Accents and Cultural Speech Patterns

When writing dialogue we strive to create distinctive voices for characters and to capture the flavor of natural speech. In real life accents and cultural speech patterns are two things that really stand out. They can be useful in screenplay dialogue as well, but must be used with care.

People don’t speak in proper grammar and your dialogue should reflect that. Screenplays often use words like “gonna” to mimic the way people actually talk. And dialogue like…

“He done went down to the crick and got hisself eaten up by one of them crocodiles.”

…can really add flavor to your characters if done well. English teachers might faint reading that, but it certainly suggests a strong voice.

Accents can do the same. Of course any line that’s written in standard grammar can be delivered by an actor in a variety of accents. But we have the option of phonetically spelling out the accent to capture the effect on the page. Here’s an example of what I mean:

“Ahm gohn tell y’all about a little thing cahlled dignahty.”

The key here, though, is discretion. It’s much easier to listen to an accent than to read one spelled out phonetically. What can add charm at first can quickly grow tiresome – especially over a whole script. Consider the following exchange between two fictional New Englanders:

“Ahm pretty soah. Those new instructahs at the gym are slave drivahs.”

“Ayuh. But a wagah they leave befah the fahst nath’eastah.”

“Maybe you bettah take the oppahtunity to take a class befah then.”

“Exercisin’ is yaw cawse, not mine.”

Exhausting to read, isn’t it? Imagine that for 110 pages. Throwing in one phonetically accented word every couple lines would give us the idea without making our head hurt.

Better than accents is capturing the speech of a certain culture. It can give a real sense of place and class (note that people of different classes in the same place often speak quite differently.) This was used brilliantly in Fargo (written by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) to capture North Dakota. Here’s a brief exchange from that script:

YOUNGER MAN
Ya got the car?

JERRY
Yah, you bet. It's in the lot
there. Brand-new burnt umber
Ciera.

YOUNGER MAN
Yeah, okay. Well, siddown then.
I'm Carl Showalter and this is
my associate Gaear Grimsrud.

JERRY
Yah, how ya doin'. So, uh, we
all set on this thing, then?

YOUNGER MAN
Sure, Jerry, we're all set. Why
wouldn't we be?

JERRY
Yah, no, I'm sure you are. Shep
vouched for you and all. I got
every confidence in you fellas.

The Coens captured a bit of the accent by using the occasional “yah” and “fellas” but kept it very subtle. Then they captured the speech patterns of North Dakota with phrases like, “Yah, you bet” and “all set on this thing, then.”

Clueless (written by Amy Heckerling) does the same thing by including words and phrases like “totally,” “outie,” and “I’m like…” to capture the speech of Beverly Hills teens. Fried Green Tomatoes (screenplay by Fannie Flagg and Carol Sobieski) uses phrases like, “bless her sweet little old heart” and “a heap of trouble” and “what in the name of Christmas” to capture a specific time and place in the South.

Done badly this kind of thing can feel cliché or stereotyped or gimmicky. If you’re not writing about a world you know personally you probably need to do some research. Ideally you go spend time with the kind of people whose voice you’re trying to capture. At the very least, dig up some audio or video recordings. Jot down colorful idioms and turns of phrase that you can sprinkle into your dialogue.

It’s important for screenwriters to remember that a screenplay is not a finished product; it is a guide for making a movie. The actors will add their skill to the dialogue, doing the accents needed. Hopefully they do them well – if not, nothing you write will save them.

When you’re writing your dialogue consider the reader. Use idiom and phrasing to give a sense of place and culture and sprinkle phonetic accents in with care to capture the flavor of speech. Then leave the rest to the actor.

Genre Considerations - Historical and True Stories

(SPOILERS: Inglourious Basterds, The Hurricane)

Writing movies based on historical events or true stories can be more difficult than it seems. On the one hand you have a lot of material to work with and presumably it’s inherently dramatic. On the other hand, real life is messy. It seldom fits neatly into a compelling storyline. And you can have a problem with too much material to squeeze into a roughly two hour film.

One of the first challenges is deciding how accurate you have to stay to actual events. Ultimately we’re not creating documentaries we’re creating fictionalized stories. However, if you claim that your story is “true” there is some expectation of accuracy.

In general the more recent the events and the greater political or social agenda you have, the bigger the obligation of accuracy. Movies like JFK (screenplay by Oliver Stone & Zachary Sklar) and Hotel Rwanda (written by Keir Pearson & Terry George) must hew to facts more than movies like 300 (screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon) or Braveheart (written by Randall Wallace).

