DZ-43: Driving Sequences - Character and Plot Intensity — Transcript

But at the point where the audience gets a little bit, okay, this is getting a bit philosophical, you then just drop, you just end up dropping, you're dropping a 12 minute car chase.

Hi, I'm Ches Fisher.

And I'm Stu Willis.

And welcome to Draft Zero, a podcast where two Aussie filmmakers try to work out what makes great screenplays work. But today we are joined by a third.

Fourth.

Fourth?

Fourth filmmaker we call you a film no wait film mate i thought you're saying our fourth returning guest like he's been on the show four times oh no no well anyway you know writer producer developer welcome back steven biographer thank.

You it's great great fun to be here as.

Usual we are talking about uh sequence questions and how uh sequences are used to structure the overall films and the different types of sequences you can have within a film and how in some ways that relates to genre and type of movie and really i'm a poor person to be explaining to this because it's all as usual kind of stevens thinking about sequences but.

Should we just before we jump into what stevens theory is for the homework doers are going to be looking at mike lee's naked possibly contrasting that with Manchester by the Sea, Fargo, The Bourne Identity, Children of Men, There Will Be Blood, Diving Bell and the Butterfly and possibly others as they occur to us.

Arise.

Very good. All right. So, Stephen, what does Stu mean when he says sequence questions?

Um, there's a school of thought about, or there's an area of talking about scripts which is to do with dividing the story up into discrete sections that comes from a desire for people to, basically make your thinking about the story more manageable. So rather than thinking about an hour and a half or two hours or whatever it might be, or an hour, if it's a TV drama, You say, what if we can break the story into more discrete sections and then work out how those individual sections work and then kind of see how those different sections link up together or not, as the case may be. And so the background to this comes from a kind of theorizing that in the early days of movies and silent pictures, the reel was whatever it was, 500 feet long or whatever it is. And so basically, when you made a two reel of film, you had to change the reel. And so you had to have a climax at the end of the first reel so that you then had something to go to. You had a cliffhanger. And so basically your first reel was... Eight, 10, 11 minutes long, which had a cliffhanging ending, and then you started a new reel and the story picked up from there. And then when you had five reelers and eight reelers, this notion that the sequence was as long essentially as the reel of film grew up. Now, this is the theory that you read.

Do you think sequence has, like, isn't it like, I guess a story structure unit has some history that is not tied to film? I'm reading a lot of fairy tales to my kids at the moment, and they are very clearly sequence-based. At the moment, we've got one of these glorious older renditions, unsanitized versions of Hansel and Gretel. And there's clearly the sequence where the parents are trying to get rid of the kids. And then there's the sequence with the gingerbread house in the woods. And there's the sequence of Hansel locked in the cage and trying to be fattened up. And then there's the sequence where they kill the witch and you're trying to get home. And they clearly have distinct goals, objectives, questions, worlds.

I think the best way to think about sequences in terms of screenwriting, I mean, for film and television, is thinking in terms of chapters is actually much better to think of in terms of individual items of length. I mean, the screenwriting theory tends to concentrated on the idea that it needs to be between eight and 13 minutes long. And I think you can get kind of caught up in that. And it's not very practically useful. If you think in terms of chapters, you know, that there is a natural end to a section, and then you go into a new section. And that chapter, if you read novels, you know, a chapter can be 40 pages long, it can be four pages long. It's really just the natural section of the story. The question is, how do those sections work individually? What is the internal dynamic of those sections? And how does the section work in relation to the next section. That's what we mean when we're talking about sequences. And that's, you know, within a screenplay, obviously it's difficult to have an 80-page sequence, because in a 100-page script, that's one sequence is 80 pages. So they do tend to be short. But the average is around 12. But they can be as little as four, and they can be as much as 25 or more. And it really depends on the nature of the story. It's not a prescriptive. I mean, it shouldn't be prescriptive. When you read books about it, it is prescriptive. This is my beef about it, the books about it. I mean, my interest in this was stimulated by reading books about it.

Yeah, it's a particular school of screenwriting, the eight-sequence story.

But when I went and read, for example, I went and watched, I would encourage people listening to do this. When you read something in a book that says, oh, this is what it is, and I would say, okay, fine, go and test that out. I was told this about silent movies. so and i'd been accepting this for like years saying okay well sequences are like they are because of the you know the length of the reels etc so then one day at home i had like four days to spare and online you can watch nearly any great silent movie i mean they're all up there now so i went and i watched i just made a list to myself of what i remembered as you know classic silent movies so i watched you know um dwe griffith and i watched metropolis and you know i went through all these, and none of them, none of them that I watched, without exception, I watched about eight, not one of them had sequences that were organized according to this kind of 10-minute rule. At all. So I began to think that, okay, maybe the films I've watched are the pure exceptions. I'd have to watch, obviously, a couple of hundred before I could be definitive. But if these are the best examples, you know, the eternal classic side of movies.

The ones that stood the test of time.

And they don't work according to this way, then maybe that theory doesn't hold water. You know, and so I'm slightly skeptical. But this notion of dividing your story into chapters, I do think is very useful. And I do think it holds water. And when I look at work, you can kind of see and i think it depends on what kind of story you're telling i think in certain kinds of stories that are highly structured you have a very organized structure and you have a very organized sequence structure if you look at thrillers particular tight thrillers or you look at um farce for example i think both really tight thriller writing and really good farce writing is entirely dependent on a very tight structural organization of the story so you can see those sequences really clearly in certain films if you watch a margin call for example financial thriller it has an absolutely rigorous set of sequences and it's not very difficult to see them you know you watch the film once to enjoy it then you watch the film again to analyze it and the sequences come out they're obvious you know it's quite clear and very often marked by you know the the the visuals that you see very often you you have this thriller set in a in a building uh in an office in Wall Street, and then you have the little sequence of, you know, the buildings outside. And as soon as you cut to the buildings outside for like 20 seconds, that's the end of the sequence. And then you come back in the building and off we go again for sequence two. So the grammar of it is completely clear.

