotions to the audience. On the one hand it’s good because the audience doesn’t have to speculate, Casper says it right to them — “That moment there was my breaking point”. Whilst this is efficient, it’s not good writing. Using a voice over, I always thought, is lazy. As Aaron Sorkin says; the worst crime you can commit as a writer is telling the audience something they already know. After watching that scene where Casper confesses his love to Anna over voicemail, the audience can already see, or at least work out, how heartbroken he is — it would’ve worked a lot better if at the end of the scene, instead of a monologue, you just get a shot of him sitting alone and in silence, as he realises Anna doesn’t love him back. As a scene I feel that would’ve been a lot more powerful.
Although I didn’t write much, I was still very happy with what I produced in the Gary McKinnon script. The opening scene takes place in Gary’s psychiatric evaluation. There was no record of what was said by who, all we know was that it happened and Gary was diagnosed with autism. I really like this scene because it's a good example of me using what little facts I could find to build up an atmosphere. I’m not claiming the scene’s perfect — upon reading it over I realised that it was too fast-paced. But in only a few minutes of screen time I introduce several key people in the story and establish their connection to one another. The most important thing, however, is that I create intrigue with Simon asking;
Gary do you often find yourself obsessing over certain interests? Interests like, for example, your curiosity in regards to extra-terrestrial life?
In his TED talk, JJ Abrams talks about the idea of a mystery box. He says;
Look at “Star Wars”. The droids meet the mysterious woman. Who's that? We don't know. Mystery box! Then you meet Luke Skywalker. He gets the droid, you see the holographic image. You learn it's a message. She wants to find Obi Wan Kenobi. He's her only hope. But who's Obi Wan Kenobi? Mystery box! So then he meets Ben Kenobi. Ben Kenobi is Obi Wan Kenobi. Holy shit!
The idea of a mystery box is that it’s a question that’s asked to the audience — who’s that? why is that important? where is that person going? Why is this psychiatrist asking that guy about aliens? When asked these questions the audience gets drawn in, and they can’t rest until they know the answer. The opening scene of Alien prequel “Prometheus” is an example of what not to do. The film starts with a shot of this muscle-bound alien creature standing by a waterfall. He produces a vial of black goo and drinks it, at which point he starts to disintegrate. We watch as his DNA is corroded by this mysterious substance. His body rots and, as the music swells, he topples over and is washed away by the water. The audience is left asking — who’s that? why is he drinking that black goo? why does it kill him? where is he? what’s going on? But none of these questions are actually answered in the film. In the opening scene for SOLO the questions the audience are left asking are — who’s that guy? why is he being psychologically evaluated? why are there lawyers everywhere? why is he being asked about aliens? These are all questions I can answer within the context of the screenplay. The importance of this is, if you’re writing something that’s true to life, be sure not to ask any questions you cant answer within the context of your story.
I really like the first scene of Everything’s Just Fine because it raises certain questions about the characters and their relations to each other — who’s that guy? who’s the girl he’s on the phone to? who’s party is it tonight? what’s he buying? All these questions are answered in the oncoming scenes. I like this because it feels real. You’re plunged into the world of teen life with no context whatsoever, but as the relationships between characters are revealed it feels natural.
Part 3
Have you established and maintained a constant tone?
