What's the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay

An Essential Guide for Directors and Writer-Directors

Peter Markham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000173895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

A structured perspective on the crucial interface of director and screenplay, this book encompasses twenty-two seminal aspects of the approach to story and script that a director needs to understand before embarking on all other facets of the director's craft.

Drawing on seventeen years of teaching filmmaking at a graduate level and on his prior career as a director and in production at the BBC, Markham shows how the filmmaker can apply rigorous analysis of the elements of dramatic narrative in a screenplay to their creative vision, whether of a short or feature, TV episode or season. Combining examination of such fundamental topics as story, premise, theme, genre, world and setting, tone, structure, and key images with the introduction of less familiar concepts such as cultural, social, and moral canvas, narrative point of view, and the journey of the audience, What's The Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay applies the insights of each chapter to a case study—the screenplay of the short film Contrapelo, nominated for the Jury Award at Tribeca in 2014.

This book is an essential resource for any aspiring director who wants to understand exactly how to approach a screenplay in order to get the very best from it, and an invaluable resource for any filmmaker who wants to understand the important creative interplay between the director and screenplay in bringing a story to life.

Part A

The approach

1

What’s the story?

Directors are storytellers. In order to tell the story in their screenplay, they need to understand what a story is.

When filmmaking students (and some teachers too) are asked to tell the story of a film, they will often begin by saying “It’s a story about …” or even simply “It’s about …” Say Wong Kar-Wai In the Mood for Love is the film under consideration, they might offer “It’s a story about two lonely people,” or “It’s a story about two lonely people in a relationship,” or simply “It’s about loneliness and love.” None of these sentences describes a story. “Two lonely people” refers to the film’s main characters. “Two lonely people in a relationship” describes characters in a particular circumstance. “It’s about loneliness and love” is more of a thematic than a narrative notion, a concept, an abstraction. Of course it’s important for the director to know their characters, to grasp their condition, their circumstances or state of being, and of course it’s helpful to have a sense of the thematic aspects of their movie or TV episode and what these may be about, but unless the director understands what a story is, they won’t be able to tell one, and if they can’t tell one they won’t be able to incorporate those other aspects—characters, circumstances, theme—into the elements of their craft.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines story thus: “A narrative of real or (usu.) fictitious events, designed for the entertainment of the hearer or reader; a series of traditional or imaginary incidents forming the matter of such a narrative, or a succession of significant incidents.”

A story is a progression. Two lonely people fall unexpectedly in love but, faced by their mutual sense of guilt, find themselves unable to maintain their romance, so they go their separate ways. That’s a story.

Evident in this progression, as it pertains to dramatic narrative, is an element of conflict. There is an obstacle that the lovers face—their sense of guilt, which conflicts with their mutual attraction. A tale of the couple meeting, falling in love, and living happily ever after might be a story but would be unlikely to prove a very compelling one. Devoid of suspense and dramatic tension, it would pose no questions and would leave an audience with nothing to want for the characters, whom as a result it would be unlikely to care about. Also integral to story, at least in its manifestation of dramatic narrative, is the element of sacrifice. Something is lost in order that something might be gained, the togetherness of lovers, for example, so that their love might be affirmed, or the life of a protagonist, so that their sense of meaning might be encapsulated.

The Shorter OED further defines story as plot or storyline, thus begging the thorny question as to whether plot and story are the same or, if they are not, what the difference between the two might be. Views on this are contradictory.

Plot can be seen as the causality of events, how one thing leads to another. Story can be understood as the delineation of events, one thing after another. Here plot is why what happens happens, whereas story is simply what happens.

This would appear not to take into account the emotional core of dramatic narrative, however, so in order to accommodate this lack, the distinction might be reversed, plot defined as the listing of events, story as the underlying emotional journey(s) of the character(s). Here, plot is surface, story essence.

The term plot might also be applied to a non-linear sequence of events in the storytelling as opposed to the linear sequence of the underlying story. The audience journeys through the plot’s reorganization of incident in order to discover the story and its chronology, as it does for example with Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or Christopher Nolan’s Memento.

(Plot can also mean conspiracy, suggesting perhaps the formulation of a transgressive act—a fundamental ingredient of drama.)

For the purposes of the director meeting the screenplay, however, either as writer-director encountering it wearing the director’s hat for the first time, or as director encountering it simply for the first time, the following distinction might prove the most useful.

Story is the essence that underlies the narrative, the character’s journey of wants, needs, and motivation at the heart of the film. It’s the emotional and cognitive journey that the narrative embodies.