The Hurricane (screenplay by Armyan Bernstein and Dan Gordon) was picked apart for any liberties it took with the facts because it was about a guy who was alive and in prison and suggested that he was innocent. There were real world implications to how accurate the movie was. Movies about people long dead are less likely to draw such criticism – with the exception of movies that take a negative view of religious icons or patriotic heroes.

If anybody in your movie is still alive or was recently famous you may have legal issues to contend with as well. I’m not a lawyer and so won’t offer any advice in this regard, but there are several books on legal issues for writers you can consult. And you would be wise to do so!

So now you’re faced with this messy true story. You’ve probably done a lot of research. How do you organize everything?

The first thing to do is figure out what draws you to the story. What is the movie you want to make really about? Keep in mind I might make a completely different movie about the same events. That’s why this is art and not a history lesson. Try to summarize your vision of the story in a logline of twenty-five words or less. Once you’ve got a logline that you think really captures the core of the story, hang onto that dearly as you outline your material.

In my personal experience and with my students who have written true stories one of the challenges you will likely face is too much material. That’s why this core logline is so important. You will probably need to reduce the big scope of true events down to a smaller, more manageable storyline. And that may mean losing things you really love but don’t serve your primary concept.

This is especially true if you are trying to write about a person with a long, interesting life. It’s difficult to cover the entirety of someone’s life in two hours. You may need to find a period that is representative of what drew you to the subject in the first place.

If you’re writing about a specific historical figure then you probably know who your main character is – though remember Amadeus (screenplay by Peter Shaffer) took the unexpected route of making Salieri the main character in a story about Mozart, so you might want to consider whether the most significant figure is actually your best main character.

If you’re writing something more sprawling you’ll want to identify a strong main character to lead us through the story. We need to become involved in a person to really care about the events of the movie. Hotel Rwanda told the story of that genocide through the eyes of Paul Rusesabagina and JFK used the character of Jim Garrison to get us inside the mystery of Kennedy’s assassination.

You’ll find you’re constantly honing, compressing and focusing the story. You’ll probably need to cut and combine minor characters. In real life someone may influence the story in an important way for one scene and then leave. In a movie you may need to combine that person with someone else to avoid having to introduce so many characters. If you’re dealing with living people, you may want to create a fictional character that’s an amalgam of several real people to avoid any legal trouble.

You’ll also have to combine events that happened at different times into single scenes for space reason. You will probably have to reorder events as well. Again, how much freedom you have to do that depends on how recent and political your story is.

You also have to consider how well known the events are. I had a big problem with Inglourious Basterds (written by Quentin Tarantino). I liked a lot of the movie…until the ending when Hitler is killed in the theater bombing. It broke my suspension of disbelief because I know how Hitler really died.

I think Tarantino could have told an excellent fictional story set against the backdrop of World War II where a fictional Nazi general is killed at the end. But by including Hitler the movie raises the bar for accuracy on itself and then fails to deliver.

The farther back in history you go, the more likely you are to find unique challenges. I once wrote a historical biography (as yet unproduced) set in 16th century Denmark where a significant conflict comes from the prohibition against nobles marrying commoners. Since we’re completely unfamiliar with those social conventions these days I had to work hard to give the audience the context for that conflict.

In the same story a lot of the historical arguments actually happened via letters. That’s not very filmic. So in my script I often took the main character (a noble) and the antagonist (the king) and put them in the same location so they could have their arguments face to face. Not accurate but it makes for a better movie.

Another challenge for historical movies, of course, is period dialogue. I covered that in my last post.

Ultimately when writing about historical and true events you must remember that story rules. Honor the truth not the facts. And keep it dramatic!

Writing Period Dialogue

One of the challenges in writing period pieces is crafting believable dialogue. The key word here is “believable” – and paradoxically realistic period dialogue often is not believable. It’s more important that the dialogue sound right to the average audience than that it past muster with a historian or linguist.

If you’re over a certain age you probably remember the brouhaha over Kevin Costner’s bad British accent in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (story by Pen Densham, screenplay by Pen Densham & John Watson). But it was a strange criticism – people from that time period would have been speaking in some form of Old English. We wouldn’t understand a word they were saying. So why do we care that Costner’s accent was bad when he wasn’t even speaking the correct language?

