Film Courage: Why do you like twist endings?
John Gray, Writer, Director, Producer: I guess I love them. As a kid growing up I
loved trying to see the twist coming, trying to solve it. I rarely could as a kid and I
just love the idea of of your expectations and your experience kind of being turned on its head
and with something else all along, I love that. On Ghost Whisperer we started developing this
idea of twists with with every episode and then twist upon twists and all kinds of things and
so I really got very comfortable with it in that and loved it and now in these short films
I'm doing it all the time. I just almost all of them have had at least one twist. I usually try
to get three twists in to really confuse the audience, they don't see it coming. In a short
film it's particularly difficult because you have so little time to lay the pipe for for a twist and
so the audience and if they know there's going to be a twist they know they're watching this film
because it can't possibly just be this there's got to be something else going on with this character
so you have to it's a delicate balance of having to try to redirect the audience
and sort of have a red hairy twist that they think it's going to be and then the actual twist which
they can never see coming and every movie I do it becomes harder and harder to come up with that
twist of well we never saw that coming but it's fun it's a great challenge to do it why would
you say it's become harder is that because so much has been done so much has been done
and there's a thing of trying to top yourself and again it's the short film sort of format
and and sometimes I work I just start with the ending if I'm trying to develop a twist I start
with the ending and then I go backwards how how many convolutions can I take away from this ending
that that makes it a surprise it makes it a twist or yeah and then by doing it backwards
something that I can write a script in a linear way beginning to end with one final twist
but then I'll go backwards and think about where else can I put another twist where is there oh
look in scene three I could plant this seed that no one's really notice but then it's going to pay
off in this scene and then when the twist happens everyone will be an aha moment of oh that's why
those things were there so it's just it's a it's a mechanical thing in a way it's like a craftsman
kind of thing to to do a good twist and so now I've just I kind of love them and every time I
write a short film I become terrified I'm not be able to find a good twist or enough of them
what is the Hollywood ending and what's wrong with the Hollywood ending I don't know what that means
today I mean I think at a certain point in film history it referred to the idea of everyone is
happy everything's tied up in a bow and your leave the theater completely satisfied and
everything's good and yeah there's certainly nothing wrong with that and that's certainly
what a lot of people go to the movies for they don't they don't want to have enough depression
and unhappiness in their lives they don't need to see it on screen but for an artist that's normally
just an unsatisfying way to work and you're for most writers and directors and actors you
you you just want to do work that reflects life a little more it doesn't have to be not uplifting
but realistic I just wanted to be a little more realistic and I think that the idea of a Hollywood
ending it's not really prevalent that much anymore I think because of the streaming influx
of streaming services and digital everything I think audiences are growing more sophisticated
and are more willing to accept a convoluted ending or a more complex ending and I mean I haven't
gotten a note like that in years about about an ending to make it more palatable or more Hollywood
how do you pull off a twist ending well it's it's really like a magician's trick it's about
misdirection it's about telling the audience to look over here when what I'm really doing is over
here and it's really tricky because you were just talking about how sophisticated audiences
are today so they see it coming right away so you really got to be careful and what I try to do with
like a a triple twist kind of a thing is I set something up that the audience right away feels
like oh that's what this is what it's going to be it's going to be I know it I can tell right away
and you you play that along and then at the same time I try to introduce what I would call the red
herring twist which is a little thing that you you you weave into a scene that you do in such
a way that the audience is going to notice it and they're going to think that they just caught you
ah this is why this guy's there because in the end it's going to be that and you play that and
if you've seen you you play those expectations and you try to disguise it like I'm being clever now
and I'm try to pull this over on you but you're too smart for me and in the meantime there's a
third thing that just comes out of the blue that they never saw coming it's been there the whole
time because you can't just do a these Ex-Machina you just you can't just you've got to have it
woven in but it's something that they never really thought about as as something's going to pay off
so this sounds very esoteric it's it becomes more obvious in the actual execution of it but that's
