*artikel dari majalah Scr(i)pt, Mac/Apr 2004
Your character is just a name on the page—how do you make sure the reader cares about him? As strange as it may seem, character flaws and weaknesses are the things that create a bond between the reader and your character.
Your protagonist enters the world naked. You don’t have Jim Carrey playing a guy who would remove portions of his memory in order to get over a heartbreak (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), or Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett trying to live up to his own legend (The Alamo), or even Denzel Washington playing a tough ex-Marine hell-bent on revenge (Man on Fire). The role hasn’t been cast. There’s no actor bringing his personal- ity and performance to the page. All you have is the character’s name and a brief sentence describing him: “GEORGE is the most cautious person in the world—he even looks up before crossing a street.” How do we make sure a studio reader cares about your protagonist for 110 pages? How do we keep that reader involved on page 73 when that single line of character description has long been forgotten? The reader may have to cover a dozen scripts that week. How can we make sure our protagonist is the one he remembers?
You need to know your protagonist well enough to write a brief, hopefully witty, one-sentence description that sums up the essence of the character. What he wears, what color his eyes are, even knowing his educational and social background doesn’t really matter. Much of that will change with casting. What does matter is who your character is. The purpose of story is to explore character; and if you don’t know everything about your protagonist, you’re not going to be much of a tour guide for the reader and audience. Take the time to really think about who this character is before you sit down to write those 110 pages about him. A little prewriting saves a whole lot of rewriting.
THE SKIN JUMP
The cinema lights go down, and the movie begins. If the film is good, we jump into the skin of the protagonist and live his life for two hours. We worry about him, root for him and feel his pain. His joy is our joy. His anger is our anger. His fears become our fears. When the protagonist is in trouble, it’s as if we are in trouble. We have made that “skin jump” into the pro- tagonist, and we are vicariously living his life. We have stopped watching the movie ... we are living the movie.
We want to take the viewer and reader inside our character’s life. But what if the character is someone to whom it is dif- ficult to relate? What if he is a villain? Or a robot? Or a Hobbit? Or a fish? How can you ever hope to get the reader to walk 110 pages in your protagonist’s shoes if he doesn’t even have feet?
Last year’s most popular film was Pixar’s Finding Nemo written by Andrew Stanton
(story and screenplay), Bob Peterson (screenplay) and David Reynolds (screen- play). The film made nearly $340 million in its domestic theatrical run and then sold an estimated $158 million in DVD and home video on its first day of home release. People love this movie and relate to the pro- tagonist even though he’s a cowardly clown fish. If you’ve watched the “making of” documentary, you know that making the animated fish “human” was a major chal- lenge for the Pixar team. Their usual “bag of tricks” couldn’t be used because Marlin and Nemo didn’t have hands with which to gesture or faces in the human sense. Even Mr. Potato Head® has a nose! It’s difficult enough to make the audience care about a human being who will be played by a major movie star. How do you make us care about a fish that’s only a cartoon?
SHARED EXPERIENCE
When Finding Nemo begins, cute, little clownfish Marlin and his wife Coral have just moved into a larger home in prepara- tion for hatching the dozens of eggs which will become their family. The biggest con- flict in their lives is naming all of those little ones—the boys will be Marlin Jr., the girls Coral Jr. ... but Coral thinks they should name one Nemo. By creating a situation that we understand (family), we have a point of identification with Marlin and Coral. Creating a similar situation in your script will open the door to your character, but then you need to pull the audience into your character’s life.
Only seconds after we meet Marlin, Coral and the eggs, a barracuda attacks their new home. Marlin is unable to save his wife and children. Everyone is eaten except Marlin and a single egg (Nemo). Marlin feels responsible ... and we feel his pain.
Emotions create a bond between your protagonist and the audience. But hav- ing the character tell us what he is feeling doesn’t work. You need to create an emo- tional experience we can share. The deeper that emotional experience, the more we feel. Don’t protect your protagonist from physical and emotional danger. Always be looking for the worst thing that can hap- pen. Having Marlin’s family killed is bad. Having his family killed because he failed to protect them is worse.