Just to point out the editing thing, the idea that it comes from post-production, there's two observations I want to make, because I agree with you. One, which is reel length, depends on the film that you're using, whether it's 35, 70, or 16. I can speak from experience. Back when you used to get IMAX on film, the reels were seven minutes long, right, versus a 35-mil print. It's a distribution thing. So saying that writers should be, it's like, well, we're an IMAX film. Our sequences need to be seven minutes long, but we're shooting on 16. so our reels need to be you know 25 the the other thing is in terms of editing is it's a often we lock reels because it's simply a practicality of we've got roughly this amount of storytelling to do and sound department and music or visual effects are breathing down your neck and you've got to start locking reels in terms of just moving the forward the film to final cut so it's like we're gonna lock reel one and work it let's work out where reel one is and we can negotiate with that and the editor and the director and whoever else about where we're going to put the pin in that little section of the story, move on. So it's not being driven by the script, it's being driven by the practicalities of production is my point in both circumstances.

17th century French drama is a five-act structure. So when you watch plays written in France that's performed in France in the 17th century, they're five acts long and each act is about 22 minutes long. And the reason those acts are 22 minutes long is the biggest candle you could make before the candle fell over under its own weight, was only able to burn for 22 minutes. And these candles illuminated the stage. And so, again, it's technology. It's burning whatever technology you have. It's like the argument about reels is that you can only have a sequence for that long because the reel only shoots that long. And we don't have reels anymore.

We have DCPs.

But in French drama, the acts were literally 22 minutes long because that was how long the candles will burn for. So there is a relationship. So then you think, okay, your dramaturge is having to work within this medium. So the question then is for the screenwriter, okay, we don't necessarily have those problems in terms of sequencing. But if you're writing a television drama, for example, for, you know, ad breaks, then you are structuring your story in relation to, you know, how long your candle is in some ways. So the sequences do come from this mixture of, on the one hand, a theoretical notion of, can you divide the story into sections that are good for the writer? And the practical idea of, you know, well, stories are practically divided into sections for various reasons to do with practicality and technology.

And you can see it in locations as well, to an extent. I mean, we're looking at Children of Men, and that clearly has three acts, which has three different worlds. You have London, you have the country, and you have the refugee camp. There's a number of different sequences within those sections, but it's so clearly clunk city, clunk country, clunk refugee camp. Like, the film is divided into those three sections. In some ways, yeah.

So we do have, we could talk about the nature of sequences and the theories about where they come from forever.

Ad nauseam.

For a long time. And we probably will after we stop recording. But the thing that I, I mean, my interest in sequences was triggered by this notion of, you know, the old theory about silent movie reels and whatever. So I started to look up this idea of sequences. And I have been thinking about it for quite a long time and trying to take it a bit further and make it more practically useful. And really, the thing about sequence is that it seemed very much to be something with plotting. That the idea of a sequence is you have a question that is the question that fundamentally drives the plot of the sequence. So you have, say, for argument's sake, a 12-minute section of your story. And you say, okay, well, in order to organize this 12 minutes, what you need to do is have an overall question that drives the plot of that 12-minute sequence. So it's, will Jimmy discover that his partner has betrayed him, for example. And in that 12-minute section, the question is opened. is opened, so there's a section a little way in where the audience becomes aware that the fundamental question at stake here is, is this betrayal going to be discovered? And then it will be answered towards the end, and there'll be a consequence of the answer. So because he discovers the truth, he does this, and that, whatever he does, throws you into the next sequence of the story. So because the question's answered in a certain way, the answer has a consequence, and the consequence then as it were provides the dramatic ammunition for the moving forward into the next sequence and therefore you can have a series of sequences where you have a series of questions and if you could write those questions down you actually have a series of questions that articulate the the movement of the plot knowing this he does this then he because he knows that he does this because there's that and that is as it were is your plot divided into eight sub questions well.

Looking at born which is a very tightly plotted film you get um what's in the bank account being the first kind of plot question that's raised we're talking about the first born film the born identity uh and then the next question is will he escape because the police and the army are after him then you know he gets to paris and there's kind of a little bit of lull for, I guess, expositionary purposes while he's poking around his apartment, but, then another assassin bursts in. And there's, you know, each time, and the next question is raised about that he needs to find something out, but that there are obstacles in the way.

And they're on, so I said, but Anne saying they're almost the titular question, what, you know, who is Jason Bond?

Yeah.

So you, you, you take your overall question.

You know, will Jason find out the truth about who he is?

And he finds out right near the end of the second act, right before the sequence that we're going to focus on, he actually finds out. It's not resolved at the end of the movie.

It's actually resolved it's more like will jason find out the truth about how he got to be in the sea floating at the beginning of the story will he find out how he got to where he was and that's the overall question and then that you simply divide that and it's just practically in terms of plotting sequence questions you divide the overall question yeah into into 10 component questions or eight or six component questions you know and basically you're and it's useful for the writer because okay well i want to you know take a any any kind of story will they be together? Okay, that's my story. So it's a romance. So how do I make an interesting story about will they be together? Well, what I have to do is I have to divide that question into eight or 10 sub-questions. So in order to be together, what do they have to do? Well, they have to meet, for example, at the beginning. So you take the opening of the story, and you say, okay, how do I get them to meet? We're just going to take the first two sequences, and then I'll have a question. This is exactly how you structure Sleeps in Seattle. The first section is who is the male character? What's going on in their lives? And so what is the question that drives them? You set that sequence up, you answer it, then you cut to the female character. Who is the female character? What's the question that drives that sequence? And then at the end of those two sections where we've introduced the audience to the male and the female character, we have them meet. And then we have our story. So you basically divide the opening into two sequences that allows you to introduce the two characters, each of which, because there's no story overall yet, because they haven't actually met, we have to give them an interesting dramatic question which relates to their lives. Otherwise, there's no reason for the audience to keep watching in terms of plot. It's just character exposition. So we have to give the characters a plot reason, so something has to be going on. So whatever the sequence question is of the male character, it's just a question that allows the audience to engage with the plot while we unfold the character underneath and then once we do that we switch the female character so the sequences are very useful for allowing you to do a lot of like character exposition underneath the surface of the action um and that's why they're that's why they're there that's what they're what's there for but then the question becomes okay is it only for plotting and if you look at sequences and say well the reason you have sequences is that you take a plot which is a big complicated thing when you look at it, you know, overall, and you divide it into 10 discrete sections, and that makes your plot more manageable. And that's why this way of thinking of discrete sections is useful. That's the theory. And that's kind of where it stops at the moment. That's where, you know, a lot of the books you'll get about it really talk about in detail about how you do that and how it works.