my that's the way I do it and like oftentimes I'll my first pass on the script I'll do the obvious
Choice and then the the red herring Choice and then I gotta really struggle to figure okay how
is it even different even another twist on this twist that we plant in the beginning that no one
realizes we've been tracking this whole time so it's it's fun it's great fun to pull it off and
it's what's wonderful about it and I love some about my short films is to sit in an audience in
a theater at a film festival and you have people react to those twists it's fantastic and it's one
of the things I love about short films by the way because of my TV work I didn't I was a connected
to the audience everyone's watching on TV in their home and I don't know but on the film festival
circuit where I'm a regular with these short films it's phenomenal and people seem to love short
films these these screenings are packed and we get these big theaters and it's it's about as good
experience as you can have making a movie watching your story unfold even if it's just 10 minutes
with an audience that that gets it is there a director or writer director that you remember
from the beginning watching movies back in in Brooklyn that was the master of the twist ending
well I mean I guess Hitchcock of course comes to mind immediately but I think I became more
enamored as a kid of the twist ending in literature in things I would read and you're
so much you have so much more opportunity to do twists in fiction because the your readers
can't see anything so you could be describing a character or a location in a way that can disguise
the fact that it's really this or this person is really that person the unreliable narrator but
you don't have that luxury with a movie because they're they're seeing everything you're doing
so it's you're that much more challenging but the answer to the question is as a kid I remember
reading detective fiction and and that kind of stuff and really being drawn in by a good twist
that I didn't see coming should the end of a story always tie back to the beginning I don't
know if if it always yeah like a rule I think is great if it does it's a great thing visually to
do and I think it gives the audience more of a feeling that they've done this complete Journey
I did it not to a grandiose myself but I did a movie Once about the relationship between
Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin and I began the movie in Dean Martin's dressing room
on a close-up of a glass of scotch with ice cubes in it and I held that for a long time
in the background you could hear a nightclub because some muffled comic and people laughing
and hooting and and that hand came into the frame and took the drink and we revealed Dean Martin
and at the end of the movie when they break up it also happens in this time in Jerry's dressing room
and they're saying goodbye they just said they have farewell performance of the Copacabana
we've gone through it's like 10 years of their lives and when Dean says goodbye and they just
have the very awkward kind of parting full of pain talk about subtext they're dying inside
each one of them but neither one can talk about it they can just do these perfunctory
good show yeah best one okay good take care yeah meantime it's like oh don't leave me
so we did the scene and then afterwards I leave with Jerry just looking in the mirror when Dean's
walked away and I pan down and I find a glass of scotch just mirror the first shot totally and
so I mean that's just an example again not that like but it was I'm such a genius but those are
really great visual ways to tie things in and I had to fight with the network about keeping
that cut on his face just cut out on his face no no there's a reason but anytime you can tie
in the beginning to the end or any other part of the movie callbacks are always yeah they'll the
joke in movies you can never pull a gun on screen without having that gun play somehow in the movie
you can't show it you can and I feel like that's true about everything in the movie you can't
introduce anything in a film that doesn't somehow call back later and even if it's a character
everything in the movie has to be there for a reason and I think it teaches you a great
discipline in writing if you try to apply that everything you write okay I'm going
to introduce this prop this this person is this event and it can't be just there for the sake of
being there it's got to be there to serve the story and so how do we call it back later on
and callbacks were different than bookending I suppose so I mean I think they can be the same but
they could also be different in that a callback it just could be just even just a fun thing where
we we see a joke introduced at the beginning of a film someone always loses their glove
and then a third of the way through the film that that comes up again that lose the glove and again
it's an example of like never like something go to waste don't don't introduce someone who loses
the glove and then not somehow bring them back later not pay that off in some way so
I think if you have to be strict strict about it bookends obviously being in the end of a film and
callbacks can just happen anywhere in the body of a movie but also I don't want to feel like there's
rules like that they really aren't it's just about what what you feel works for your story.