Film Courage: If we look at Forrest Gump does he have defining moments?
Christopher Riley, Screenwriter, Author, and Instructor: Wow,
that's a really interesting question.
So Forrest, he experiences a moment that doesn't transform his inner nature his inner nature is
is constant he is he's an innocent that's his genius but when the movie opens he's
an innocent alone and the moment that he climbs onto the school bus and meets Jenny
defines his life his life will never be the same after that moment that he climbs onto the school
bus and in fact there's dialogue in the film where he says it's I can't quote it but it's it's funny
what a a person remembers I don't remember my first pair of shoes etc he says but I do remember
the first time I heard the sweetest voice in the whole wide world and he meets Jenny on
the bus she invites him to sit beside her and he says in very defining moment language from
that moment on we was like peas and carrots so he experiences a moment that defines him even though
it doesn't redefine his inner nature it defines his experience of life I think that when Forrest
finds out he's got a son that is a transforming moment it redirects the
course of his life his life will now be about caring for a little Forrest
and I think that Jenny's death it is also probably a defining moment for him because
his life at least as told in the movie is bookended by meeting Jenny and then losing Jenny
but receiving from her the gift of his son and that then will define the rest of Forrest's life
so defining moments don't always transform say the nature of a person
but they can still change the course of of their lives I think we see that with
Jack in Titanic Jack is not a character who really has a big need to grow and change
Rose definitely needs to be transformed when we meet Rose she's ready to
leap off the back of the ship to her death by the time the movie's done Rose is all about surviving
so she has been transformed Jack is still kind of the same guy
but I think we could say that meeting Rose is a defining moment for Jack and if he had not met her
his certainly those whatever three or four days of the voyage would have been different
and while that sounds like a short period of time that was that was his whole life that
was all the life he had left he might also say winning that card game that got him the ticket
on Titanic would also be a defining event in his life yeah so with Forrest Gump it seems as
if there were maybe stronger in some sense turning point like in terms of the defining moments that
changed a lot of the people because if you look at Lieutenant Dan he was so angry he was
so competitive he had so much vengeance and then toward the end when you see him at the wedding
he's he's a different person he's transformed yes so for Lieutenant Dan
his life was on a clear course toward what he thought was his destiny which was to
die heroically in battle which that was what his family did and Forrest intervened and pulled
him out of danger and disrupted the course that Lieutenant Dan thought his life was supposed to be
on so that was a moment that redefined Lieutenant Dan 's life in a way Lieutenant Dan despised and
then Lieutenant Dan was on that course of being completely unhappy with a life that he saw as
he's been cheated so all he's got now is just emptiness until he is on the shrimping boat
in the middle of the hurricane with Forrest and he climbs up the mast in the middle of that hurricane
and has a screaming match with god over his destiny and Forrest tells us that in that moment
he believes that god and Lieutenant Dan somehow came to peace with each other and Lieutenant
Dan is a different person after that which makes possible Lieutenant Dan showing up at the wedding
now he's got new legs he has a wife and he's no longer the bitter person he's been made whole
and we within the movie we have the two pivot points the rescue which denied him his destiny
and then the confrontation between Lieutenant Dan and god in the midst of a hurricane
which then makes his growth possible so we can only understand Lieutenant Dan 's
character arc through those two pivot points and then with Jenny here she recommends for Forrest
to run to run from the bullies but really that's a metaphor for what she'd been doing all her life
and so we don't see her toward the end until she comes back and she's changed
but we just know that she was a runner herself and then she's much different
yes and in many ways the moment that made it possible for her to come home
happened off screen we we understand well we see her hit bottom when she when she climbs up
on that railing of a balcony at a new year's eve party I think and so we understand that
either we've seen a defining moment or that she is in the zone where those things kind of happen
her return to forest is evidence that she has had this transformative kind of experience
but I think it shows us that defining moments can be
kind of if we're talking about playing cards they can be played in different ways they can
be played on screen off screen through just a character recounting something that happened or
we end up with more defining moments than we can actually use it's one of my frustrations I was
working today on my next feature screenplay and the last two pages after fade out
are a nice little dialogue scene that tells the story of my main character's defining moment and I
know that that's going to fall out of the script because it just it doesn't need to be in there
but I needed to know what that moment was
so that I could write the rest of what that character says and does
so even when these defining moments don't end up on screen they still enrich my understanding
this is also something that can be really valuable for actors for them to understand not only
that this is true of my character but why this is true of my character
so I’ll tell a story out of school when I worked at warner brothers in the script department
the movie Twister started shooting before the script was fully written
and producer Ian Bryce called me up and said can you send a script typist to Oklahoma
to work with the writer as he finishes writing this movie while we shoot it
and I said that sounds like too much fun I’ll send myself so I was on a plane the next day
to Oklahoma City and I ended up out in the middle of a farm field with 300 vehicles and making this
big tornado action movie Helen Hunt plays a meteorologist who's chasing tornadoes obsessively
for reasons that no one knew at the moment because that scene hadn't been written yet
so she's having to go out and try she's trying to put this scientific instrument place it in
the path of a tornado so it'll be sucked up and they'll learn all kinds of things about
tornadoes she's putting her life at risk putting her relationships at risk and at some point they
know will write the scene for her backstory the defining moment that made her a tornado hunter but
they didn't need to film that for several weeks into the future and they didn't seem to take
into account that Helen Hunt as an actor would like to know why she's doing all these things
eventually they came up with what we would describe as a defining moment a moment from
her childhood when she experienced a killer tornado and that birthed in her the dream
that she would someday make the world safer by getting people more advance warning of tornadoes
my argument is it would have been a real service to Helen Hunt as an actor to know what that was
while she was chasing those tornadoes and that I'll just use as a metaphor for the way that
an understanding of defining moments can be of use and a value to actors certainly
directors editors cinematographers everyone I described
the way Michael Corleone is in the bathroom in that pivotal defining moment for the godfather
you can see evidence that everyone on the team appreciated what that moment meant for
that character and for the film the production designer had to design three sets of doors for
the character to walk through the cinematographer had to arrange the shot that way the editor the
composer had to all support that moment not cut past it because oh my gosh how much time are we
spending in this bathroom nothing's going on in here but everybody recognized that yes this is
where Michael is going through this metamorphosis and so we have to support and dramatize
all of the interaction that is happening outside of our view somehow we have to make that visible
on the screen and the entire team understood intuitively or not what a defining moment that was
and built an entire film around that moment we've talked a lot about
defining moments in drama but in comedy as well I mean we could think of so many John Hughes films
that had great defining moments whether it was 16 Candles or Home Alone or something I mean
there's just is there a difference in the way that a comedic defining moment is done
I think I am not a comedy writer I it just gives me terrible anxiety to think about exchanging
money for laughs and I have friends who specialize in comedy I think it's a gift that I don't have
but to the extent that I understand comedy comedy works a lot like drama except it's just
funny we laugh so when a character is pursuing a goal they pursue it to absurd lengths
in a way that you wouldn't do in a drama but the character arcs
still often have to do with character transformation
I think that the deepest and and like most satisfying comedies really are dramas with laughs
and so I think that these defining moments absolutely exist you might need a moment
a defining moment to help us understand why a character would do the absurd things that they do
but so that they may be a of a different quality when I brainstorm my 20 possibilities
i'm going to pick a different defining moment in a comedy than I am in a gritty drama
just for tone but it's still performing those functions of either explaining
why the hero wants what they want why they need to grow and change the way they need to
or that's showing us the transformation as it unfolds step by step.