Goal, stakes, and urgency is one way people will put it together.

Absolutely.

Each sequence has a goal, stakes, and urgency to it.

I mean, we've looked at these books before, and each one break those sequences up into different kind of sections. I mean, going to where I think you're going next is how can we drive, how can we have, is it possible to have sequences driven by questions that are not plot related? But there, I mean, Michael Hay does have, two of those little flowchart lines, one which is laid out for the plot questions, and another which is laid out for the character questions. So...

If you're a writer of any skill, irrespective of what your plot question is, you should always be unfolding as with a character underneath. But the question is, is the character always unfolded underneath? And what if you say, okay, I wanna organize my plot sequences in such a way that each one predicts the next. And so therefore it's like a chain link that each link, each sequence links in like a chain link, uh, fence to the next one or like a necklace and drives the story along. What if I don't want to tell the story that fast, that hard, that driven, what if I'm interested in character more slightly than this notion of a driven story? And I think, and that's kind of what I was interested in this idea of what, what if it's a different kind of story? And I think sequence structure that's very tightly plotted works for very tightly plotted kinds of stories, like thrillers, for example, like certain kinds of thrillers, like farces. But then you have different stories. And then you, so I started looking at other ways of thinking about sequences. And I think there are three kinds of sequences, fundamentally. I think there are plot sequences, which are sequences that are driven entirely by the plot question, where character can kind of perform underneath, but really the sequence is driven by the plot question. Then you have what I would call plot character sequences, plot stroke character sequences, which are sequences where. You do have a plot question that's primary, the main question, as it were, the fundamental issue that drives the story forward is a plot question. But the reason that question is there is really more for the unfolding of character. So it's not, if you like, a plot sequence is where you have a question for the sequence that drives the story forward with the main and almost entire purpose of moving the plot quickly and engaging the audience almost entirely on the question of what's going to happen now, what's going to happen now, what's going to happen now. You're not underneath that you can gently unfold the question of who are these people but you're not asking the audience to really be thinking about that too much then you have a plot stroke character sequence where you have a plot question but really what that sequence is about is about unfolding character so it's the question who are these people really is kind of answered by what are they trying to do and as you understand what they're trying to do the question you become to understand that's just as important is, well, who are they? And they normally struggle to answer that question, you know, because they are concerned with other things apart from plot in their own stories where it's not simply like, for example, questions like, why should I do this? What do I get out of doing this? These are, as it were, more philosophical ways of thinking about action that the characters will have. And so you have plot character questions, which are where, as it where the exploration of character and the exploration of plot is more in the balance, then you have a different kind of sequence altogether, which is unusual, much less frequent, but which is a character sequence, where there really isn't a plot question. The question of what will happen next is not being asked or even explored by the character. The character is not fundamentally interested in achieving anything. So now again, in many, theories about writing, this is a bad thing. A character must always have an objective. But there are certain kinds of characters who have no objectives. Like, for example, insane people. Very young children. They have no objectives. They live in the present. So if you're building a story out of that kind of a character, then you couldn't have a plot question.

Well, I think there's also... We did an episode which was called Plot Light, where we they were clearly plot questions but it was often the same plot question being asked over and over again it's almost like as you said the whole movie was one sequence and really it was just allowing that to take a really deep dive into the character so we looked at Amor where it's one long exploration of you know one man's journey and caring for his dying wife and we looked at happy-go-lucky whether characters have life goals but not, you know not plot goals they're not being driven towards something they're just going about their daily life from going to work dating having drinks you know doing the dance lessons so there there are definitely like larger questions that are driving the characters plot questions but really the the, sequences within them are not. You seem to be asking the same question over and over again.

What's really interesting and profound, I think, about when you go down this track, is that I think when you think about how these different kinds of sequences work, and you think about the kinds of characters that you get in these different kinds of stories, I think there's a kind of deep connection between the philosophical presupposition of the filmmaker and the way the form of the story plays out. If you look at Amour, for example you say forget the kind of the nuts and bolts of how the story is organized okay what it's really about is this kind of relationship between two people who love each other very much, and one of them is coming to the end of their life and these two people have kind of uh you know built their lives around each other so once one character falls away the notion of meaning for the character falls away for the husband who remains you know his life means something because of his love for this woman. If this woman dies and is gone, his life no longer has any meaning. If it doesn't have any meaning, there is no causality. Nothing matters, you know, in the sense of what happens doesn't make any difference. If what happens makes any difference, plot can't function. You know what I mean?

Yeah, absolutely.

So therefore, you have a story. If you really want to dramatize a man who's come to understand his life to contain no meaning, then there can't be a plot in his life. Because a plot in his life implies his life has meaning. And the whole point of that film is that as soon as his wife falls away, there is no meaning in his life. And so everything is, it's not meaningless, but there is no, as it were, coherent pattern to it. He could have meaning in a moment. It's the moment, for example, when he sees the bird in the landing. It's full of meaning.

And that's plotted. That is, will he catch that?

Within the moment of the scene, it's plotted. But you say, how does that relate to the scene that came before, the scene that will come after? And the answer is, in terms of logical plot, none whatsoever.

I'd want to re-watch it but I think what's interesting about, or more and all those films particularly is that there is most of them i think have plot questions but on a very unlike on a scene level and their intensity is very low either because the stakes are low like him getting the bird out of the apartment's very low stakes and that means i guess i'm quoting from previous discussion by lowering the intensity on the stakes you raise the intensity in terms of the meaning or in terms of the character thematic.

Stakes are much higher because what does that bird mean? That bird poetically signifies a soul that needs to be freed. You know, it's kind of, you know, what is he seeing? When we see him trying to free a bird in that apartment, knowing that his wife is dying or died, I don't remember exactly where it comes, that bird has a poetic metaphorical meaning that is far stronger given the context of that story than it would be if you had a, you know, that bird poetically resonates in a way. It has nothing to do with plot it's to do with your understanding of what the themes are and of character who he is and what he's thinking absolutely.

I'm just saying that there is a plot question it seemed quite.

Simply getting a very tiny little skeleton you always need that plot question that's the point you will because you always need that drive forward no matter how characterful or metaphorical your story if you don't have the drive forward then you have you know you're not running through time and film is always running through time so.