We care because it just didn’t sound right. It was distracting. Now fortunately as writers we don’t have to worry about the actors’ accents. But we do have to worry about the construction of our dialogue.

There are actually two types of period dialogue to address. The first is dialogue from more recent history – say the last 300 years – where the language is basically the same as ours but different expressions, idioms, phrasing and slang were in vogue. The second is dialogue from times when people spoke what amounts to a foreign language even if it was a forerunner of English.

In both of these cases it’s first important to strip away modern slang words and terms. Obviously nobody’s going to say “LOL” in the 1990’s or in the 1690’s. But some terms are a little trickier. Would someone use the term “road rage” in 1975? What makes this hard is that we’re so used to talking in modern phrasing we do it without thinking.

For movies set in the last 300 years you may need to do a little research into the period. It’s particularly useful to read letters and things from the time to get a sense of how people used words. Though keep in mind that until only recently people tended to be much more formal in their writing than in their speech.

Dropping in archaic terms can help set the mood. It can even be fun, particularly in more recent time periods when we have fond memories of the slang. Consider these lines of dialogue from scenes set in the ‘80s from an early draft of Hot Tub Time Machine by Josh Heald:

“Genius! Man, not to get all fag on you, but I’m digging your fresh threads, bro.”

“You guys a couple of spazzes?”

And the movie 13 Going on 30 (written by Josh Goldsmith & Cathy Yuspa) drops slang like “dorkus,” “freakazoid” and “totally” into its ‘80s scenes.

You might load up the dialogue with period slang and phrasing for comedic effect, but in general it’s best to use that kind of thing sparingly for flavor. Try reading something more than 100 years old. It can be difficult to slog through. You want your audience to be able to understand your characters!

For time periods before modern English the best approach is similar to what you would do when writing dialogue in English that would actually be spoken in a foreign language (see my post on foreign language dialogue).

You’ll want to avoid most slang and idiom altogether and write in a slightly more formal voice. Avoiding contractions often helps things sound period (for example, using “do not” instead of “don’t”). Consider some of the dialogue from the second draft of the Gladiator screenplay (revised by John Logan based on the script by David Fanzoni):

From Gladiator: “The first thing I shall do is honor him with games worthy of his majesty.”

A modern character might say something more like, “the first thing I’m going to do is honor him with some cool games.” Now consider this one:

From Gladiator: “Should Caesar permit, I’ll go home. I’ve been away too long. I’ve forgotten my wife’s face and I barely know my son.”

A modern version might be “If Caesar lets me, I’ll go home. I’ve been away so long I barely remember what my wife and son look like.” But the more formal phrasing sounds right to us, even though these characters would actually be speaking in a completely different language.

Now things get really tricky. You don’t want all your characters to sound alike. You’ll want to make your upper class characters well spoken and your lower class characters crass. You can also vary things like how verbose characters are, how blunt, how obsequious, how honest. These kind of things require more attention in a period script than in a contemporary one.

When you’re thinking about character and conflict and making your scenes work it’s difficult to avoid the occasional modern phrase. So you’ll probably have to do at least one pass in the polish phase just to weed out things that sound off.

I also like to have a few friends read the script and instruct them to make a mark next to any line of dialogue that strikes them as off. Since we’re talking about a fairly subjective idea of what sounds right it’s useful to get multiple opinions.

Ultimately good period dialogue feels natural. We should be caught up in the story and characters, not in the way they speak.

Foreign Language Dialogue

Writing good dialogue is tough even in normal situations, but sooner or later you’re likely to encounter a story with an added challenge. In some of these cases there is no “official” way to handle the dialogue. In my next few posts I’ll discuss some of the options for these challenges so hopefully you can find a solution that fits your problem and comes across as professional. Today I’ll discuss foreign languages.

Obviously in the real world not everybody speaks the same language. And since your movie will be targeted to speakers of one particular language (for the purposes of this blog I’m going to assume English), when a character is speaking in another language you will have to figure out how to handle it.

If you’re entire movie takes place in another language the best approach is just to write in English. The audience will understand that the people in your story of the French revolution are speaking French and appreciate not having to read subtitles for the entire movie. The Reader (screenplay by David Hare) took this approach – the movie is entirely set in Germany about Germans but the dialogue is in English.

If you do this you will want to make the dialogue slightly more formal and avoid slang and idiom. It just sounds weird if someone from India says, “that’s awesome, dude.” Somehow we can accept the fallacy that English is a stand-in for another language but can’t accept slang. However, the dialogue still must sound conversational. Too formal and it will seem stilted.

