Your Screenplay, Four Corners

    Your Screenplay, Four Corners


          Here is a little advice I picked up from a well known Japanese director.  When asked how he writes a script he would say that he would start with a story board in the shape of a comic script.  Four corners to tell the whole story.  He would draw the 4 most important images in the whole movie
and then write toward those visual moments.  Take some of the greatest
movies of all time and see if you can come up with four shots that tell the whole story. 
    Next about the most important character.  The Antagonist.
    Yeah, you heard me right.
    Heroes are the characters that we love. They are our babies and we treat them
as such, but it is the villain who drives the tension of the story.  The antagonist is the
one that makes drama possible.
    The great Bond movies all had great villains .  The bad guys made Sean Connery
number one.  He had villains who were fun to be around and to watch get it in the
end. Treat them, while they are on the page, as if they were the stars of the story.
Also following a comic book rule here is not the worst thing you could do.  The
hero is usually the mirror opposite of the villain.
    The villain is strong where the hero is weak.  In superman his arch-enemy is the
smartest man on earth.  If your hero is made of water your villain should be made of
fire.  Keep this in mind.  And now some advice from the last action hero.  The
bigger the obstacle the bigger the hero must be.  I like Woody Allen, but he has
never fought aliens and saved the world because no one not even himself
would believe it.
    Also try to keep your characters, both good and bad guys, on their feet.  Tie
their shoes tight and make sure that they do not stumble and fall in moments
of crisis.  In Friday the 13th the girl always falls while running from Jason. 
In too many action film the hero is saved by the villain stumbling and falling
at the moment they are about to win.  Only in comedy should you have
characters flopping like Ric Flair in a title match.
    Let me  leave you with this.  If you want to learn more about writing scripts
read them.  Read your favorite movies, they are mostly free on line.  If you
want a master’s class on the subject read Hitchcock’s The Birds, or North by
North West or Psycho.  He did not do the actual writing on these scripts, the
director influenced every one of them and the attention to detail in these
scripts is why Hitchcock is considered the greatest of all time.