Before we get to diving into these plot character questions, because I fear that we're diving into the deep end too quickly. I just kind of want to give two simple examples of really high intensity plot sequences. I mean, hopefully for most people, they're self-explanatory, but I was just thinking of two that I could pull out here. And one of them is the bank robbery centerpiece in Heat, which is, will they succeed in the bank robbery? There's almost not, the character development comes in-

Catch them because.

Yes yeah yeah exactly right and it's it's an incredible action sequence which is all plot questions and it's all about the tactics in the moment but the character consequences that i mean and obviously it pushes the whole second film is about who's died and who who tipped off the police and all that stuff within the moment it's about the plot question right and hopefully people have seen heat and we don't have to really talk about in detail the other one which is one of your examples um weirdly is in frenzy when the um the murderer is that the ring falls into the bag of oats potatoes no.

No no no yeah.

He strangles.

A woman and as she dies her hand goes on his lapel of his suit and in his suit he has a kind of ornamental brooch and she her dying hand grasps it into and pulls it out of his suit and then he dumps the body in a bag of potatoes and as he and then he dumps the potatoes in a van that's in a truck's driving them away and as he gets back to his apartment he suddenly notices his pin is missing and he realizes that the pin he was in his suit is now in the hand of the corpse, and that if the police find the corpse, then that may theoretically lead them back to him as the murderer.

And so then he has to go and find lapel and the plot question is is it's a whole series of really interesting moments it's an incredible set piece but it's about will he recover the pin and on and often you'll see that i mean there's so many examples now come to think of it's like row one at the end of the whole end sequences will they get the death star plans you know often those kinds of movies and i'm just using that to illustrate saving private ryan is.

My favorite you know there's favorite private run when they get on the beginning of act one of saving a private Ryan is, is firstly, will they get out of the landing craft onto the beach? And then will they get off the beach before getting killed? That's it. And there is no character or virtually no character development in that story. There's a little tiny bit of character painting, but it's simply, you know, they're at every given, any given moment in that for 25 minutes, their lives are in danger. And it's only about how will they not get killed? It's all about plot.

It's only when it slows down, do we get that moment with Tom Hanks and shaking and the Tom size more k it's time so time size fires more again don't bring the dirt in the tins we get it's when that plot question is resolved we have those moments to explore the characters flip side from another the end.

From the different section of a movie is the last sequence in fury road which is will they make it through.

Yes like the there's tons of.

Mini sequences in there of action where you know and that's constantly escalating and constantly changing but there's one plot question are they going to make it back through Morton Joe's crew or not.

Yeah and often that's why you get the elaborate plan high synurities are a perfect example right so I kind of just wanted to get that out of the way so you can kind of illustrate this is the extreme of like plot sequence high plot, plot questions with like a high intensity of plot.

So the question the word is really good because the word is intensity you know if you if you think of like a really intense plot sequence like ryan okay where literally any given moment all the people we care about in this story can be killed so it's life and death is absolutely on the edge there's a and the level of intensity of storytelling If you think back to that sequence, just the way it's realized, the way it's directed, the enormous amount of stakes at any given moment is life or death. It's incredibly intense. So basically, the intensity is all in the service of action. It's all in the service of the plot. So there's an amazing intensity. Now, the question I would ask about any sequence is where does that intensity go if you take away the plot requirement for it to exist? Like if they no longer have their lives at risk at any moment literally the next second you could die so the sequence is really intense because everything is at stake all the time as soon as they get off the beach it's no longer at stake so when so that suddenly there's where the intensity of the the action dissipates and what happens then you suddenly unfold the characters because you can't have a vacuum in a story if you use that much intensity of plotting as soon as you turn that intensity down you need intensity somewhere else and so as soon as they get off the beach suddenly who these people are becomes it kind of flowers you know suddenly you see ryan it's not ryan you suddenly see tom hanks's character suddenly you see the sergeant suddenly you see there's a guy who gets a given a dagger they say hey look there's a hitler youth dagger and he picks it up and he starts to shiver and he starts to break down and getting kind of hysterical crying so suddenly all that intensity of action is translated to intensity of character so and that's really i think important to understand is that the question you always have to ask in these sequences is where's the intensity it's either intensity of plot or intensity of plot and character imbalance or it's intensity of character but it always has to be intense and i think.

We're going to get to i think you're right in terms of it always has to be intense in terms of, a way I would put it is it always has to be compelling. You don't want to be bored, right? But I think there are going to be questions, there are going to be moments which are filled in by the audience that the writer and the filmmakers may not have posed either a plot or a character question. And the film that I keep thinking about is Drive, where it's almost like a joke, all those scenes which is just ryan gosling staring into space while there's synth pop music happening but you've had the plot leader before those moments and you have the plot following those moments there's just this space and it's not like he's interacting with anyone it's not like he's doing anything but you're just sitting there in the moment and obviously the music and the filmmaking is driving certain the audience to feel something but that the audience is the one that's posing the questions like what is he thinking about is he thinking about this would Would you not say that those are simply intense moments of character?

Yes, but it's not- The audience is simply intensely engaging with the notion of the character.

Absolutely. But I don't think the question has been raised by the writer. I think the audience is supplying those questions.

Because some of these other examples that we'll get into.

Like Naked on Manchester, I see the writer is very much in control over the character questions that the audience is asking. Stephen nods thoughtfully, I'm not entirely sure I agree with you, John.

I really am not, because what I think I would say probably is going on in those moments, in Drive, for example, is that the fundamental question about the nature of the character, that's when the audience is beginning to engage with the question of, okay, well, it's not so much what's happening, but so much as who is he, what does he feel, and what does he need to understand, and what do I need to understand?

And it's about how far he will go.

Yeah. But it's not like, I don't want to jump into one of these other examples yet, but, you know, in... I'm not going to but i reckon when we get to these when we get to um.

