Film Courage: How does a character arrive for screenwriters?
Is it something that is very vivid in their mind like this is almost a real person even
though it is not?
Or is it a hazy, vague thing that develops over many drafts?
Paul Joseph Gulino, Associate Professor at Chapman University Dodge College of Film and
Media Arts: I think ultimately it’s going to depend on the writer and I have know writers
that have a great character and they just want to see what kind of circumstance would
be right for this character to explore.
In fact Frank Daniel [Paul’s former Columbia mentor] used to say that you could see a story
as a scientific experiment where you take a known substance and an environment that
you know and you put them together and you see how they react, found out what happens.
Some people will say this great character what kind of circumstance would challenge
them the most and make them explode basically.
But most people tend to come up with a story I find first and they explore what kind of
character can that be and would work for my story that I have.
And in terms of how different writers work, I know some writers will base it on a person
they know and sometimes that is very useful and the advantage of that even though the
person they know has nothing to do with that kind of story is that they can get real specific.
Because you know that character, you know how they are, they are capable of some things,
they are not capable of other things.
But I’ve been in a situation where we based a person on a script that was in the story
and at the end of the story.
And at the end of the draft I was like “That’s not the right person for that story.”
So I wound up going through I called it a major character-ectomy.
I changed the…
Film Courage: Ouch!
I bet that hurt.
Paul: Right, well actually it worked out in the end.
So different writers have different processes.
But the key for me is to make it as specific as you can.
I do have student who will say “He’s 19 and a typical Freshman.”
And it’s like, there is no typical Freshman.
There is no typical anything.
Everybody is a little…everybody is unique and you look for that.
But so yes, that’s been my experience.
Film Courage: What about the science of connecting to character?
Paul: That is something that we again dedicate a chapter to [in Paul and Dr. Connie Shears
book entitled The Science of Screenwriting: The Neuroscience Behind Storytelling Strategies].
One term that gets used that I think can limit imagination is the idea of a hero.
We’ve talked about the Hero’s Journey and then people say well if I’ve got a hero,
the connotation of is someone who is heroic.
Someone who is likable and does brave things.
That’s not necessarily what is meant by the Hero’s Journey but that’s the connotation
that people have.
And the fact is that people tend to like to watch people with flaws and you don’t want
to eliminate that.
You have people that aren’t necessarily admirable.
In fact one theory we talk about, a psychologist by the name of Jonathan Gottschall has a book
on this is that we watch characters that are flawed because we learn from them.
That again (and I can get you the exact psychologist who said it) he said “Stories are flight
simulators for life.”
A flight simulator so you can make mistakes and not crash.
And a story is watching other people make mistakes so you can learn to not do those
things.
And so the question of does you character have to be likable?
Well the answer is it’s all about the primacy effect (first impressions).
In the example of J.P. McMurphy in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST.
How likable is someone who has committed and who gets into fights all the time and is in
jail and slacks off and doesn’t want to work, just wants to play cards.
You tell someone “You know I’ve got this character..”
I don’t want to spend time with that character, that’s who he is.
But when you first meet him he’s not doing those things.
When you first meet him he’s being released and he’s whooping it up for joy and then
he is out there hanging out with people and trying to encourage people and looking at
cards and things.
So our first impression of him is that and that allows us to bond with him and then in
the course of the story we get to see his flaws come out and how they play into the
circumstance of that movie.
That movie En Brouge is the same thing.
You have a hired gun and now he’s wondering what to do but you don’t know that when
you first meet him he’s like a little boy complaining that he’s stuck in this place
looking at museums and there is a dark side to it but we get to know him that way and
then we gradually learn about him and by then we’re on his side.
But the question of connecting to a main character is what exactly happens (we talk about it
in the book).
There are different theories.
There is this idea that you like a character so you sympathize with them.
But there is also a theory that you become the character.
That you literally go through a process that one theorist argues is the basis for morality.
Where you go through a process where you can feel the pain that the other person feels.
Like the example given is the other person decides that she is going to hurt the man
near her and then imagines what it would be like to be hurt and imagines that they are
the ones being hurt and feels the pain and says “No!
Not going to do it.”
So it’s more than just liking a character.
It’s actually a process by which you merge and become emotionally connected.
I don’t know if we talked about this in the book but there’s this notion of mirror
neurons, too (in the brain).
That looking at someone eating a chocolate pie
fires the same pleasure neurons in your brain as you eating it so that you…it’s not
subtle science as of yet but there are strong connections that audiences make with the character
that allows them to go on this journey and purge themselves of emotion.
As Aristotle said many years ago and I think this poses a challenge (oddly enough) for
virtual reality a few years ago they were really struggling with a way to make it a
mass consumption hit like you have JAWS or STAR WARS.
Or at the movie theater you will have a similar thing going on with public theater where they
are doing something and the problem with that is that when you surrender to a movie character,
you are surrendering.
You’re not there anymore, you stop existing and you don’t have agency.
You don’t do anything, you are just watching it, you’re just enthralled with it and you
are it.
But if you’re in virtual reality you still have agency.
You are not the person there, you are still making decisions.
So you are inevitably pulled out of it and great for a game (I’m glad they haven’t
developed them too far because I would never do anything but play virtual reality games).
It’s wonderful but this process of audience connection with character whether it’s with
movies or storyteller involves real close connection and therefore learning and you
see a character go through what we call character arc when they become consciously aware of
something they didn’t know before that’s a lesson they have to learn.
Or you have a tragedy where the character never learns but we learn that they did something
that they couldn’t recover from (they didn’t learn in time).
Or you get something really twisted like [ONE FLEW OVER THE] CUCKOO’S NEXT and we don’t
want him to learn.
It’s a tragedy that happens but something else happens so there is variations that.