This is obviously tricky and may take some trial and error. I like to have a few friends read the script and instruct them to make a mark next to any line of dialogue that strikes them as off.

In The Hunt for Red October (screenplay by Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart) there were two submarines, one Russian and one American. The filmmakers famously started the dialogue on the Russian sub in Russian, then zoomed in on Sean Connery’s mouth and switched to English to indicate to the audience that though the dialogue on that sub would be in English from now on we were to understand the characters were still speaking Russian.

If you only have a few lines of dialogue in another language you have a variety of options.

If you don’t care if the audience understands the character one option is to just write the dialogue in the foreign language (if you are fluent or can get someone to write it out for you). I wouldn’t advise this for longer passages.

A second option is to indicate the speech in an action line, such as:

The policeman rants at him in German.

A third option is to indicate the dialogue is in another language, such as:

POLICEMAN
(In German)
Move that car!

However if the dialogue is actually conveying important story information this last approach is risky since the script is giving the reader information that the viewer wouldn’t have.

Subtitling used to be frowned on for a variety of reasons. One problem is that people talk faster than we can read so subtitles usually have to be condensed for any extended amount of dialogue. Another issue is that people read at different speeds and of course some people can’t read at all (though this was a bigger problem in the early days of film than it is today.)

Subtitles have become more acceptable now, and are actually the preferred way to handle most foreign language situations. Slumdog Millionaire (screenplay by Simon Beaufoy) and The Kite Runner (screenplay by David Benioff) had large sections in other languages with subtitles. The scripts I’ve seen for these films simply ignored this and wrote all the dialogue in English.

I would suggest it’s usually better to indicate which dialogue is in English and which is subtitled. There are a couple formats that are common for subtitling. For the occasional line it’s most common to indicate the subtitle in a parenthetical:

CONDUCTOR
(In Russian, subtitled)
Ticket please.

If it’s a whole scene or section of the script you can use action lines to indicate the subtitling. When you do this it’s fairly common to then bracket the subtitled dialogue. For example:

INT. APARTMENT

Pablo enters. Maria lounges on the couch.

(THE FOLLOWING SCENE IS IN SPANISH WITH SUBTITLES)

PABLO
[Why isn’t dinner read?]

MARIA
[I got delayed at the bank.]

PABLO
[You always have some excuse.]

(END SUBTITLES)

So you have many options to deal with the challenge of foreign languages in your script. Which one you choose will depend largely on the amount of dialogue that will be in the foreign language. Next post I’ll discuss some other unusual dialogue situations.

Genre Considerations - Thrillers

(Spoilers: Collateral, Shutter Island, Rear Window, Chinatown)

Thrillers are movies that get their bang by creating tension in the audience. There are several tools useful to writers in this genre.

The first is suspense. It is critical to ratchet up the sense of impending doom. The set pieces in thrillers are all scenes of suspense – for example the scene in Rear Window (screenplay by John Michael Hayes) when Lisa has broken into the suspicious neighbor’s apartment and he returns while she’s still inside.

A corollary to this is pacing. Thrillers rely on slow, careful escalation of anxiety. Unlike many genres, too fast pacing can ruin a thriller. But slow pacing only works if we’re drawn into the character and the situation. For more on how to build tension in scenes, see my prior post on suspense.

Also important in thrillers are twists and turns in the plot. If the audience can predict what’s going to happen, there won’t be much of a thrill. The best thrillers keep the audience guessing. Most thrillers have some kind of complex mystery at the foundation of the plot.

(Note: I covered Mystery as a genre in a post before I started this series. True mysteries are a unique type of story that works in a completely different way emotionally than the thriller but share some of the plot techniques.)

Some thrillers involve a cop or detective investigating a frightening crime. Silence of the Lambs (screenplay by Ted Tally), Chinatown (written by Robert Towne), Basic Instinct (written by Joe Eszterhas) and Se7en (written by Andrew Kevin Walker) are examples of that kind of thriller. I would also include in this category thrillers where the leads are criminals or others who seek out the dangerous environment of the movie such as Memento (screenplay by Christopher Nolan).

Other thrillers involve an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances such as in North by Northwest (written by Ernest Lehman), The Third Man (screenplay by Graham Greene) or Collateral (written by Stuart Beattie). We sometimes call these “Hitchcockian” thrillers since Alfred Hitchcock did so many of them (Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, The Man Who Knew Too Much, etc.) These thrillers gain added tension because we identify more strongly with the innocent, under equipped hero.