The more character question go back to those those ideas of sequences you have a plot sequence which is driven by action so it's an active question above and to do with the plot then you have the plot character sequence which is a there is still an active question to do with plot but the reason you're asking that question is really more to do with how how the writer can unfold the character and then you have the sequence question which is really a character question where they're essentially in that sequence we're in the character sequence, there is no plot to speak of. In a sense, there isn't a determined active direction. The character is kind of meandering through, as it were, their life and their experience, but they're not trying to do anything, and they don't have an objective, and there isn't really a plot in the story. And so those are the three kinds of sequence. So you can say, well, in certain kinds of story, like in a farce or in a tight thriller, you will tend to organize the story around plot sequences. And then you can think of something else like a more characterful story like for example a road movie where you have a overall plotted objective to get somewhere but the road movie is really about characters and who the people are on the journey so you will mix um a plot quest plot sequences with plot stroke character sequences which are about exploring character and then you'll have particular kinds of films which are not fundamentally interested in very much in exploring plotted questions driving questions, but might be more interested in the nature of people, for example, or the nature of things. And you will have these kind of character sequences, which are much less organized. I have to say, I think those kinds of character sequence stories are very much less common than maybe a lot of writers would like them to be. Because I think, basically, you can't really get through much more than 15 minutes of story in a feature script without having some kind of plotted objective. I think the audience, there is this fundamental requirement of film narrative, which is we have to go somewhere.

Film narrative yeah exactly we're talking about film narrative because there is art film there is experimental film and in preparation it was to and leon and i are sound recorders is god knows what he's doing over there on the couch but uh we we went out for drinks the other night and we were talking about the stargate sequence which deliberately from 2001 which deliberately goes very very long without any plot or character question um and we discussed whether that was a thematic question or whether you know much in the same way you i think we'll get into with naked or there will be blood or diving bell and the butterfly and certainly the way where we got to um with a more is that the very purpose of that sequence is to kind of unhitch you from, narrative thinking, that desire to make you sort of absorb in the moment. And so I think there are like those moments in drive, like, let me be clear. They're moments that last forever. At most, 10, 15 seconds, they're not a sequence. They're not even a scene.

But if you think of sequences, what we're saying in sequences in a philosophical sense is that there are three ways to understand meaning. You can demonstrate meaning as a writer, locking the meaning onto the meaning of the action. You could demonstrate the meaning of the story, locking the audience onto the action, which through the manipulation of action reveals character, and then you can demonstrate meaning by an investigation of the nature of people, not with action. But these are all, as it were, quite iterative ways of saying. There's another way of thinking about meaning, which is that meaning is not, in some sense, literalized in that way. That meaning is a poetic, elusive, intuitive, non-rational way of thinking. It's So, you know, someone like Tarkovsky, someone like Parinjarov is basically saying, by showing a series of shots with repeated images and the use of music, I can make you understand the nature of the reality of things, which doesn't require a necessity to understand action or understand character. There's a deeper, as it were, poetic way of thinking about the world. And that's an entirely, particularly, for example, art installations, the notion of narrative is very often not explored at all in those things. It's, you know, you get repetitions and you get, you know, it's not that narrative is not, the idea that narrative leads you to meaning is kind of an argument that cinema makes and television makes, but you don't have to accept that argument. And so within a film like Drive, you can say, what happens if we then have, as it were, a conventionally organized story, which takes the argument that narrative delivers meaning and within that narrative delivers meaning structure, we then drop in 15 seconds of non-narrative meaning which is poeticism and you know and Tarkovsky does much more than that just 70 percent 30 percent meaning in a narrative meaning yeah um and so that's another tool altogether but that's not what we're talking about here today but so should we talk about.

The the plot.

Character question i was thinking we should move on to the born identity as kind of the softest entry point right because it's a film it is a film it's obviously it almost like a genre, definer as you know there's so many action movies now that follow the born model and we talk and we talked about this early uh which is the original we're talking about the original 2002 with matt damon not the pierce prosdenham miniseries was the pierce boseman that was in the miniseries I.

Didn't even know there was.

A miniseries.

So it starts to come back No it doesn't start to come back The knot's like everything else I just found the rope and I did it, Same way I can read, I can write I can add, subtract, I can make coffee I can shuffle cards, I can set up Yes, yes, it will come back No it's not coming back god damn it, that's the point, I'm down here looking through this All this shit for two weeks I'm down here, It's not working I don't even know what to look for, you need to rest it will come back what if it doesn't come back, we get in there tomorrow I don't even have a name.

You know it's the act it's similar to a road movie which is interesting because they have to move around a lot I'm not going to try and summarize the plot what is interesting is it's got this beat in the middle, of or a sequence in the middle of the story when Bourne goes to the house two-thirds in two-thirds in uh and the house is the ex-boyfriend of murray of murray right but the film slows down and this is a beat that we saw recently in logan we saw a similar kind of moment in looper and we were talking about potentially it was also in skyfall had a similar kind of they it's become a bit of a template it's.

Interesting you list those examples because they're all at very different parts of.

The movie.

Like Logan is at the midpoint, pretty much. Skyfall is the end. You're talking about when he goes home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, and, yeah, that, that homestead sequence where they- And the fact we even call it a homestead sequence.

So it's obvious that we've got some questions. Point is, I think it's an interesting example because it actually kind of belongs to a kind of larger generic- Convention. Convention. Or, or I don't want to say a trope because it belittles it. It's part of the rhythm of these things where they slow down, have a moment where we get to explore our hero.

I mean, it's because, you know, it's, again, the interesting thing about this particular section of the story we're talking about is that this is a story that's constructed on plot sequences. And then, so you ask the question, what happens if I take a genre that, generally speaking, the action film is, or the Bond movie, you know, where it comes from, is generally structured as a series of plot sequences? What happens if I take one of those sequences out, no longer make it a plot sequence, and then make it a plot character sequence? What happens then? What that means is you take a genre which is not really traditionally that concerned with the complexities of character. So, for example, the morality of action is not something that Bond asks himself. Well, certainly he didn't used to. After this movie, the Bond film, he did. And that's because this movie changed the way that Bond thought. But previously, Bond would kill people and not go, is that the right thing to do? Is it a good thing? Am I a good man? You know, what does this make me feel about myself? All those questions are character questions. If you have a series of plot sequences in a Bond movie, the character never gets to ask those questions because the plot is driving them forward. In this movie, Bourne is on the run. He's discovered a few things about himself. And then he gets to the house. Suddenly, you have a character who starts to ask fundamental questions about his nature. So you have an action character, an action movie character, who's beginning to ask things like, is what I'm doing a good thing? a fatal question for a plot-driven character because he's beginning to question the nature of plot.

Maybe I should not be part of this plot.

