Argo

Argo is a terrific political thriller that will probably get some Oscar nominations. I hope that includes one for writer Chris Terrio whose ability to tell an epic true story using the thriller genre allows him to transcend both true story and thriller.

The political thriller is a popular sub-genre in novels, but much less so in film. That’s because the typical opposition in political thrillers – some form of government agency – is so big and so hidden that it’s not a fair fight. Which means political thrillers in film often end badly.

But that’s not the case in Argo. This film is based on real events whose outcome we know, or at least suspect, going in. Besides giving us an upbeat ending, these real events give the highly choreographed thriller beats a raw, gritty believability and tremendous emotional impact.

Still, the true story foundation creates some real problems for the writer. The biggest difficulty you face in writing a true story is that real events don’t tend to have dramatic shape. They often don’t build to a final decisive battle and they often have long stretches of time where no story beats occur.
Again, that’s not the case with Argo. The final battle is extremely dramatic and the short time period in which the key events unfold means there is no down time. But the true story foundation does require Terrio to structure his thriller in a much different way than normal.

In the typical thriller, the hero investigates an apparent opponent who may, or may not, be guilty of a crime. The opponent’s true power, and the final truth of that character’s guilt, is parceled out over the course of the story. Notice that plot in this form of thriller is based on revelations, and we save the biggest revelation for last.

In Argo, the opponent is not a suspicious, hidden character but rather a known, extremely powerful Iranian security force that will capture and possibly kill the heroes. So plot will not come from a succession of reveals. There is nothing about the enemy we don’t know from the very beginning.

Instead plot must come from the hero’s plan and, even more so, from a succession of building attacks against the hostges. So the writer sets up a huge vortex, a crosscut between the hero trying to get the hostages out and the opponents closing in for the kill.

Terrio creates the vortex by beginning with the endpoint in space and time, the airport, where heroes and opponents finally decide the issue. He then works backward to the beginning of the two prongs: the hero creating his plan and the opponents trying to find who is missing.

One of the key techniques for setting up the vortex properly has to do with the desire line of the story. The desire line in thrillers is especially tricky because it always involves some version of investigating while under attack. Notice there is a push-pull effect on the desire line that is difficult for the writer to calibrate. When the hero is investigating he is active and moving forward. But over the course of the story the hero comes under increasingly aggressive assault by the opposition, which makes him reactive and knocks him back.

In Argo, Terrio replaces the investigation line of most thrillers with an even clearer goal: get the captives out. The opponents have an equally clear goal: keep the captives in. The endpoint of both those goals is the same place, the airport. So now the vortex story structure is simply a matter of speeding up the crosscut as the heroes and opponents approach the convergent point.

This crosscutting vortex structure goes to the heart of the film medium itself. It’s as fundamental as the crosscut between the cowboy racing to save the damsel tied to the tracks and the oncoming train that’s going to run her over. In this simplest form of crosscut, the point is to set up the pressure cooker effect. The faster you crosscut as you approach the end, the greater the pressure builds on the audience. If the hero wins, the result is total elation.

The writer adds a number of other story and dialogue techniques that make this script really sing, especially some very funny inside Hollywood jokes as the hero is concocting his plan. I saw the film at the Writer’s Guild theater and one joke in particular about directors had the audience in stitches. In a story this intense, comedy plays the same role as the fake attack does in horror. It releases the pressure on the audience only to allow the writer to kick the pressure up to an even higher level.

But the key to the success of this script and film is the writer’s ability to infuse an already dramatic true story with powerful thriller beats. Thriller tends to be a very narrow form. In the Detective, Crime Story and Thriller Class I talk about transcending the form by combining it with its genre opposite, the epic. By accomplishing this difficult feat, Chris Terrio has written one of the best films of the year.

African Cats

I had the pleasure of co-writing a wonderful film that’s just come out, called African Cats. This is Disney Nature’s third release, after Earth and Oceans. These films were all made by the highly talented nature documentarians at the BBC, who work together not unlike the writers and directors of Pixar. African Cats was led by Keith Scholey, co-writer and co-director, and the world’s premiere expert in filming big cat behavior. So this was a really fun project for me.

