Dramatic Questions

"I think these films have got really strong control over the questions and that's how they get us to follow, compelling us to follow characters who are doing terrible things. And sometimes it's removing the mystery. We know who did it in Woman of the Hour."

"That is the central dramatic question for the audience, but that is what none of the characters are trying to do, except the father."

"Plot questions should be short and concise and comprehensible. And character questions should be long and meandering and incomprehensible. It's expressed as will X do Y? The thing they do must be clearly observable. In a character sequence, there is no plot question. If you say, what are they doing, the answer is they're just walking around to no purpose. There's no action, there's no question you can characterize over that 20-minute section of the story. It's not about what will happen, it's what will the character come to learn? Or will indeed they learn at all?"

"In Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it's reversed. The character question comes first, unlike Toy Story, unlike 90% of stories. The character question is, will Jean-Dominique Boby find a way to make this existence palatable to himself? Will he be able to reconcile himself to this life? And that question is asked first, and then the plot question comes after. Will Jean-Dominique Boby write a book? And because he writes a book, he finds a way of making his life reconcilable to himself. Most stories have the plot question asked first, made possible by the answer of the character question. If you are doing it the other way around, it's a character-driven story, which is to say the character question comes first and is answered last."

"What's really clever is here, and the other scripts do this as well, is normally in drama you wouldn't have the fla stated so early abd in such obvious terms. Often if it comes at all, it's like at the end of the second act, you know. And here they tell the audience and they tell the character what their flaw is, but they show them oblivious to it... And then this actually leads me to think...it actually sets up a dramatic question for the audience, right? You're told what is wrong with this guy. And so the question becomes, when will he realize or how will he realize? It's a subtle question, but I think it is in there. And then part of what you're compelled to do is watch to see, because you're not trying to work out who this character is. You're actually wanting to see how they will ultimately change."