Plot is the mechanism by which the story moves forward.

Thus, to relate the plot of a screenplay or film is to relate the raw events, one after the other. To relate the story is to reveal the emotional narrative of the main character(s). Plot prompts the audience to ask “What is going to happen next?” Story engages emotionally. Both compel, but whereas the audience may never have experienced the specific events of a movie, will rarely have lived through its plot, it will, to a greater or lesser extent, have experienced the emotions, wants, needs, and fears of the film’s characters as manifested in the story. Indeed, in Lessons with Kiarostami, master director Abbas Kiarostami says “What happens on the screen has no impact without past experiences brought by audiences.”

Returning to In the Mood for Love, its plot might be set out as follows:

Hong Kong. 1962. Chow Mo-wan, a journalist who aspires to write martial arts serials, rents a room with his wife in the same building and on the same day that Su Li-zhen, secretary to a shipping manager, arrives with her husband. The spouses of both tend either to work late or travel away from home so that, although their neighbors have formed a bustling social group, the two find themselves solitary in their respective apartments. When they go to the noodle shop, however, they encounter each other. Their loneliness, accentuated when Chow’s gambler friend Ah Ping takes advantage of him, and when Su has to cover up for her boss’s extra-marital affairs, brings them together. In realizing that their spouses are having an affair with each other, they decide to re-enact its possible beginnings in order to learn how the relationship might have started. By spending time together, however, they find themselves falling in love. Chow is to leave Hong Kong for Singapore and suggests Su should go with him, but, after waiting for her, leaves without her so that when she arrives late, she finds him gone. Some time after, she goes to Singapore, where she calls him. He picks up but says nothing. When he returns to his apartment, he discovers lipstick on a cigarette butt, so he knows she’s visited. He tells a friend how, in the past, people would whisper their secrets into holes in trees, which they’d block with mud. Years after, Su returns to the apartment building in Hong Kong, asking her former landlady if her room is for rent. Chow returns later, to be told that a woman and her son are now resident in the building. He leaves, not realizing that this is Su (with a boy who is perhaps his own son). Later, visiting the ruined temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, he whispers unheard words into a hole in a wall, which he then plugs with mud.

The story of the film might be described thus:

A man and a woman, lonely because of the absence of their respective spouses, discover a painful truth—that their unfaithful mates are having an affair. In trying to work out how this began, they re-enact the possibilities, but by doing so fall in love themselves. Shamed in the realization that they’re behaving in the same illicit way as their spouses, they contrive to end their romance although remaining unable to deny it.

As is the case above, the description of a plot is usually much longer than that of a story. Such is the case with Andrea Arnold’s short film Wasp:

Zoeˉ takes her three girls and baby son along with her when she reprimands a neighbor who has intervened in a scrap between their children. On her way home after fighting with the woman, Zoeˉ encounters Dave, who invites her for a drink. Claiming her children are not hers but belong to a friend, she agrees, saying she will meet him in the pub once they have been picked up. At home she calls a friend to ask them to take care of the children, only to learn she’s unavailable. A wasp buzzes at a window, which she opens in order to free it. Zoeˉ then sets off for the pub with her children. Leaving them outside, she enters to find Dave. He invites her to a drink but then suggests she buy the first round. Zoeˉ buys crisps for the children as well as Dave’s lager but without sufficient cash foregoes her own drink. When, outside the pub, the children complain that they wanted fries, not crisps, she changes the subject, inviting them to dance to the pub’s music. After she’s gone back inside to take Dave his lager, darkness falls and the children run wild in the street, while in the pub Zoeˉ and Dave grow more intimate. Dave suggests they go to Zoeˉ’s home, which she says is not possible. He lives with his mother meanwhile, so his home is not an option either. When Zoeˉ sees one of the children tapping at the window, she pretends to Dave that she needs the restroom and leaves him, passing her adversary from earlier in the day, who repeats her threat that social services will take her children. Angered when one of them asks if she’s going to have sex with Dave, Zoeˉ tells them that they must wait a little longer for her while keeping out of sight. In his car, Dave wants to drive off, but Zoeˉ asks that they remain in situ. While they make out, the children spot a passer-by discarding a takeaway and one of them collects it. When a wasp from the garbage lands on the baby’s face, one of the girls screams, prompting Zoeˉ to leave Dave and rush over. The wasp crawls into the baby’s mouth, terrifying Zoeˉ, but after a while flies out. On seeing the food around his mouth, Zoeˉ blames the girls for the wasp, upsetting them but then comforting them when they cry, an action Dave witnesses on arriving at the scene. Shortly after, while the children eat fries, he tells Zoeˉ he will take them all home so that they can chat.

