I had a great, long dinner with my producer friend on 7 Red last night, as we tried to break the new climax and ending our director is seeking. It’s not too much change in terms of story, but an adjustment in where all the final pieces fall, along with a mechanism that supports a few more turns of the screw on the way there. It will be labor-intensive, and it will mean a lot of new pages, but I always find new pages far easier to write with a script and characters I already know.
We closed out El Coyote on Beverly Boulevard, drinking margaritas and eating steamed tacos and looking at our playing pieces in every angle and configuration imaginable for well over three hours. I love evenings like this because I feel more like a screenwriter when actively-wrestling with something.
There’s a caper element to this script, which illustrates one of those hidden Golden Means we’re always trying to achieve in scripts. In Writer English: You’ve got your protagonist (the one seeking something), and the antagonist (the one who seeks something that sets them in opposition to the protagonist). In a caper, the protagonist usually has some multifaceted scheme they are trying to work, while the antagonist is either playing defense (Ocean’s 11), working a contrary scheme of their own (The Grifters), or completely-ignorant that a scheme is unfolding around them (The Sting).
Each option has its own perks and challenges – in the case of 7 Red our antagonist is making moves but they are fundamentally playing defense. So in a climax of this nature you want to throw in a variety of ingredients like:
-Moves by the protagonist that show off the clever and interlocking nature of their scheme beginning to work.
-Moves by the protagonist that show off their ability to anticipate how the antagonist will behave.
-Moves by the antagonist that throw off the protagonist’s scheme, providing suspense and forcing them to improvise
-Moves by the antagonist that SEEMINGLY throw off the protagonist’s scheme, but are actually clever feints drawing the antagonist into a trap.
-Random twists of fate and physics that make everything come harrowingly-close to spinning completely out of control.
If you think back on movies you enjoy in this genre, you’ll probably see a lot of mixtures like this. You don’t want it to be just one. Maybe someone has written all these down before – I don’t know, but I had to figure it out on my own.
Audiences are most-satisfied when, by the end of the story, they at least can work out from available evidence nearly-all, if not all, of what happened and which of the above categories most-accurately describes the happenings. You can tell them beforehand, let them experience it as it happens, or show the result and explain it afterwards. Sometimes you do all of them – any approach can work, and when it comes to which you use, it’s often going to come down to feel. And as before you ideally use a mixture of them to get across all the information you need.
There is a threshold, though, which, once crossed, leads to disaster, and I think it comes in the area of those moves and counter-moves between the protagonist and the antagonist. It’s the old “I knew you would do this, and so I did this, but knowing YOU would probably KNOW I would do this, I also did THIS! HA HA!”
I think people understand the existence of master chess players who can think twelve moves ahead, and even admire them to a certain extent. But my general feeling about movie audiences is that – as I said for this genre – they like to have a shot at understanding how it worked, and they don’t want the process of understanding it to be un-cinematic.
What do I mean by un-cinematic? The usual stuff – excessive flashbacks, idle scenes of people talking a lot about things that already happened. Stuff that is dangerous in any genre or situation. You see, it’s not that the scheme you came up with is smart that is rubbing the audience the wrong way (remember – they’re smarter than you think), it’s that sharing your work with them resulted in bad screenwriting.
Just look back at Ocean’s 11, which had surprises, reversals, seeming-accidents and real accidents, and a few mid-and post-game explanations and flashbacks, but kept it all brisk and fast and funny while mixing it up. Whereas Ocean’s 12 ended with a lot of flashbacks and talking about this one secret component to the plan which we were never shown. Not that the movie was triumphing up to then, but it made for a pretty sputtering end.
So the trick is to tie enough knots that the audience appreciates the work you did, but not tie too many that you can’t unravel the thing without resorting to bad screenwriting. How many twists are ideal? How much of the above ingredients can the stew hold? The answer is never defined enough that you can write it down, is it? But after you’ve watched enough movies you know when there’s too much or too little, don’t you?