- The heart of drama in any movie
is a reversal, basically.
You think somebody's gone one way
and suddenly everything changes.
(light music)
A plot twist is just something in the movie
that is a big hinge moment that you don't see coming
and I think it's not effective
when it feels like it comes out of nowhere
and is disconnected from what came before it
whereas if it feels like the culmination of something
or if it's a surprise but it's a surprise
and it connects up with things from earlier in the movie,
then it feels satisfying to an audience.
When you're plotting something out,
the worst way you can possibly approach it
is to think, what would be the craziest twist
to throw at the audience?
I don't think you should think in terms of plot twist,
I think you should think in terms of the logic
of the story and think about, kind of the overall arc
and think about kinda the spine underneath it
and what dramatically makes sense.
Once you start thinking of that in terms of the
perspective of your main character
and putting yourself, seeing it through their eyes,
it's gonna lead you to opportunities.
- I suspect foul play.
In Looper, we start out with a character
of older Joe, Bruce Willis's character
and he's had the woman he loves, kind of violently
taken away from him by this evil character, the Rainmaker
and we experience that with him
and so we're on the side of yes,
find this evil person and kill him.
And then, at some point in the movie,
we reveal what that actually means,
finding the person and killing them.
And it's kind of an emotional pivot point,
where suddenly your emotional perspective
on both the character of older Joe and his quest, changes.
- So why don't you do what old men do and die?
- The 1970s version of the film Sleuth
with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier,
the setup is very simple.
It's a country estate in the middle of England,
it's a rich, wealthy mystery writer.
He invites a young hairdresser to come out
for the afternoon.
He fixes him a drink and they start small talk
and then basically he says,
so I understand you're in love with my wife.
And that begins a game of cat and mouse between them.
- Well, it's the truth.
- With your information, of course.
- I like the relationship between telling a story
on the screen and a card trick.
I'm always really interested by that analogy
because there are a lot of similar elements
that are at play and one of the big ones is misdirection,
the notion of like, look over here
while you're actually, you know,
slipping a card in their pocket
or setting something else up here.
The way that usually works the best
is when it's emotional misdirection,
basically when you're guiding the audience emotionally,
to feel a certain way and that's gonna bias them
to looking at things from a certain angle
while the thing that you're actually setting up
is in the other direction.
That's always, I think, the most effective thing.
Inglourious Basterds, you don't think of,
really as a plot twist movie
but it may be the number one example of
a thing that happened at the end of the movie
that I didn't expect, when I felt as if
I was floating off of my seat in the theater
with the realization of oh my God,
this is what this movie is doing.
The fact that we know it's a,
here's a gang that's gonna try and kill Hitler movie,
and so from the very start,
all of our expectations, emotional and otherwise
are tuned towards tragedy
because no one's gonna kill Hitler,
we know they're not and so these guys are gonna fail.
Because of that, that's the ultimate misdirection.
So at the end of it, when you're waiting for it all
to go wrong and it does all start going wrong, it happens.
And they win and I remember when I realized
I was watching a fantasy,
I remember that having the emotional effect on me
that I think is the ultimate thing that any plot twist
could ever aim for, which is a feeling of revelation.
You feel like the floodgates have opened in your heart
and like, oh my God, this is what this is actually doing
and that for me, exemplifies the emotional reaction
that the best plot twist can give you.
You know that you've pulled off a great plot twist
when it feels satisfying beyond just,
oh that reaction, when you actually feel like
people are happy that it has happened.
After it's done, it feels like it was inevitable,
even though they didn't see it coming.
- That's some heavy duty conjecture.
- Plot twists in my movies, again,
I try and make it so that they're never really the point.
Like with Knives Out for example,
it has a revelation at the end in terms of
a who done it style of revelation.
For me, it's much more about the relationship
that has to the character Marta's arc
throughout the story and how you're going to react
to the very last shot of the movie basically.
To me, that's kind of the actual twist
that I'm doing with the audience is where she ends up
at the end of the film, in relation to the family.
And yeah, and similar with Brick, like I mentioned,
there's the plot twist of oh,
it was actually the femme fatale the whole time
but the real plot twist for me is what she
tells him at the very end that completely shifts
your emotional perspective.
The stuff I'm always going for
and trying to get people an experience of
is kind of an emotional revelation as opposed to
you know, a true plot twist.
(light music)