Trust the audience

The Hollywood Reporter recently posted a fantastic roundtable interview with directors Gus Van Sant, Ben Affleck, Quentin Tarantino, Ang Lee, Tom Hooper and David O. Russell.  In my humble opinion, the whole thing is worth a look, but there's one section in particular I want to highlight.

THR: How do you deal with executive interference? When Django was running three hours and Harvey Weinstein was pressuring you to bring it lower, how did you handle that? 

Tarantino: It's not a big deal. I didn't want a three-hour movie, either. It's a big epic and everything, so I figured it would be around 2:45, and that's what it is. When you're cutting it down, at that moment in time, before you watch it with an audience, you know it's too long, but you can't imagine taking anything out. So then you watch it with an audience, and then all of a sudden -- "Oh, wow, that is kind of boring now!" or "No, this is not as suspenseful by the time we got to it as it needs to be." 

But you can only go so far in the Avid room on your own. At some point, you have to watch it with an audience. And then literally 15 minutes just come flying out, where before you couldn't imagine a minute leaving. (Laughter.) 

Russell: You sit through one of those screenings where all of a sudden everyone's bored, and then you come back and just like … 

 Tarantino: "I mean, guys, the story could never make sense if you take one more minute out of it!" And then you watch the movie and 15 minutes are gone by noon the next day! (Laughter.)

This is why I'm a big believer in doing table reads of your script once you've gotten it to the point where you can't imagine making any further changes.  Some of you might even remember a puppet offering up that advice.

I've done this a few times and it really helped with one script in particular.  I had sort of a tricky tone to balance between comedy and horror, and for the most part the table showed me that I was pretty on target.  Jokes landed as well or better than I imagined, the pace picked up in the right spots and the scenes had momentum all the way up to the shocking death at the end of Act Two.  In fact, going into Act Three you could really feel the low point.

And then came the scene that killed all the momentum dead.  When I wrote it, it made sense.  The protagonist pretty much just had his legs kicked out from under him.  All the easy solutions were denied him and his efforts to fix things not only resulted in at least one death that (hopefully) the audience didn't see coming, but it actually made things worse.  So I wrote a scene where the character goes to a bar and wallows in his situation.  The intent was to set up that he was ready to walk away rather than take one last shot.  And then after wallowing there, something leads him to another encounter which ends up provoking him to action.

Problem - the bar scene brought all the momentum to a screeching halt.  It was probably less than two pages, but it felt like ten.  With every syllable, I was aware of the energy being sucked out of the room and even when things got back on track, I could tell that this scene was a dud.  I never would have realized that without the read-thru because even though I was iffy about a few scenes, nothing made me especially concerned about this story beat.

Always trust your audience.  Be attuned to their energy.  If you can read a room, you can go far.

21 Jump Street - a lesson in economical story set-up

I've talked before about how important the first ten pages of a script are.  One of the biggest issues I seen in amateur writing is writers taking too long to get their story in motion.  A bad writer thinks he needs 30 pages to set up his premise; a good writer can explain a lot in a third of that time.

I saw 21 Jump Street this weekend, and was impressed at how much the writers packed into the first ten minutes or so.  These are the plot-points that the script blows through:

- Jonah Hill was an awkward dork in high school.  Girls didn't like him (we see one hot girl rather cruely reject him) and Channing Tatum's popular jock character often teased him.
- Tatum's character couldn't go to prom because of bad grades, leaving him as humiliated as he made Hill feel.
- After graduation, the two re-encounter each other at the police academy.  It turns out, Hill is an ace at the academic stuff while Tatum is equally gifted at the physical challenges.  The two become friends and help each other through it.
- The two are assigned to bike patrol in the park.
- After botching a drug bust, the two are reassigned to an undercover unit at 21 Jump Street.

All of that only takes about a minute of time to set up in the trailer, and to be honest, in the movie, it feels like there's not much else added into those scenes.  I could easily imagine the hack writer version of this idea dragging its feet and not arriving at the church on Jump Street until p. 25.




Hack Writer would have insisted on a full 10-minute prologue in the school, driving home the point again and again that Jonah's a nerdy outcast and that Channing's big man on campus.  Here the point is made quickly - Jonah tries to ask out a girl way out his league, she crushes him, and Channing taunts him.  We don't need three scenes of bullying, we don't need to see Channing treated as the star athlete who has girls practically throwing their panties at him.  Their characters are such understandable archetypes that the script need only suggest these aspects of their characters and let us fill in the blanks.

Ditto for the police academy scenes.  The dynamic there really is established as fast as it is in the trailer.  We don't need a whole classroom scene to show off Jonah's smarts - just have him get back an A+ grade.  Similarly, two shots of Jonah being taken down by Channing in a wrestling match easily establishes the dichotomy.  From there, all it takes is a montage of them helping each other and we're off an running.

Why is it okay to do this ADD version?  Because as important as the set-up is, it's not the point of the story.  The story is about two guys who go back to high school while undercover and find that all the rules have changed.  It's about how it affects their friendship.  It would mess with the pacing to establish them as enemies, spend a whole act making them friends, then spend most of the movie with them breaking up only to make up at the end.  We just need a hint of how they became friends so we can take it as a given, and then enjoy how the rest of the story challenges that.

So when setting up your story, trust the audience to fill in the blanks.  Brevity reigns when getting to the main hook of your story.

You can always cut something

If there's one mistake first-time writers make, it's over-writing. I'm not just talking about writing dialogue and speeches that go on too long. Often they'll write too many scenes to drive home a particular point. They won't just start with Joe on a train just as it pulls into the station in his hometown, they show Joe packing in his hotel room. Then they show him checking out of his hotel and asking for directions to the train station. Then we see him buy his ticket for home, then an entire scene of him getting on the train and watching the world go by, and THEN at last, we see him arrive at home and the story finally starts.

So what could have taken one scene and one page ends up consuming ten pages and ten minutes of screentime.

Guys like me often harp on the "Start a scene as late as possible, leave a scene as soon as possible" rule, but I'd also encourage writers to think hard about if a particular scene is even necessary. We don't always need to see A to B to C to D. Sometimes you can show us A, cut to D and leave B and C as points that we can fill in for ourselves.

If you've got a script that's 128 pages and you're convinced you can't cut any more, you're wrong. I just read a script this week that was 105 pages and jam-packed with story and character development. It was a fast moving plot that seemed to contain twice the twists and turns that I see in the first-timer scripts I sometimes end up reading.

It's amazing the blanks that an audience is capable of filling in. Trust them. Leave something to their imagination. See how much you can cut before they get confused. And true, you won't always know. If you watch DVD deleted scenes, you'll often see scenes that were cut for redundancy. Even the pros have trouble with this, but that doesn't mean it's not worth the effort to master.