Christopher Riley, Screenwriter, Author, and Instructor: You find
all of these but they're like you know their cards in your poker hand
and you're not sure where you're going to play them or even if you're going to play them.
Film Courage: When we're developing a character, how much are we charting out all of sort of the
wonderful and terrible things that have happened to them? Are we doing this beforehand before
we get into the actual story, we're kind of coming up with a checklist of defining moments?
Christopher: This is one of the confounding qualities of storytelling. We don't have
a linear process where we do this first and the second. We sort of try
we have to have we have to approach the story somehow but I think that what we do is we
I typically have a notion for what is the story what maybe in a sentence
what is the story I want to tell and that tells me something about a character and
and also something about the plot that is it's somebody like this
trying to you know climb out of a well and so but then I go back to the character and I said well
I have more questions for you character where did you come from how did you get in that well what
were you doing in the field in the first place and sometimes the answers are really surprising to me
sometimes they come as sort of epiphanies as I'm out for a run or taking a shower or lying in bed
often though they come as a result of just the ditch digging of sitting and
asking these questions I know that this person to be interesting needs to have
both strength and weakness when did they discover they had that strength
when did they first experience the crippling quality of that weakness and um
then I come bring the character back to the story and now they're doing more interesting things
that I didn't expect them to do because there's more to that character and so I discover more
twists and turns that are potential within say the events or the plot of the story
and then I go back to the character so I'm I think I'm it's a very messy recursive process
when I am finding these defining moments for a character I don't know if any of them
will end up on screen at first I'm just discovering what are these moments
and then so there are things I can do with a defining moment I can just know about it
and it's going to inform how I write dialogue for this character other times I'm going to say
if I were writing Pixar's Finding Nemo I would say oh that moment when marlin's whole family
gets eaten by a barracuda I think we should see that that's really visual and exciting and tragic
would Pixar allow us to start a children's movie with that kind of scene because if we were to do
that then we would really understand why Marlon is this overprotective father who won't let Nemo have
any adventure have any fun experience any danger and we won't view him just as you know oh that
neurotic marlin we will feel with him well of course he is a hyper vigilant parent because
this tragedy struck him and we witnessed it we experienced it with him
now when I first came up with that I didn't somebody did if I was the one who had come up
with that I i wouldn't have known at first does that make it into the movie or not
there are other moments that we don't see but a character talks about they just tell you the story
of what happened or they allude to the story whatever makes great dialogue and then
other times there are moments right in the middle of the movie where a character transforms and
here I think the great example is Michael Corleone and the godfather so we know that Michael is a
war hero just back from world war ii he's the son who was not supposed to get mixed up with
the family's crime business he was supposed to go on and maybe be a senator maybe even a president
but after his father gets gunned down Michael decides he's got to take matters into his own
hands and so he goes to meet the crime boss who had his father gunned down and the police captain
who protects that other crime boss because to meet them at an Italian restaurant he has a gun planted
in the bathroom and he excuses himself from the table goes back to the bathroom gets the gun
and then there's this long pause as Michael smoothes his hair and sort of allows himself to
make his choice am I going to step across this threshold from which there can be no return or not
and then the director has set it up so Michael has to pass through three sets of doors
as he returns into the restaurant from the bathroom
just to emphasize visually this is a threshold there is a real boundary of before and after here
Michael walks out into the restaurant guns down the police captain and the other crime boss and
the rest of the movie and the next movie and the next movie the die is cast for all of those
in that moment of the change of Michael's legal status from war hero to killer
there's also a moral and a spiritual change that happens in him and
he thinks he's done this for all the best reasons for family
but in the end he becomes someone who kills members of his family for the family and he is
undone by this action by this choice that he's made in a moment that defines him so you find
that moment and you think ah that's probably a scene in the movie and in fact that becomes
the fulcr of the whole movie the moment that defines Michael as who will become the godfather
so you you find all of these but they're like you know their cards in your poker hand and you're not
sure where you're going to play them or even if you're going to play them and that is the messy
organic artistic process I suppose of crafting a story but you can't craft it if you don't have
the raw materials from which to craft it and I think that defining moments are one of those
really rich materials that we have to work with when we're telling stories about characters.