Ironically, one of the reasons I loved it was for the unique story challenges it posed. You have to identify these challenges right at the beginning of the writing process, or your script will have severe problems. First, we had to make this an epic event, worthy of a feature length film. That meant we had to avoid the typical nature documentary, which is predictable and familiar, and way too informational and dry.

We also had to write a story that was dictated by the animals. Obviously, you can’t script animals; you have to find the best story in what they actually do. That can be very difficult, especially when you want to avoid anthropomorphizing them. So the main challenge of the plot was how to overcome the episodic quality inherent in all nature films, especially when the animal depicted must go on an annual migration.

Animal stories are also constrained by the main characters. The more the animal is limited by what he can learn, the more the story is guided by predictable instinct. One solution, but also a problem, was to have two main characters, a lion and a cheetah. This makes the film feel like the story about the world’s big cats. But it also breaks the single narrative story line into two tracks, and the tracks may never cross.

So what did we do? I always say in my genre classes that the main trick is to transcend the genre. How you do that is different for every form. Nature films are a sub-genre of the True Story (which also includes memoir). True stories are at their best when they are deeply personal, when they focus on the family. For us, that meant focusing on the two mothers.

Motherhood is the greatest challenge in the animal world, both emotionally and strategically. These mothers, whether lion or cheetah, are ferocious fighters for their cubs. They despair at losing one. They rejoice when a cub comes home. When you see the intense feelings of the two mothers, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have no need, or even possibility, of anthropomorphizing these animals. Call them what you will, these animals love.

Unlike all other animal activities, which are single bursts in the present, motherhood requires a strategic campaign that can cover years. So we knew that tracking the cub-raising process would give us most of our plot.

Motherhood also unifies our story line. It gives the audience a sense that, below the surface, these two main characters are really one. Ironically we united them further by using extreme contrast. Luckily for us storytellers, these two feline mothers are complete opposites: the lioness raises her cubs within the strong society of the pride while the cheetah raises her cubs alone. Each way of living and mothering produces different terrors, mothering techniques and plot beats.

While the two moms should give us enough plot (we wouldn’t know for sure until all the footage came back!), it wouldn’t necessarily overcome the story’s episodic nature. We began to solve that problem by first admitting that this story will always have episodic qualities. That’s life. That’s a journey. And to this day, it’s a major form of plot.

But we also knew a great technique in writing, which is to turn a negative into a positive. Make your weakness a strength. If we’ve got two major characters and a journey, let’s get all the benefits of the crosscut we can.

The crosscut was one of the keys to this plot, because it allowed us to cut on the cliffhanger. The cliffhanger has been used in storytelling forever. But this technique was refined for the film medium in recent years through television, in shows like ER. Multi-strand stories on film allow you to sequence scenes based on the most dramatic moments of each story.

The crosscut in turn affected how we wrote the narration. Most narrations in nature films are too wordy and informational. They often step on big reveals and smother drama. The crosscut allowed us to convey lots of information through juxtaposition of scenes rather than by voiceover. For every step of the cub-raising process, we could show, by quick comparison, how the two mothers must use opposite techniques, with opposite costs.

That in turn allowed us to keep the narration lean and emphasize the dramatic. Our discipline was to give only enough information to tell the big cats apart and highlight the underlying strategies the cats use for each challenge they face. We let the “greatest hit” drama beats tell themselves, and that brought the audience into the action, instead of dryly backing them away.

You cannot transcend a film’s genre unless you also transcend the form’s basic theme. Animal films are about survival. About life. It goes on, but the process is brutal. It’s a war out there. One of the ways we punched the epic quality of the film was to frame it as a fight for the entire lion kingdom, which arguably is the most dangerous place on earth. So we were playing that theme hard (and yes, it really happened).