Regardless of which type of thriller you’re writing, it’s important to be able to answer the question, “why this character for this story?”

This is not a plot question. Sure, the cop takes the case because it’s assigned to him; the private detective is hired for the job; the ordinary man is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s the logic.

But what’s important is that the character has a thematic need to go through this experience. The internal story of the character has to connect to the external story of the plot. The character should learn something from the journey and that something should be important to their lives.

For example in Collateral taxi driver Max is a man who dreams of a better life but never takes any action to achieve it. And he’s able to go along perfectly content living in denial of this fact. But when a hit man hires his cab, Max is forced to make a decision: is he going to continue to avoid risk or take a stand to save someone’s life? There’s a thematic reason that Vincent gets into Max’s cab – Max needs to have his way of life challenged.

In Chinatown, Jake Gittes is a cocky character who believe he has the ability to read people. When he is set up early in the movie it embarrasses him and he sets about to redeem himself. But along the way he learns that he doesn’t know nearly as much as he thought he did. This internal story reflects the thematic elements of the movie about the powerlessness of the average man in a corrupt society. That’s why – on a thematic level – Jake Gittes is the detective that’s hired for this case.

Hitchcock popularized the term MacGuffin which is a key concept in thrillers. A MacGuffin is something that the character cares deeply about but the audience doesn’t inherently care about at all. It’s a device to propel the story, the thing our hero or the antagonists are trying to get that puts them in conflict.

In Collateral the MacGuffin is the list of people Vincent has been hired to kill. Who can remember why he’s killing them – I’m not even sure if the movie ever reveals that. And it doesn’t really matter. What matters is whether Max will find a way to stop Vincent. And it matters that the last person on Vincent’s list is someone that is important to Max. We care about the MacGuffin because the main character cares about it.

Hitchcock liked his MacGuffins to be as simple as possible – secret plans or microfilm. Something that doesn’t require a lot of in depth explanation. I agree with him. It’s really boring when characters have to deliver long expository speeches to explain the MacGuffin.

However that doesn’t mean the MacGuffin can’t be a source of twists. Remember, thrillers thrive on twists. For example, the MacGuffin in Shutter Island (screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis) shifts as the movie goes along. Initially it’s a missing patient. Then we discover our hero, Teddy, is actually on the island to expose a government conspiracy. And at the end of the movie we learn his mission was about something else entirely. But all of this is filtered through Teddy. We care because it affects him.

In a sense, a search for a killer’s identity is also a MacGuffin – and a common one in thrillers. Often the killer is both the MacGuffin and the antagonist. Rear Window is a good example. But consider Silence of the Lambs. The killer's identity is much less memorable than Clarice's battle of wits with Hannibal Lecter.

A good thriller hits the audience on many levels. The twisty plot mystery engages our mind, the character’s internal journey plays on our emotions and the suspense elicits a visceral reaction. This is probably why they’re such a popular genre.

Genre Considerations – Romantic Comedy and Romantic Drama

(Spoilers: Sweet Home Alabama, Casablanca, Sleepless in Seattle, Wedding Crashers)

The difference between romantic comedy and romantic drama is really just tone. Other than the need to be funny in a romantic comedy, most of the other genre issues are the same. Also, many movies have romantic subplots that have similar concerns as the ones I’ll address today.

One of the most important things to remember in a romance is that seeing the lovers happy together is boring. Drama is conflict and romances are only dramatic when something is keeping the lovers apart.

Before we keep them apart, though, we need to see that they are meant to be together. Of course some of this will depend on the “chemistry” of the actors. But we can’t rely on that in the script stage. Romances work best when each of the lovers has a need in their life that the other one fills.

For example, in Sweet Home Alabama Melanie needs to face her past and come to terms with it. Jake represents that past. Meanwhile, Jake needs a bigger ambition for his life – something that Melanie inspires in him by her big ambitions. Each makes the other one a better person.

In Casablanca (screenplay by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch) cynical Rick needs to regain his passion for lost causes. Ilsa’s compassion and emotional vulnerability help him to do this.

In Pretty Woman (written by J.F. Lawton) Edward needs someone who can warm up his cold heart and Vivian needs someone who sees her as more than a sex object. We know they’re meant for each other because Vivian brings out Edward’s humanity and he treats her as an emotional and intellectual equal.