And so the question for the writer is then what happens to the plot? Because if you have a character who traditionally drives the plot, going, I'm not sure that action is good, you know, in the sense that what if the things that I'm doing are bad, they suddenly hesitate in the notion of action. And so what happens in this sequence is you go, you have a sequence, which is, I want the character to kind of unfold themselves. I want to start thinking about who they are. So we have a, this is a plot character sequence. And so the, in that sequence, the question that drives the, as it were, the plot question that drives the sequence is no longer controlled by the protagonist. Bourne doesn't drive the sequence. The question is, will the CIA nail Jason? They've worked out. And so what the sequence shows is the CIA, in a number of small scenes, the CIA working out where he is, setting out to get an operative to go and find him, and that operative will kill him. And that's... So the action is now...

He's also Clive Owen.

He's Clive Owen. And that action, that part of the story, the action of the sequence is in the control of the antagonists.

Those are the targets, beg, borrow, pack, tap, bypass. I don't care what you do. I want to know everything you can tell me about what's going on at those locations.

There is very much a plot question, but the plot question is, will Clive Owen, the professor, get Bourne? It's not, will Bourne do whatever, because Bourne deliberately relinquishes agency.

And coming back to our point of view thing, what is interesting is it's playing on audience point of view. We've got more information than Bourne, so we feel tension for him, we feel threat for him, and that makes it compelling, even though born and then that then also gives space for born to be inactive in this sequence because we are feeling tension for him and in his inaction at least for the first.

And what that also means is that that that as a word driven action which is will they get born will will you know that will they find and dispose of born that doesn't take up very much space in the sequence if you look at the previous sections of the story the sequence of the story which you're which are all rotating around jason and questions with jason will jason do that will jason do this jason is driving everything and we're with jason and the action is taking up all the time in the in the sequence there's no there's no time to spare doing other things whereas now that action is given over to the opposition to the antagonists and jason is beginning to think about things and so the scenes with jason are you have scenes where you know he he he kind of lies about who he is and then you have a sequence where his girlfriend marie is talking to her ex-boyfriend and he says you know so what does he do and it's a conversation about you know what's your boyfriend like what's.

What's he did for a living? He used to be in shipping. Is it good for you? Are you happy? You know me. I try too hard.

We suddenly go to a much more conventional kind of world where people have girlfriends and boyfriends and your ex talks to you about your new boyfriend. And, you know, the notion of, you know, international spy thrillers and action film, that's suddenly where it's a different world now.

To put it into context, because... Sorry, I do want to say this, because to put it into context, The sequence preceding that has ended with Jason learning that he was an assassin. He still can't remember his past life, but he... Whatever sense of morality he has since his amnesia is he is ashamed of himself. And also Marie, who can clearly believe this because she's seen what he's capable of physically, is also questioning. Like, are you going to wake up one day and be an evil person? Like, are you a monster? They're both asking that question despite still being on the run. And so that overhanging character question is also creating a lot of tension.

Marie. Get away. Marie. Stop, Marie. Stop right there. What are you going to do, kill me? Is that what's next? Stay calm. Stay calm. Whatever we do, we have to do it together. We have to be strong. Marie, the only thing we had in common was that neither one of us knew who you were. We passed the... Marie. The police will find us, and the people who took that picture in the embassy, the people who killed Lombosi, they are going to come here and they are going to kill us. The people who you work for.

Absolutely and what you need in the story is you need to create the space and the organization of the material to allow these questions to come to the surface so you have to give as it were the agency of the action to the opposition to allow jason the space to start unfolding these questions about himself and around marie to have these questions so in the first part of the story what happens in that sequence is that you know the the meanwhile the cia are tracking him down and working on what to do about him but jason is at home he's you know having to pretend to be a decent, normal person. Maria's having to pretend that, you know, their boyfriend and girlfriend, the ex has got his kids and there are these children. It's a very important part of the sequence, these innocent children that are around. And then they all go to bed and Jason has to take the, um, uh, the, the, the bedding from the guy and pretend that they're kind of lovers, but they're not, he's going to sleep on the floor. And so all the kind of, the kind of sexual dynamics, their relationship.

They were lovers the night before. And since then they've, they're asking that question. So that's, you know, an interesting... Shifts.

And you're talking about where the homestead sequence is in the context of this story. It works because Jason has to learn a element, a part of the truth of who he is, which is he's an assassin. If this scene was earlier, if this homestead sequence was before that, it wouldn't have the charge because this is about him getting to live a life that is not his, right? We get to experience, learn more about his character by him play acting, being a normal person, right?

The point about it being a plot character sequence is, you know, you couldn't do this kind of character work if Jason had the responsibility of driving the plot of the story.

If he was still interested in finding out who he was or the next piece of information, he wouldn't hang around in...

So you slow the action down. And another thing that happens here is not much happens in terms of action until quite a long way into the sequence. And so the action such as this is inconsequential. They have dinner together. You know, they wash up. They, you know, they get their bedding. They go and lie down. And then Jason wakes up in the middle of the night and he looks at the children and Marie wakes up and he's not there and she goes to find him. And Jason says, let's just give this up.

What are you doing here? I'm the kids. I was worried. I couldn't sleep. We're going to wake them up. I don't want to know who I am anymore. Shh. I don't care. I don't want to know. Come on, we'll talk about it. Everything I found out, I want to forget. It's okay. I don't care who I am or what I did. It's okay. You have this money. We can hide. Could we do that? Is there any chance you could do that?

And so you have this section in the story, extraordinary section in an action movie where the action hero says, what if we just didn't take any action? What if we just ran away from the plot? What if we, you know, all these people are trying to find me and do stuff. What if I just disappeared? And you, and basically he's, Jason is saying, is my destiny bound up in what I do? Or maybe I need to take time out to work out who I really am. And this is, and this is, as it were, the debate between plot and character. They're dramatized in the surface of the story. It's quite remarkable in that way. Meanwhile, the story is, of course, ticking over. Jason may want to do that, but it doesn't make any difference because outside is an assassin. Next morning, he wakes up. You know, the dog is missing. And as soon as the dog is missing and he realizes it, bang, we're back into causality. The dog is missing. Ergo, someone's out there. Ergo, someone's trying to kill us. Ergo, I have to stop them. Ergo, ergo. And he, you know, he suddenly dropped back into the world of plot. It doesn't matter whether he wants to be a different person, because the children that he's worried about are now in danger. And so he has to act. And so he's driven back into the world of action and the second half. But once he gets to the climax of the sequence where he finds Clive Owen and shoots him, Clive Owen is mortally wounded. Clive Owen, as he dies, and Jason's asking questions like, you know, who sent you? Why you here which all plot questions what are you doing and clive owen is saying do you still get headaches you know do you are you like me are you you're on your own aren't you we're all on our own.

