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As Good as It Gets (1997)

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DZ-3: Making Unlikeable Protagonists Compelling

How do you keep an audience watching a character everyone in the film hates?

AI✦Breaks down how to swing an audience between finding a character repulsive and finding him funny--then use that oscillation to make them care about someone genuinely difficult to like.✦

⏱ 1h 20m

31 MAR 2014

Character · Structure · Audience

Listen if you want to make audiences care about deeply flawed protagonists!

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In this episode, Stu and Chas try to work out what stops a-holes protoganists from pushing the audience out of the movie… →

Films: Hot Fuzz (2007) , As Good as It Gets (1997) , Groundhog Day (1993) , Gran Torino (2008) , Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Character: Character Flaw , Character Wound

Structure: Dramatic Questions

Audience: Audience Sympathy

"What’s really interesting about Hot Fuzz is in the first couple of pages, they could be setting up a James Bond character. Effectively, that kind of almost bulletproof action hero, right? And then, after they’ve done that kind of, like, escalation, then they start deconstructing it. And this is a pattern that As Good as It Gets also does very well. There’s this kind of yin-yang or this peak and trough with our perceptions of the character that they play with to make it, in my mind, make the character both unlikable yet compelling."

— stu | DZ-3: Making Unlikeable Protagonists Compelling