In Knocked Up (written by Judd Apatow) Ben is a slacker who needs to grow up while Alison is an uptight businesswoman who needs to let loose. This kind of pairing is one of the reasons “opposites attract” is so often present in movie romances.

Of course it helps to show that these people actually have something in common. One of the knocks on Knocked Up was that the two characters didn’t seem like they would actually like each other. (Personally, I enjoyed the movie but I understand the complaint.)

And be sure the issues are actually significant to the characters. One of my least favorite romantic comedies is Sleepless in Seattle (story by Jeff Arch, screenplay by Nora Ephron and David S. Ward and Jeff Arch) because it’s so superficial. The big reason we’re supposed to know that Sam and Annie are right for each other is she peels an apple like his ex-wife. Lame. Go for something deeper.

Once we know the lovers belong together the next challenge is to keep them apart. Frankly, here in the 21st century, this is getting tough to do. Traditional societal mores that were the basis for many classic romances are disappearing. Once it was forbidden for people of different classes, races, religions, etc. to have romantic relationships. But we’ve progressed – to the benefit of society and the detriment of writers!

When looking for obstacles to romance there are two basic kinds: internal and external. Internal obstacles are those where the character needs to change something about their personality in order to succeed in love. For example, the chauvinist may to learn to appreciate women as in What Women Want (story by Josh Goldsmith & Cathy Yuspa and Diane Drake, screenplay by Josh Goldsmith & Cathy Yuspa). Or the recluse may need to learn to accept risk as in Lars and the Real Girl (written by Nancy Oliver).

Since the societal obstacles are getting difficult to pull off, the most common external obstacle is now the romantic rival, also known, of course, as the love triangle. This is an example of the “mutually exclusive goals” technique of creating conflict – two people want the same thing (the love interest) and both of them can’t get it. Instant conflict and therefore instant drama.

Love triangles pose certain challenges, though. One way to go is to make our hero a good guy and the rival a bad guy.* This is how it works in Wedding Crashers (written by Steve Faber & Bob Fisher). John falls for Claire but she’s with Sack. Sack is such a jerk that we root for John to take Claire away from him.

The trouble with this is we might start to dislike the girl if she’s with a jerk. And if we don’t like her we won’t be rooting for our hero to end up with her. The usual solution is that the rival hides his jerkiness from the love interest. But that’s still risky – you don’t want her to seem stupid for missing what everyone else sees.

Of course, in a love triangle the rival doesn’t actually have to be a bad guy. Two perfectly nice men can be in love with the same woman and you still have good drama. That’s the approach I took in Sweet Home Alabama.

It’s also the approach taken in Casablanca. Both Rick and Victor Lazlo are good men. Ilsa’s caught between them because in the confusion of war she had thought Victor, her husband, was dead when she met Rick. We long for Rick and Ilsa to be together but the fact she’s married to a decent guy is a pretty big obstacle.

The risk here, of course, is that we might not root so hard for the protagonist if we actually like the antagonist. It’s a balancing act. The key is to adequately demonstrate that the hero and the love interest absolutely belong together.

And don’t underestimate the power of scenes of preparation and aftermath in romances. These give us a chance to check in with the characters’ emotions. In Casablanca a big reason we’re rooting for Rick to get the girl is the aftermath scene that follows her coming into his bar. We see how in love he is because of how torn up he is.

Romance is challenging to make dramatic. In real life when two people fall in love they generally start dating without any real obstacles. That doesn’t make for very interesting stories. But love is a powerful, primal emotion. A good love story can impact the audience in a very deep way!

*For the purposes of discussion I’ll use a love triangle with two men in love with the same woman. Of course the genders could be reversed, or all characters might be the same gender in a gay story.

Genre Considerations - Science Fiction and Fantasy

Genre is a powerful tool in storytelling. And every genre has unique considerations and concerns. With that in mind, I’m going to start a series of posts to address some of these special considerations in individual genres.

The first genres I’ll tackle are fantasy and science fiction, which have a lot of similar issues. They may seem quite different because we associate a lot of very specific iconic trappings with each of these genres. However those trappings can be confusing. Some movies that appear to be science fiction are actually fantasy. From a writing standpoint the primary difference between the two is that fantasy deals with magical elements while science fiction deals with realistic projection of technological advances.

