How to Write a Screenplay

CORE OF THE CHARACTER

All of these characters come into conflict with the protagonist, point out his mistakes, or give him the encouragement to effect change.  That’s what it’s all about.  In a novel, a person can sit around and ponder whether he should be an angel or a devil.  In screenwriting and drama, you have to take the inner demons of the protagonist and go through a process of making them external, turning them into the proverbial angels and devils on the shoulder.  There has to be an explicit external tug of war.

And that war ultimately comes down to one battle.

The battle is to find the core of the character. What a character appears to be and what he really is are quite different.  A character might be good looking and wealthy and smooth-talking and friendly.  That’s all appearance.  You can show him writing millions of dollars in checks to help orphans.  However, until we see him make a really hard choice, we cannot truly understand him.  We cannot say that he is altruistic or giving unless he chooses selflessness AND his choice is also really difficult for him.  In drama, a billionaire philanthropist is not necessarily altruistic. A character that has little money and chooses to give money away when we know that he intended to spend the money on something else deeply personal to him… that character is altruistic.

The climax of the movie should bring the character to their hardest choice.  It should be a choice that reveals who they really are at the core of their being.  In fact, this might be the essence of drama: to create events perfectly suited to reveal the utmost depth, strength and possibility in the protagonist.  The climax will force him to choose or act in a way he was incapable of earlier in the film. The end of your story will finally reveal who he is, and what he is capable of.

The most interesting characters are dynamic characters; characters who change.  Very often characters will go from one extreme to another.  Think of Rick in Casablanca.  He hates himself, he is indifferent to the politics and he is full of anger at Ilsa. By the end of the movie, he cares about himself, the politics of his world and loves Ilsa enough to let her go.  A great template for a character is something like this:

Although my protagonist seems XXXX, by the end of the movie, he will be revealed as anything but XXXX. 

How will he get from A to Z?  The other characters will come into conflict with him, test him, point out his mistakes and give him the encouragement to change from what he appears to be into what he truly is. 

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