ASSOCIATION BY GUILT
Nemo is the only family Marlin has, his only chance at being a good parent ... so he becomes overprotective of the little guy. On the first day of fish school, Marlin swims Nemo to class holding his fin the entire way. He wants Nemo to play on the sponges with the little kids and warns the teacher that his son isn’t a good swimmer. When he finds out that the class is going to the edge of the reef, he chases after them to make sure Nemo doesn’t get hurt.
Meanwhile, little Nemo has had his first taste of freedom and adventure and loves it. He and some playmates dare each other to swim out and touch the bottom of a boat in the middle of the ocean. When Marlin sees this, he loses his temper and yells at his son for putting himself in potential danger. He wants to pull Nemo out of school and keep him at home where it’s safe. A huge argument ensues. Nemo breaks from his father and swims away, and is captured by a scuba diver.
Marlin loses his son because he was over- protective. Their final conversation was an argument. Again, Marlin is responsible for the loss of his family. It’s his fault that Nemo was captured.
You might think this chain of events would make us dislike Marlin, but it has the opposite effect. If a character makes a mistake and regrets it, we feel sorry for him. Marlin had no idea when he argued with Nemo that those would be his last words to his son. Marlin thought he was doing the right thing by being so protective, and now he realizes he was wrong. “Maybe he wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been so tough on him.” Marlin needs to set things right and is look- ing for personal redemption because he contributed to Nemo’s capture. We know how bad he feels, and that offers us a doorway into the character. The bigger the guilt, the bigger the doorway. It’s because Marlin made a major error in judgement that we identify with him so much. We all have things we regret; we all have loved ones we have hurt; we all wish we could take back some action or words. We are really rooting for Marlin to find his son so that he can make up for his mistake in judgement.
HOPES AND FEARS
It’s not enough for a character to have a problem. He has to do something. Your protagonist needs to be actively struggling to resolve the conflict. If Marlin just sat around the house feeling sorry for himself, we would stop caring about him. Your protagonist needs a goal and a plan of action for achieving that goal. When the boat carrying Nemo speeds away, the scuba-diving dentist’s face mask falls off the deck into the ocean. On the mask’s strap: the dentist’s name and address. Now Marlin has a goal and a plan—he’s going to swim to Sydney, Australia to rescue Nemo.
Your protagonist’s goal must be tangible—something that we can see or something that we can see accomplished. The goal is the character’s purpose in the story. So if a character has a vague goal or a goal that’s difficult to understand, your protagonist will seem aimless and possibly pointless—not a good thing if you want us to care about him! Marlin’s goal can’t be something like “be a better father” because we can’t see that. Film is a visual medium, and the goal needs to be something we can see.
The film’s title tells us the goal in Finding Nemo, but that scuba mask gives us the plan. The sooner we, the audience, know the protagonist’s goal and his plan for achieving it, the sooner we can become involved in the outcome. You, the writer, must commu- nicate the goal and the plan to the audience/reader, or we won’t know what the protagonist is doing. We won’t know when he is
about to fail. We want the reader and later the audience to hope the protagonist will achieve his goal but fear that he might fail. Marlin’s goal becomes our goal. His struggles to find Nemo not only bring his character to the surface, but they also make us care about him. What if he can’t find Nemo? For a skin jump to work, we need to understand exactly what the character is doing.
WHEN PLANS GO WRONG
The first thing Marlin needs to do is find someone who can read the address on the mask. This is a small goal, a step in reaching the larger goal. The mask becomes a physical symbol for finding Nemo.
Marlin finds Dory, a fish with serious memory problems but with the ability to read. Before Dory gets a chance to read the mask, they are captured by a trio of sharks. When characters are in danger, we worry about them. A compelling character is one who gets deeper and deeper into trouble—put a baby on the ledge of a building, and we’re going to worry. Put the same baby in a crib, and we just think it’s cute. If you want us to care about your character, get him in lots of trouble. Make sure everything goes wrong.