The film’s story, on the other hand, might be described as follows:

Lonely and trapped in impoverished single motherhood, Zoeˉ, who is desperate to engage the affection of Dave, frees a wasp trapped in her kitchen before taking her children along with her as she goes to meet him. Neglecting them, she tries to win his love, but is interrupted in her efforts when she finds a wasp about to sting her baby son. The threat prompts Zoeˉ to realize that her love for her children is paramount, which in turn moves Dave, who at last shows concern for her.

The director should not only know both the story and the plot of their screenplay but also be capable of telling them to their creative team—producer, production designer, cinematographer, costume designer, editor. They might initially ask these key collaborators themselves to tell the story. If they can’t, perhaps this is because they’re not right for the film, perhaps they simply don’t know how to tell a story, or perhaps the screenplay does not make the story clear. Should they all happen to tell the same wrong story, either the screenplay is suggesting this or the director’s sense of the story is mistaken. If they tell different wrong stories it may mean that the screenplay is leaving itself open to individual interpretation and that its story needs to be made clearer.

The director should be able to tell the story to themself too. If they can’t, how are they going to tell it to their audience? How are they going to find the means of telling it? The visual and aural language, the staging, the style, the modulation of energy, rhythm, tension, suspense, and drama?

Ideally, the director should need to tell the story. They should feel an urgency that motivates them. The challenges of the physical production of a movie or a TV show for the director are considerable indeed, but if the filmmaker is possessed by the need to tell the story, coming to see it as a story that must be told, this can sustain their energy and focus through the multiple difficulties of the pre-production and the shoot.

The director might be telling a story close to their own, or to that of someone they know, admire, care about, or are in some way fascinated by. They will be drawn to the protagonist. They will find the world of the story compelling, whether or not they’re familiar with it. They will feel the story “speaks” to them. The most powerful reason for telling a story is that only through its articulation might the answer to the questions it poses be found, although they may remain ever elusive—mystery at the heart of a story affords it a resonance to render it compelling in ways a philosophical treatise or a moral lecture cannot match.

A plot should be clear. A story should engage. A mystery should have no answer.

2

Premise

In its usage, the term premise has more than one meaning. This can lead to confusion, so it’s important to understand the implications of each interpretation.

Meaning 1:

The premise is the foundation of your story—that single core statement, says James N. Frey, “of what happens to the characters as a result of the actions of a story.” For instance, the premise of The Three Little Pigs is “Foolishness leads to death, and wisdom leads to happiness.”

(Writers’ digest.com, March 11, 2008)

Similarly, in The Art of Dramatic Writing, long a mainstay of manuals on dramaturgy, Lajos Egri maintains that premise is the truth that writers seek to prove, at least to themselves, by way of their stories: “poverty leads to crime” or “bragging leads to humiliation,” for example. But is this what the director should be looking for in their screenplay? Do the best stories really prove anything? Don’t they instead pose questions, perhaps questions that have no solutions? Anton Chekhov, master of both theatre play and short story, said that the job of the writer is not to solve the problem but to present it. More recently, writer and director David Mamet wrote that drama is about irreconcilable opposites. Indeed, the French word dénouement, which we use in English and tend to interpret as the wrapping-up of a story, translates in fact as the unraveling—the opening up, unwrapping, or untying.

The problem so often with a story that attempts to prove something is that it can lend itself to moralizing, to teaching the reader or audience how to behave. It can tend to be judgmental, proselytizing, banal even, and ultimately limiting in its dramatization of contradictory human nature and the inner paradoxes that make for the most compelling characters. Most importantly perhaps, it can undermine drama, reducing the inevitable and perennial friction and conflict of life and human interaction to a foolish mistake, something that a moral lesson could have put right all along if only the characters had been lucky enough to know it or be allowed to put it into practice. This can be an approach that soothes and reassures rather than engages and challenges. It sends out a message rather than posing a question, reinforcing a sense of certainty instead of leaving the audience to figure out their own solutions after the film or TV show is over. Another danger this risks is the tendency of the story to conform to conventional wisdom. The best stories, perhaps, help us to find revelatory and even transgressive insights we wouldn’t have understood or even thought of without having undergone...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part A The approach
• Part B The case study—Contrapelo screenplay by Liska Ostojic and Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer
• References
• Bibliography
• Index