The biggest problem with the script for Everything’s Just Fine was that, to me, it felt confused. Was it a comedy or a drama? A romcom or a tragedy? Some scenes were light hearted and some were fairly depressing. The script felt bipolar. That wasn’t just bad luck on my part, the whole time I was writing it I was confused about what direction the script was going in… At some points I wanted to write a funny story about teenage mishaps, but at others I wanted to tell the story of a teener’s fall into depression. In the end what I got was a weirdly-paced mess. An example of this confusion can be seen on page 58, where we cut from the phone conversation were Anna tells Casper she can’t see him anymore — emotional drama, to a scene where Johnathan, Lucas and Max chat about weed, girls and cheese toasties — teen comedy. This shift in tone is just too much too quickly — it can be very confusing for an audience to watch as they are unsure about how they should be feeling. Here is the Casper/Anna phone conversation and the first half of the Johnathan, Lucas and Max scene;
The tone shift between these two scenes is too drastic for the audience to cope with. Some may argue that sharp tone shifts help to draw contrast between the two scene’s differing atmospheres, but this only works in select circumstances. Let’s say we’ve just watched the phone conversation between Casper and Anna – it’s upsetting. It’s created a negative tone. Then we cut to Anna, sitting down, looking upset. She calls Charles (her boyfriend). The conversation becomes light hearted and funny, creating a positive tone. This sharp tonal shift would work because the two different scenes are relatively similar, and it’s this similarity that helps bring out the differences between them. This tonal shift would work because it draws a sharper contrast. In my existing draft, however, the two scenes are too different from one another for the same distinction to be made.
Whether your script’s tone is a happy or sad one is ultimately a result of everything that it’s made up of. The pacing, the plot, whether most of the scenes are set inside or outside, if your characters are likeable or not, how dialogue heavy your script tend to be, whether you’ve chosen to use well known songs or an original soundtrack. Every creative decision you make as a writer contributes to your scripts tone. But, as I’ve previously said, a lot of those decisions aren’t yours when you write a true to life screenplay. Think your skills as a writer will be better suited to a chatty protagonist? Sorry, he’s mentally disabled and struggles to speak in full sentences.
This problem applied to Everything’s Just Fine because the stories I tried to tell just weren’t compatible. The Johnathan-Lucas-Max dynamic is based off my group of friends… but that upbeat tone just doesn’t work when put alongside the Casper storyline. I didn’t realise that the integral tones of the stories I was telling just weren’t going to work together.
Conclusion
My final piece – Everything’s Just Fine – I felt was a disappointment. I thought that there were some scenes and sequences that, individually, worked excellently, but ultimately the whole script together felt stilted and weirdly paced. What I liked most about my script was its dialogue. I thought it flowed well and felt natural. When characters were speaking to one another I could really picture that conversation taking place, I could envision it in my minds eye. I loved the fact that I’d write a scene which, when I read it over, felt like I’d recorded my mates having a conversation. I also like how my skills as a writer developed over time. I couldn’t have finished Everything’s Just Fine without what I learnt from my previous projects.
However there were many problems with the script. I disliked the pacing of it — the scenes were too long and you felt as if nothing was really happening. Although my dialogue was good, it dragged on for too long and often felt directionless. As I’ve already said, the piece was very inconsistent when it came to tone. This happened, I think, because I didn’t plan it out properly. If I had properly plotted out the script beforehand then I would have seen these issues before I even started writing. I also didn’t raise the issues of depression and drug addiction in the way I’d hoped to. What I realise now is that you don’t really understand what you’ve written until you’ve finished it and read it over again. I think that if I had more time to write a second draft I could fix these problems — but I don’t — so I can’t. If I did, however, have more time to spare, then here are the five things I’d do to change the script.
Make a document which re-plots out the story scene by scene (and makes more use of the key themes of drug addiction and depression) — this should keep the tone on track and would let me look at the script as a whole more easily
Rewrite the script from memory, using that document as a guideline — this should cut down any unnecessary dialogue
Rewrite the script again except this time without voiceover
Compare the new versions of the script with each other and the original draft — this allows me to check if there was anything better in the older version e.g. phrasing of certain lines, and also lets me see if the script would be more effective without voiceover
Make any necessary adjustments to the best draft, then re-write it again!
I’m so glad that I chose to do a creative writing EPQ. I’ve enjoyed it so much and It’s really inspired me to write more in the future. I always knew that filmmaking was what I wanted to do in the future — and this project has really spurred me on to achieve that goal. Now that the project’s ended i’m going to continue writing scripts, and I hope they’ll continue getting better.