Several times the mask is almost lost, and we root for Marlin and Dory to risk their lives and go back to get it. When the mask is dropped into a deep trench, we fear that it is gone forever; and Marlin may have lost his only clue to Nemo’s whereabouts. We hope Marlin and Dory can swim into the darkness and find the mask. Even when they find the mask, there is still a chance at fail- ure—still a major struggle ahead of them. The only light to read by is from a fish that’s trying to eat them. While Marlin uses himself as bait to lure the fish close to the mask, Dory reads the address on the strap. Several times Marlin almost gets munched—his potential peril involves us.
Conflict that is easily or quickly resolved doesn’t involve us. It’s the struggle which creates suspense: Will Marlin be able to keep from becoming lunch long enough for Dory to read the mask strap? You want to keep that conflict perking for pages! The best way to do that is to create a dilemma: Marlin has to choose between his own safety and getting the address on the mask. When he swims away from the hungry fish, it becomes too dark for Dory to read.
HE’S ONLY HUMAN
Once Dory has read the address, they know where Nemo is ... but how do they get there? Marlin’s plan is to swim to Sydney, Australia; but that’s many miles away, and he’s afraid of the ocean. Marlin is the most cautious fish in the sea, but he will have to swim through dangerous waters to rescue his son. The story will force him to confront his fears and deal with being overly cautious.
Look at your protagonist’s character flaw (emotional problem). Does your story make him bump into his flaw? Usually a character is in denial about his shortcoming. Marlin believes that being overly cautious is the best way to live, but that’s what caused the argument with Nemo. In scene after scene, Marlin must choose to do danger- ous things in order to rescue Nemo. When Marlin and Dory swim through a minefield of deadly jellyfish, Dory gets stung and Marlin must decide to swim back into the danger and save her. This takes courage, and we worry that Marlin may not be able to rescue Dory and may even be killed.
Marlin has to learn that his methods are wrong. Though he may risk his life again and again to find Nemo, it isn’t until he’s hanging out with Crush, the turtle, that he realizes his being overly protec- tive of Nemo was a mistake. Crush allows his kids to roam free and learn by their own mistakes. He trusts them. Marlin realizes being so protective is what caused Nemo to be captured. A character’s fears and flaws make him human ... even if he has gills.
Your protagonist’s character flaw is the story. His physical prob- lem (plot) should be created to force him to deal with this emo- tional problem. He won’t be able to resolve the physical problem without resolving his emotional problem. Just like Luke Skywalker can’t blow up The Death Star until he believes in the Force and starts trusting his intuition, Marlin can’t find Nemo unless he stops being over-cautious. By the time Marlin gets to Sydney, he’s become a legend: The little clownfish who fought three sharks, swam into the deepest trench in the sea, crossed the ocean and swam through a swarm of dangerous jellyfish. Marlin has not only conquered his own fears, but he has also conquered his flaws and now can allow Nemo to be a kid and play without constant supervision.
MAKE THE READER FEEL
It doesn’t matter if a character onscreen is emotional. What mat- ters is if those emotions are experienced by the audience. Bring us inside your lead character and make us feel what he feels. We only dislike people we don’t understand, so show us their goals, their flaws and their fears. Strange as it may seem, character flaws, weak- ness and guilt are the very things that create a bond between the reader and character. Vulnerability makes us care about characters.
Involve us in your protagonist’s struggle to achieve his goal and make sure the obstacles seem almost impossible to overcome. If the character has no chance to fail and doesn’t constantly come close to failing, we can’t root for him to succeed. Compelling characters are characters struggling on every page with problems that we understand—emotional problems that are connected to the major conflict in your screenplay.
WILLIAM C. MARTELL has written over a dozen produced films for cable and video, including the HBO World Premiere Movie Crash Dive and the family film Invisible Mom. He is the author of The Secrets of Action Screenwriting. He may be reached at: Scriptsecrets.net
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