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (written by Melissa Mathison) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (written by Steven Spielberg) are good examples. The “science fiction” alien elements of these movies are not realistic expansions of current technology. The aliens are so advanced that their special powers are more akin to magic. That makes these fantasy movies, not science fiction.

Star Wars (written by George Lucas) is an interesting hybrid of science fiction and fantasy. The space ships and robots are science fiction, but the force and light sabers are really more fantasy.

Science fiction and fantasy share one important trait: both are allegories for the real world. They let us explore political, social and emotional issues in a symbolic way. This allows the audience be more objective, unencumbered by some of the baggage that might come with a more realistic setting or story line. This is an important idea that I’m going to come back to.

First, there are some terms and sub-genres you may wish to be familiar with if you plan on working in these genres:

High Fantasy – The medieval style fantasy of Lord of the Rings (screenplays by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson). Usually features an imaginary world, magic, wizards, and alien races like elves and dwarves.

Near-Future – Refers to science fiction that takes place in a time period only a few years ahead of ours so that the world is recognizable. Children of Men (screenplay by Alfonso Cuaron & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby) and District 9 (screenplay by Neill Blokamp & Terri Tatchell) are good examples. Some of this flavor of sci-fi movie are actually set in our current world with a new sci-fi element introduced, such as The Terminator (written by James Cameron & Gale Anne Hurd) or Back to the Future (written by Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale) or The Fly (screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue and David Cronenberg).

Space Opera – Refers to movies set in a science fiction universe but that are more concerned with adventure than science. Star Wars and Star Trek (written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman) fall in this category. Some sci-fi purists do not consider these true sci-fi movies. They believe real science fiction deals with the impact of technology on the course of culture and human development.

One of the first things you’ll need to be concerned about in a science fiction or fantasy story is the world of the story. Is this meant to be a believable representation of our world with one or two fantastical elements added (Back to the Future)? Is it a near future projection of our world (Children of Men)? Is it a vision of our world projected far into the future that is both familiar and very different (Alien – story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, screenplay by Dan O’Bannon)? Or is it a complete alternate world (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings)?

That decision will affect how much work you have to do to bring us into the world. In a world we’re familiar with you don’t need much set up. In The Terminator Cameron and Hurd don’t have to explain Sarah Connors’ lifestyle because it’s one we’re familiar with. All they have to do is explain at some point why a robot and soldier have travelled here from the future.

In the Lord of the Rings, however, we’re completely unfamiliar with the world. The filmmakers have to explain how magic works in this world and the politics of hobbits, elves, dwarves and men. That’s a big reason why the films open with a long expository prologue. They need to teach us the unfamiliar history of this world.

You also have to show us the rules of the world, and of the fantastical elements you introduce. The most important thing is that your story have an internal consistency and logic. You get to create the rules but then you must abide by them. Otherwise it will feel like “cheating” and the audience will reject your story.

For example, the technology of Star Trek and of Alien are very specific – and not the same. Teleportation exists in Star Trek but not in Alien. And the conditions required for successful teleportation in Star Trek are clearly laid out. You need a teleportation room on one end and the range is limited. Also, the faster someone is moving the more difficult teleportation is. Space ships also travel much faster in Star Trek than they do in Alien, where crews must enter a kind of hyper sleep to make the journey between planets.

Introducing the rules of your world can be kind of a tricky thing. On the one hand, you can just lay everything out at the beginning, which helps the audience suspend their disbelief. However sometimes we want to hold back some of the information for dramatic effect. For more on introducing fantastical elements in film, see my last post.

It’s crucial to the success of both sci-fi and fantasy that you give us a main character that we care about with a problem that we can relate to. Remember what I said about these being allegorical genres? We may love spaceships and laser guns, swords and dragons, but if we can’t relate to the story those things will quickly grow tiresome.

The way to get us involved is to show us someone we can identify with and allow us to experience the spectacle and the world through their eyes. In The Lord of the Rings we can empathize with powerless little Frodo who must do something very dangerous because it’s the right thing to do – even though he’d rather just go home. And we are moved by the loyalty of his friend Sam. Friendship, duty, fear, and homesickness are universal emotions.

And though an alien space ship hasn’t actually broken down in South Africa as shown in District 9, we can certainly identify with the racial politics on display and Wikus’ growing realization that the government he works for has a hidden, morally questionable agenda.

Ultimately it’s the characters and their journey that makes the best sci-fi and fantasy movies great. The spectacle of fantastic worlds, technology and magic is just icing on the cake.