Who else is out here who else how many you got with you i'm not gonna ask you again i work alone like you we always work alone who you mean who are you bro paris, Treadstone, both of us. Treadstone? Which one? Paris, I live in Paris. Do you get the headaches? I get such bad headaches, you know, at night when you're driving a car. I don't know, maybe it's something to do with the headlines. What is Treadstone? Treadstone said pills. They said go to Paris. Is Treadstone in Paris? Look at this. Look at what they make you give.

And all that Clive Owen's replies are to do with character. they're all to do with who you are and the way you you know the the way this life changes your essential nature they don't speak to plot there's a little tiny bit of plot but they all speak to character and then the clavine's dying words the last words he says in that sequence of look.

At what they make you give.

And it's a it's a fantastic line it's about look at what being a man of action does to the nature of your character that's really what the subject of that.

It drives the next two films it's such an incredible powerful question and it absolutely just why the fourth and five so weird i think little taste.

Moment i love the born legacy the one without jason born absolutely despised the.

Fifth one it was.

Just a complete awful film.

That would be interesting because i do wonder if it relates to these questions he's run out of these questions to asked by the the fifth one is they want to turn him into a james bond right i think is that where it fails down he's going to save the world because that's what he's destined to do as opposed to the question can he escape his past and they find more and more ways to keep no you volunteered for this you were actually a patriot you wanted this because they that's kind of where two and three go and they're okay two and three i mean.

The first three born movies are essentially driven by one question, which are, who am I really? That's the question that Bourne is exploring. Who am I really? And therefore, what should I do? And of course, action in that sense is slave to character. You know, until I know who I am, I can't know what the right thing to do is. Therefore, I can't do the right action. And the paradox for Jason is that he's thrown into a world of action where people are constantly trying to do things to him. And in order to work out what is the right thing to do in the long term, he has to work out who he is. But how can I work out who I am when people are trying to kill me all the time? And I don't have any time and space to sort that out. And that's the kind of paradox the character, which is why it takes him a while to get that position of resolution. And that astonishing scene, like for me, the second film.

It takes him getting through all the action, basically killing everyone who's trying to kill him till it can stop the plot again. And then there's that scene where he's apologizing to the daughter of her parents who he killed.

Absolutely amazing scene.

And it's all about character. There's no plot question at all. It's just about about him wanting to be this new person, someone who's taking responsibility, someone who's apologizing, someone who's feeling guilt, someone who's not what his past.

I would want to know that my mother didn't kill my father, that she didn't kill herself. Not what happened to your parents i killed them, i killed them, it was my job it was my first time your father was supposed to be alone, but then your mother, came out of nowhere and I had to change my plan. It changes things. That knowledge, doesn't it? When what you love gets taken from you, you want to know the truth. I'm sorry.

The actions I made, the way he's saying in that scene is, the actions that I took are not a reflection of who I really am. And that's the point where the character is kind of beginning to work out. And the Bourne movies are extraordinarily brilliant because they simply take this genre, the action genre, and then they debate and turn inside out the question of the reliability and the value of action. They're amazingly together.

And I think they work as well, because on some level, I think we can all relate to that idea of how much am I my past actions? If I have sinned in the past, should I and, you know, to what point am I beholden to them?

But at the point where the audience gets a little bit, okay, this is getting a bit philosophical, you then just drop in a plot. You just have you know you're dropping a 12 minute car chase you know which is a pure plot sequence and you back and the way these stories are structured that's the point you're balancing plot sequences and plot character sequences the thing i would encourage people to think about is you know take a pure action movie it's all plot sequences and then think about what would happen if i took a action movie that i love that kind of silly action movie what would i drop in as a plot character sequence how would the story change if i suddenly made a character think about the nature I'm.

Now imagining an Amor remake with Liam Neeson, where he's fighting. It's like Rio Bravo meets Amor. It's like he's fighting off bad guys while his wife's got Alzheimer's. I'm going to write that out. But if you go to.

For example, Naked, have we switched on, move on to Naked?

Yes, let's move on to Naked. So that's Bourne Identity. Move on to Naked. That's what I was going to suggest.

Can you tell me something, Jack? What's all that about? Eh? That, the old Highland fling there, do you know you're doing that? What? That, you know, and for my next tick. That. Look at it! It just happened again, I'm not imagining it. Fuck off, eh? You do that in a sack with the old tick spit. Hey, Maggie! Must be a big fucking shag. You're taking a piss! You're fucking giving it away, are you? Fucking come on, cunt! Get your fucking head open! Eh? What's it like being you? Eh? A bit hectic.

