Movies are a lot like professional sports. The things we notice tend to be the great plays, the brilliant scenes, the moments that make us say “wow!” But what really makes movies work is a lot like what makes sports teams successful: not the bright moments, but the fundamentals. In soccer, those fundamentals are blocking and tackling. In the movies, they come down to the basics of the character: strong desires, huge obstacles, and a deep journey that changes the character forever.
When these elements work, it is easy to forget them. Like it’s easy to forget those great offensive linemen blocking for the quarterback. But when they break, bad things happen. And suddenly you have big problems.
Like professional athletes, even the best writers can lose sight of their fundamentals, especially when struggling to make the most of an exciting premise, take their writing to new levels, or reach a scene in a new way. Once we’ve learned the basics, we tend to take them for granted. And sometimes we forget that we have to practice our fundamentals, even while we live to master the fancy stuff.
Because fundamentals tend to go unnoticed in truly successful scripts, it can sometimes be even more valuable to analyze problematic scripts, where fundamental errors and the problems that stem from them can be seen more clearly.
Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen it yet Substitutes and plan to do so, you may want to stop reading here.
Screenplay by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato Substitutes is based on a truly seductive premise: a new technology that allows people to experience the world completely through robotic surrogates. It asks a profound question: what if you could look exactly how you would like (ie a man one day, a woman the next) and do what you want to do most, without any physical risk to yourself? How would society change? How would you bring people together? And how would you keep them apart?
Clearly, this is a question worth exploring. Yet despite its brilliant premise, as a story, Substitutes it fails, mostly because writers forget its foundations.
Your premise is as seductive as your main character’s journey.
As a writer, if you spend your time explaining the world of your story, you are probably boring your audience. It doesn’t matter how interesting the world of the story may be or how many bright shades you’ve created. If things don’t happen, your movie doesn’t budge. This is especially true in an action movie like Substitutes. Things have to happen fast. If you spend your valuable pages feeding information to your audience, you are practically guaranteed to stop your story.
In successful scripts, the worlds are revealed through the actions of the main character. Contrast Substitutes with movies like Gattaca, The Pan’s Labyrinth or even Ferris & Brancato’s blockbuster thriller The game and you will immediately see the difference.
These scripts take you into the world, treat that world as a reality, and allow you to experience it as the characters do. They don’t waste time “telling” the audience what the world is like. Instead, they slowly but surely reveal the rules of the world as the character pursues what he wants against all odds.
The tremendous obstacles the world creates for the character reveal his nature in a visceral way, forcing the audience to imagine themselves within the world, as they seek for the main character to triumph over his obstacles.
On the other hand, when you simply spoon-feed the world as information, as Substitutes try to do, it achieves the exact opposite. Without a visceral bond for the audience to connect with, the movie begins to feel like a school. Before long, even the most potentially interesting details are reduced to a litany of boring information. The audience is playing with their thumbs, waiting for the movie to start; once you have lost them, it is difficult to get them back.
Force your character to change in a profound way.
Bruce Willis plays Tom Greer, the only person (in society at large) who doesn’t like the idea of substitutes because he feels They cut it off from real connections that make life worth living. At the beginning of the movie, he reluctantly uses his surrogate in his job as an FBI agent, but in reality he just wants to connect person-to-person with his wife, who only wants to interact through his surrogate.
When a terrible weapon appears that can cause people to die while in their surrogates, he forces Tom Greer on a journey, through which he discovers … drum roll please … that Surrogates cut people off from the real connections that make life worth living.
Do you see the problem?
Tom has already been through his journey before the movie begins. This leaves you with nowhere to go as the story unfolds. He doesn’t NEED the story to happen to him, because he already sees substitutes for what they are. This robs every action that undertakes of any real meaning, we are left with smoke and mirrors, external “exciting” twists of the plot taped together with no visceral journey to back them up.
Imagine if the action of the story forced Tom to be seduced by the world of surrogates that he once rejected, so that despite his expectations at the beginning of the film, letting go of his replacement would be the hardest thing for Tom. never had.
Imagine if Tom felt a deep connection to his surrogates and the action of the story forced him to realize what they were really doing to him and his family, and then make a choice between the danger of connection and the safety of isolation. .
Imagine if Tom’s wife was the main character, with her desperate need to live through her surrogate to avoid dealing with the death of her son, and was tested the same way Tom was, having to deal with life outside. of your substitute.
When the characters don’t change, the stories don’t move. And when the stories don’t move, the audience isn’t moved by them.
Make it hard. And then make it HARDER.
Of course, there have been movies, especially action movies, that have been successful despite the lack of profound character change. Indiana Jones confronts his fear of snakes and reconciles with the woman he harmed in the course of his life. Raiders of the lost ark, but he’s still pretty much the same guy he was at the beginning of the movie. Similarly, when it comes to the third installment in the series, The Bourne UltimatumJason Bourne, for the most part, has already accepted his identity.
Both scripts are successful for a simple rationale. The writer makes it REALLY REALLY HARD for the main character. Jason Bourne never stops running, running from one external obstacle to another, and overcoming them in such unexpected and spectacular ways that it’s hard to worry about whether or not he’s changing. Similarly, Indiana Jones is constantly dealing with such fascinating and growing challenges that there is no time to wonder about his psychology.
Get this fundamental right and you can get away with it.
Make it hard. And then make it more difficult.
Make it easy and you will get Substitutes, a potentially spectacular idea, which falls short because it allows itself to be seduced by its own premise and loses sight of the fundamentals that make movies work.