Christopher Riley, Screenwriter, Author, and Instructor: His theory says is that
no one is smart enough to come up with 20 bad ideas in a row.
Film Courage: Once a writer has processed their own defining moments, how do they begin to
apply that knowledge to the characters that they create? Christopher: When I think about applying
the idea of defining moments to characters,
I think in terms of these categories. If I’ve got a character who has a dream,
I’ve already looked back at my moment of watching Ordinary People and seeing this dream of somehow
getting my fingers into the clay of filmmaking. I know about how at least one dream was born,
then I can come to my character and say for this character What does it look like when
their dream was born? Now their dream may be to be an astronaut and so I would think about
what is analogous from my experience to their experience? I was watching a movie an astronaut
dream might have been born as somebody was watching a shuttle launch or the tragic
loss of a shuttle that immediately interests my writer's brain because it's unexpected
that you would see a catastrophic loss of a space shuttle and say that's what I want to do but
I think that's actually often how it works i've described television writing
to aspiring writers and the atmosphere in the writers room and how you have to compete to
get your joke on the page and how cutthroat that can be and I think i've just talked to everyone
out of wanting to be a television writer and then people will crowd to the front and say that sounds
fantastic that's exactly what I want to do so that tells me that sometimes it's even seeing
a story that seems like it would drive you away that actually attracts the die hard dreamer
so I bring that sort of general experience from life I kind of mix it up
with what i've observed in myself and I will often try to brainstorm
a bunch of different options of what that defining moment might be until I find one that both
feels emotionally real and also makes an interesting story because I might have the
character tell the story or we may flash back to see that story the writer Bill Marsilii who wrote
the film Déjà Vu talks about his discipline of brainstorming 20 options for any creative choice
and his theory he says is that no one is smart enough to come up with 20 bad ideas in a row so
one of your 20 ideas is bound to be decent so i've taken to calling that Marsilii’s rule of 20.
it is a discipline because often when we're coming up with say a potential defining moment
for a character we want to just jump at the first thing that occurs to us
part of becoming a mature writer is recognizing that it's not supposed to be that easy
and so we want to stick with it and keep coming up with options so that we don't pick the first thing
that occurs to us which probably is the first thing that is going to occur to everyone else
we want to get to something else further down the line that's unexpected that we haven't seen before
and if i'm drawing from my own life experiences that has a real chance of being fresh
because it's drawn from life not from the movies
so that would be how I would go about finding say one defining moment so a dream is born
maybe in the course of the film this dream is going to die
so then I would look at my own life and also lives of people around me that I know well and
say where have I seen a dream die and I can think for myself a defining moment where dreams died and
in my experience dreams die slowly they die kicking and screaming
we don't want to admit that thing that you dreamed is not going to happen
and so I would draw on that and say how do I how do I bring that to this character
and I would keep doing that until I had that handful of moments
that gives me an understanding of this character that makes them
complex and relatable and interesting and when I really I can feel myself when a character starts
to come alive in this way and I know I want to spend time with that character and I want to hear
the dialogue that they're going to say and I want to see them get into whatever trouble the story is
getting them into and I want to see them struggle to get out of that trouble to get to their goal
and I also want to watch them grow over the course of that story either
for good or for ill they're going to change
and they're going to change in in these moments these pivot points and so I just keep at it
until I feel like I have this full character it's it's an organic messy process definitely not paint
by the numbers but having my own history and an understanding of myself to draw on
also having this sort of set of characteristics of defining moments
helps me at least know where to look and then I just I try to keep looking and until I found
what I need to find it's interesting because we're talking about defining moments for various
characters and knowing them sometimes if i've watched a biopic I feel as if the filmmaker has
tried to cram in so many defining moments that it loses some of the impact of them and I think it's
because there's so much to tell yeah but then i've seen documentaries where they also do the same
and for some reason it lands better I don't know why that would be I don't know I do think that
the best biopics tend to focus on a single event I think of Spielberg's Lincoln
and we know so much of Abraham Lincoln's life and career and Spielberg and Tony Kushner the
screenwriter chose to focus on just a single vote in the US House of Representatives about
the Amendment to the Constitution that outlawed slavery and so out of everything you could look
at in Lincoln's life and career the film focuses on a single event and I think we get a bunch more
dramatic power focused when when we do that and it can be really tempting if you're doing
a biopic because so many interesting things happened in in many people's lives if we were
doing Winston Churchill there'd be so many things to focus on but the fantastic film darkest hour
focuses very specifically on the couple of weeks leading up to Winston Churchill's speech
to parliament where he declares we're going to fight on the beaches we're going to fight
on the landing field where he galvanizes the British people to oppose the Nazis.
That is a dramatic move to to restrict yourself in that way and at the risk of sounding
disgustingly like a film professor I'll go back to Aristotle one more time and Aristotle as
long ago as that said that the drama should be about a single
event and I think that I think he's right and I think that um
for reasons I don't understand we are we are geared toward a story of a hero struggling against
obstacles to reach a goal there is a unity to drama that both focuses its power but also helps
to give it meaning because there's a there's a configuration of events that becomes meaningful
these choices and these actions led to this outcome so that's it gives us this sense of
completion that I think we was one of the things that we long for from our stories.