Film Courage: How does The Hero's Journey help writers develop complex characters?
Christopher Vogler, Hollywood development executive, screenwriter, author and educator: The
Hero's Journey is really useful for giving depth and dimension because it asks a lot of
questions that may not occur to the writer at first when you just dream up a character The
Hero's Journey suggests that there is a back story that the hero came from somewhere that
the hero is in some kind of a relationship to his or her world at the beginning and
that there's something a little bit out of balance about that and then there is
a barrage of impediments and obstacles and challenging people or energies that enter
into it and make life very complicated for the hero there's a villain who has often who has
different Ambitions and desires than the hero perhaps exactly contradicting with the hero's
wishes and then other characters who have their own agendas some to make fun of the hero some to
give him some grief in the Romantic department or some other area and so it it gives a lot of
a lot of scaffolding for people to work out and ask questions about the heroes I've just
been doing some Consulting on student films in Denmark I went to a film school there and also
had just been working with a Hollywood production and they all want to know you know what is The
Hero's Journey say about my story so they've laid out certain steps but they want to know
what uh what are the possibilities within the structure that they've created so there they
usually come to me for that kind of alternate possibility thinking because I've developed
by looking at thousands and thousands of scripts examples I've developed sort
of a drop down menu about everything that if you come to a certain crossroads there's one
kind of obvious thing that can happen but then there's all these other not so obvious things
that could happen other possibilities and I know that that list is theoretically infinite
because I keep thinking I've come to the end of it and I'll be watching some wonderful show
that I love and I'm thinking well I know at this crossroads they could do this this and
this those are the only four possibilities and then the filmmaker does five six seven that I
didn't think of and I love it that's a thrill to me to to see my pattern as I understand it
expand and you know to add an extra decorative two of possibilities just is a great thrill
to me so I think the the mythical mythological way of looking at things is really a practical
guidance for writers you know that it it lets them think a little outside of the box and also
provide mythological examples and that's part of how I operate people treat me like a mythological
cash machine where you know they put the card in and then I'm supposed to like a ticker tape is
supposed to come out that says when you're dealing with snakes and stones what kind of myths have to
do with that and then they'll listen to me tell some ancient story that relates to it and they'll
go ah that I could do that that's interesting you know they'll take a piece out of some myth
or fairy tale and apply it to their let's say modern day story and I just find that delightful
that that this old dusty stuff still can spark things in modern creators I think that's just
terrific what are the key elements of compelling character ah character that's a whole subject that
I didn't deal with very much in my original book except in the sense of looking at these archetypes
as you know seven or eight different aspects of possibilities for characters and I'm going at
it again from a different point of view trying to understand that word character and as I always do
I like to excavate and go back to the original meaning of the word when they made up the word
what were they thinking about and what did it mean way back when so with character you trace it back
it's actually a Greek word spelled slightly differently but it's the same word character
the original meaning of the word was that a character was either the tool that made the
impression or the impression itself like with cuneiform lettering where you take a stick and
you make wedge-shaped marks to indicate you know how many sheep or how many bales of hay
that those marks or those imprints were what they called character and then by way of metaphor
the Greeks started thinking about well human beings have those marks too human beings have
characters impressed on them the the blows of Life the kind of the good things that are
dealt out and the bad things that are dealt out leave Impressions they leave marks on you
and then also you leave marks on the world around you by how you react to what's been dealt out to
you so they put all of that together the marks the world makes on you and the mark you leave
on the world that equals your character and they had a very elaborate system of understanding this
which in sort of the typical Greek way was very humanistic what I mean is they couldn't really
deal with abstract concepts except to put them in human terms so if they're dealing with an abstract
concept like justice or revenge or excellence or struggle the only way they could really get
a grip on it was to turn it into a human character and say let's tell some stories about the goddess
of victory the god of struggle the god of good timing the goddess of luck of fortune the gods
of vengeance and retribution the goddess of justice and so they they took these abstract
qualities human characteristics and turned them into characters that they can tell stories about
and so this is an area that I'm studying now is what goes into making a character that we
create as an imaginary person but also what goes into their character what goes into making up
the nature of of that imaginary creation so everybody's got a character which is a mix of
the way the world sees you like your reputation but also how you really are inside the things
you will do and won't do the behaviors that are your downfalls or your virtues all those things
go into making up your character so this is what I'm studying now and and looking at seven or eight
of those gods and goddesses that are the Greek way of understanding these human characteristics
the one I really got started on was Arete who was a goddess of excellence and they had they
used that word Arete to mean somebody has got a retake they've they've got that quality they're
just excellent as a speaker or as a law giver or as a father or mother or cook you know they they
just they're really good and and that was called irate but then they had this story about Arete
who was a goddess who guided people on the path of virtue and they even made up a evil twin for her
who was called Kakia and she was the bad version of excellence maybe excellence that is perverted
that you're excellent at all costs and you're you want to be excellent at something so much that
you'll walk on other people's heads to get there or that you take the lazy way instead of the path
of difficulty and challenge and excellence so this is just for me a wonderful lens you know that I
use to look at these qualities and I'm trying to gather ideas about it to help writers to compose
characters who have some of these qualities and just asking themselves asking the writers
I'm asking the writers to ask themselves have I considered my character's attitude
towards Justice my character's attitude towards excellence my character's attitude towards revenge
so this is me the new area for me that I'm exploring and have you applied some of that back
onto the original example that we talked about the Cary Grant character in The Hitchcock film where
you you there was something amiss and you couldn't figure out why he was coming at it a certain way
sure well in that example from Hitchcock and notorious Cary Grant is ruled by two Gods at
once and one of them is Amore the god of love or Venus the goddess of love and he's got a gorgeous
perfect personification of Venus right in the room there with him calling him to give up this
other path but the other God that he serves is the god of Duty and I haven't figured out or analyzed
yet what that is in the Greek language but or the cast of characters but he is clearly torn
between those two and that's a great thing to do to a character is to give them two gods that they
are equally bound to and but they're in conflict and this is a great place to to put a character so
I think Cary Grant is trying to figure out which God he's going to serve and makes the mistake of
serving the god of Duty for most of the movie but in the end he realizes he strung away a treasure
and he sets aside the the the duty in order to honor the god of love or the goddess of love.