Script Tip: Secrets, Goals & Fears

GOALS & FEARS & SECRETS

What do you need to know about your characters? I've seen "character construction charts" where you fill in the color of eyes, hair color, height and weight. If it helps you to have a visual image of the character, that's fine... but none of that information should be in the screenplay. Casting decides what a character looks like - not the screenwriter. James Bond looks like whatever actor they cast to play the role - when Pierce Brosnan's contract was up recently, they were in talks with Sharon Stone to play Bond. In Hollywood, all stars are interchangeable - Eddie Murphy and Tom Hanks and Kevin Coster may be considered for the same role... along with Sharon Stone! So your carefully constructed chart with eye color and hair color is meaningless... and using those specifics in the script will limit your casting possibilities. The key is not to worry about the exterior of the character (things that change with casting) and focus on the interior. The CHARACTER of the character. What kind of person is this? What's their attitude? How do they act?

I concentrate to WHO a character is. That comes down to goals & fears & secrets.

GOALS - What does the character want? Not a long Christmas list. just ONE thing. The most important thing. Your lead character is setting out to DO SOMETHING. Attain a specific goal. Are the objectives physical? Concrete? A vague goal like World Peace won't work. Film is a visual medium, and the goal needs to be something we can see. In THE FUGITIVE, Dr. Richard Kimble is searching for the One Armed Man who killed his wife. A specific person. We can SEE that he has only one arm, and SEE that he is the same man Kimble fought with at the murder scene. It would not be enough to have Kimble's goal just be to evade the police. That's not concrete enough. Not visual. How can we tell he's evaded the police? The lead character's goal has to be something the Director Of Photography can focus his camera on. Something we can see. One single thing. What is that thing? What is it that your character can't live without? What is the goal that drives them?

FEARS - What are they afraid of? Not a physical fear, like spiders or the dark, something emotional. Does he fear commitment? Is he afraid he's not good enough? Is he afraid that he'll never find happiness? That nobody loves him? That he's not worth loving? That he'll never measure up to his father? That his best days are over? Dig deep to find this fear, because it will become what the whole script is about. This won't be easy, because our protagonists are really ourselves... and that makes their fears our fears. But for most characters, fear is the key.

SECRETS - Secrets are my favorite part of character. Give a character something to hide and it tints every scene. The audience never has to know what the secret is, it's just a subtext. An executive with an inflated resume might make up for it by being strict and demanding respect (in fear that someone will discover he's a fraud). Sometimes the secret has to do with the plot and will be revealed "She's my sister AND my daughter!" (that secret fuels "Chinatown").

Your character chart will also list anything that may be important in the script (if it's a mystery, lots of things are clues and motives, so I tend to go into lots of detail on what character drink or wear). In my RAILROADED script (a mystery) it was important for me to remember what drink each character preferred because a glass was left at the crime scene. If certain fibers are left at a crime scene, I have to know who wore clothing with those fibers. This type of detail isn't important in most scripts (and usually falls into the set dresser and costume designer's job description) but in a mystery you have to keep track of EVERYTHING. If there's a cigarette at the crime scene you may not only have to know who smokes and what brand, but how they extinguish their cigarettes and whether they wear lipstick or use chapstick or have particularly juicy mouths.

I also write down pet words, turns of phrase, vocal rhythms, etc. I want you to be able to know who is talking from the way they form their sentences. (Some of that is intuitive, but I'll write it down as a reminder). Every character has a different vocabulary, and it's our job to keep one character's words and phrases out of another character's mouth. Listing which words "belong" to each character is helpful.

I also like to give my characters a "twitch" or "touchstone" - a physical object that represents them and has meaning to them. It's like an object that displays character. This could be as simple as Groucho Marx's cigar or as complicated as that music box that Mad Max carries in ROAD WARRIOR. That music box is a symbol of Max's lost humanity, his lost faith in the human race. It symbolizes hope and love and all of the things he lost the day that Toecutter ran over his wife and baby... killing them and killing part of Max. Find a physical object that symbolizes your character's emotional problem - something that reminds the audience of that emotional problem every time they see it. It's important to find some way to externalize the turmoil within a character.

It's critical for the audience to know and understand the characters on screen so that we care about what happens to them. That means WE need to know about those characters and find ways to SHOW the audience who those characters are. Because casting decides what a character looks like, the most important things for you to know about your characters is their Goal, their Fear and sometimes their Secret... and to use dramatic situations to SHOW these elements of character to the audience. A character isn't clothes and hair color, a character is a person. Who are your characters?

For More Script Tips: http://www.scriptsecrets.net

Okay, so what are some other important elements of characters? What do **** when you're coming up with a character?

- Bill