But to transcend our theme, we knew we would have to show that within this world of brutal survival, where there is no justice, there are moments of courage, sacrifice and love. Once again the mothers were the answer. Because when you see what these mothers do for their cubs, these big, beautiful cats become the Shakespearean characters of the animal world. Rest assured, if you see this movie the tears will come. Don’t fight it. Your secret is safe with me.

Disney's Earth

Earth, the most ambitious nature documentary ever made, is coming out, appropriately, on Earth Day, and I had the great pleasure to have worked on it as story consultant. A project like this is quite rare, first because it had the potential to be an historic film, and second, because the creative team behind it was both extremely talented and open to outside ideas. Because of the role I played on Earth, I’d like to take you inside the creative process to explain how this remarkable film came about.

The nature documentary is a sub-category of the very broad genre known as True Life stories. Like the biopic and the memoir – other kinds of True Life stories – the nature doc hits all the key story structure steps but also bends them in several severe ways. The most obvious special characteristic of a nature doc is that the main character is not human. Surprisingly, the only one of the seven steps that this strongly affects is the self-revelation. Animals, especially as we move down the chain of being, don’t really have self-revelations, although they do learn.

Another restriction in nature docs is that the storyteller must work with what actually happened, and worse, with what he or she actually got on film. (While working on Earth, I was amazed to learn that no filmmaker has ever gotten footage of a black jaguar in its natural habitat.) If you don’t have film of the opponent step, for example, you’ve got a huge hole in your story and no amount of rewriting is going to fix it.

Besides these substantial restrictions common to all nature docs, Earth brought a slew of its own story challenges. The film’s title suggests one of the biggest: this film had to be the epic of all nature epics, covering the entire planet and potentially every plant and animal on the planet. A second challenge was the opposite of the first: how do you create a strong emotional bond between the audience and the animals – the main characters – with so many characters to depict?

Yet another challenge had to do with creating dramatic build: animal behavior is almost always cyclical, driven by the four seasons, with animals all over the earth undergoing physical changes at any and all times. The final major challenge (I won’t get into the hundreds of minor challenges) had to do with the inherently episodic quality of a story covering so much time and space, and so many animals.

So here’s what we did. First we realized that the epic and the personal don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We could show the massive scope of the planet more effectively by making the story more character driven. And that meant focusing on fewer characters more intensely, showing a complete seven steps drama of each main character in condensed form.

The key then was which animals to focus on. To heighten the epic scope and provide an easy-to-follow narrative line, we would track the sun from north pole to south pole. The character line would be built around three families: polar bears in the north, elephants near the equator, and whales in the waters of the south.

Choosing these three animals as the main characters and focusing on one family in each was the crucial decision in the entire story process. These three animals are among the most popular with audiences, and linking them on a path from north to south allowed us to make quick forays to other animals without losing a sense of the spine.

Showing a family instead of an individual animal gave us all the benefits of the family as the basic unit of drama. The struggle of each to survive wasn’t just the drama of predator and prey resulting inevitably in death. Instead, it became the story of a mother’s love, of teaching the babies and watching them grow, of the wonder of life rather than the horror of death. In fact, the biggest revelation I took from the film is that the most powerful and heroic being on this earth is Mom. What mothers do in this film, emblematic of what they do a billion times a day on this earth, will blow your mind.

No discussion of the story work on Earth would be complete without mention of the amazing footage these filmmakers were able to get. What strikes you first is the extraordinary beauty of this planet. And the images you see in this film are far beyond what you have ever seen before.

But you quickly get caught up in the even more unbelievable pictures of the daily drama of life. Perhaps my favorite in a long list is a sequence where elephants and lions must share a watering hole because of a drought. That’s something that neither elephant nor lion likes to do. And I dare you to watch what happens without your jaw dropping open in utter disbelief.

Most of you reading this do not write or film nature documentaries. But you do write stories. Watch Earth first because it is a joy to behold. But then study it for the problems and solutions every writer deals with in the never-ending challenge we call storytelling.