You have a different kind of story, which is it's an art house movie rather than a multiplex film. And the director has the writer director has much more kind of serious concerns in many ways. Not that necessarily concerned with entertaining an audience. He can take them on a ride. He has something to say. And it's a story about a boy who arrives, the young man who arrives at the beginning of the story, who is kind of on a trajectory. And that trajectory is kind of excluding him from society. So overall in Naked, we say it's the story of this guy, Johnny Boy, this character, who comes, he arrives to the story on the run. He's on the run from something. It's never quite clear what exactly it's to do with. It's kind of pretty clear, but not explicit. And he arrives in London, and he is troubled. And then he goes on a kind of odyssey through London, at the end of which he's expelled from... City, and is fundamentally alone. So it's kind of the journey that Johnny Boy goes. So he comes into the story desperate, and he goes out of the story kind of completely isolated. So it's a story in some way of a character. The reason it's interesting to think about Manchester by the Sea, it's a story of a character who's kind of part of society, who by the end of the story is really excluded from society. If you think of Manchester by the Sea, it's a story of someone who has self-excluded himself from society, who by the end of the story has kind of become part, even though in a very hesitant way, become part of society. So they're kind of diametrically opposite to each other in terms of the way the arc of the story goes. And in Naked, you have this progression of Johnny Boy, where, and again, if you think about it, if you say, you know, my life makes sense. Then what you're saying is the actions that I take have meaning. And if you say my life has no sense, makes no sense, then what you're saying is the actions in my life are of no consequence. So in some way, plot at the beginning of a story like that is where the character kind of thinks that they are part of something, i.e. Society and a group of relationships, and they can make sense of themselves. Plot is important or has a value. And if they go through their journey and they begin to realize that actually no one cares for them, that society has no interest in them, that there is no way that they're going to fit into this world and there is no place for them by the end of that story you only have character there's no plot it doesn't matter what johnny does nobody cares society doesn't care he has no friends nothing he does has any consequence there's no action that he can take that will make his life better he's excluded so in some sense what the story is on a kind of philosophical level is a demonstration of the of of the lack of uh suitability of plotting. It's about a man who literally loses the plot. I mean, and you think about what the story is, he literally loses the plot. He loses the capacity to take any action that makes any difference to his life. So this is the writer's problem. Okay, I want to write a story about a man who loses the plot, a man who loses all meaning in his life. So what do I have to do? And if you look at the way that Naked is structured, it does break into chapters. Those chapters are not the 11-page classical blah, blah, blah, you know, one real silent movie theory. They have different lengths, depending on whatever length they are, but they have specific sequences, and those sequences are driven by specific questions, sometimes plot towards the beginning. In the middle, plot character, and then the further down the story you go, they're character questions. And they're no longer to do with action. Will Johnny, if you look at the two sequences in the beginning that we're going to look at, the sequence with Johnny where he's looking for Maggie, the Maggie sequence. It's a simple, it's a plot character sequence in the sense that we're using a plot question, will Johnny help Maggie and Archie to reunite? That's the plot question. But what actually happens in that sequence? And the answer is no. You know, they reunite by accident. There's nothing he does.

But he is trying? Not really. But he's not sabotaging. No, he's not sabotaging.

He's trying. This is the point of the character.

He's trying, as it were, to have meaning. He's the one that says, in the sequence, if you look at it, what happens is he's out on the streets in London, is sleeping rough, and then he meets this guy, and the guy is very disturbed, and the guy is looking for a girl called Maggie.

Maggie! Maggie! You all right there, Chief? Have you lost somebody? Yeah? Are you looking for somebody?

And he doesn't make much sense. And he's obviously quite a disturbed person. And Johnny kind of gets involved with trying to help him find her. And eventually he goes, well, I'll tell you what to do. You go off looking for her. I'll stay here where I am. And if she comes here, I'll keep her here until you come back.

Listen, mate, what do you think of this? Why don't you have a little wander around and go look for the wee lassie and I'll wait here. And if she turns up, I'll keep her here until you get back. How does that grab you? You're going to be here, right? Yeah. Right. If you get back, right, tell her fucking way here till I get back. If you wanders off, knock her out. You slap her gut for me, right? Yeah, I'll tie her up. Aye. You gonna be here, right? Yeah. Oh, listen, what's her name again? Mackie. Oh, yeah. We'll be back in a minute, right?

And that sounds like a good plan. That's an active, complex piece of plotting. Okay, and the guy goes, great. And off the guy goes, and then sure enough, the girl turns up.

Oh, yeah, Mackie. Is your name Maggie? Glad you can that. It's just a hunch. Are you looking for the petulant dwarf? Me? Sprechen's your dice. Archie! That's the fella. I was told to wait here for you. You're Maggie, he's Archie, I'm nobody. He's gone off looking for you, love. What are you feeling? No, would you just come and sit over here now? Why, fuck off, you dirty cunt.

And then they sit around for a while, and then Johnny goes, let's go and get something to eat. And he leaves the corner where he said to the other guy, if you stay if she comes i'll stay here with her and then he disobeys the the plan that he made and goes and finds something to eat with her talks to her and then they're walking back to where they were presumably and then archie by coincidence walks across the same piece of waste ground meets maggie they start fighting both of them forget about him and they disappear off into the background where.

The fuck are you being where the fuck are you being i've been waiting on you.

And if you think about what's going on in that sequence, I mean, what is that sequence for in the story? What's going, what's it really for? In the story, what it's really for is to show, you know, we have this guy, Johnny, who's on this journey. And this journey is, as it were, is into meaninglessness. And that's where he's going to get to end the story. Nothing he's going to do towards the end of the story is really going to make any difference to his life. He isn't capable of taking an action that is going to change the way his life is. He's falling into a kind of despair. In the middle of the story, he's trying to do things, but the things that I, he's taking action, he's trying to organize his plot, but things happen in spite of who he is, rather than because of what he does. These people meet by accident, and when they meet, they both look at him and start swearing at him.

We did an episode looking at Yusuf, coincidence or plot but not driven by character intruding on film and how you know you take away character agency and you make the audience feel a certain way about them here's a guy who is deliberately at the effect of life rather than affecting life what's.

Important to understand is that you know you talk about a plot sequence a clear classic plot sequence which without character which is it has a question which is raised a little way into the sequence maybe a quarter for the way in. It's explored. It has a midpoint that turns the question in a classical way. So it restates the question in a more interesting way, and then it answers the question, and then there are consequences. That's, as it were, how a classic plot sequence works. You take this plot character sequence in Naked, and there's exactly the same point in the story. You get the question raised, will Archie bring them back together? The question is answered, no. Will Johnny bring Archie and Maggie back together? The answer is no. And that comes at exactly the place you'd expect it to come in the organization's sequence. The twist in the middle is that Maggie turns up That's the restatement of the question. Will Johnny bring Archie and Maggie together now that he's found Maggie but Archie is gone? And so it all works in a completely classical way.

That's almost like a Pixar moment. We've lost the first story.

The structure is absolutely classic. And as you say, the beats in the organization of the question are the same beats he would find in the organization of an action movie made for $200 million. None of the beats are different. Now, you talk to the audience about this. They would not recognize that. You say, do you know this film, that sequence is structured exactly like Pirates of the Caribbean, or exactly like whatever big budget movie you want to think about. The beats are there, but the reason it doesn't feel like that is because the action doesn't have much meaning. Because the film is not saying, okay, everything that this film means is invested in the action of the story. What the film is saying is, really, these actions are inconsequential. Whether or not Archie is brought together with Maggie by Johnny doesn't really make any difference. The point is what we're really interested in is is johnny wants to make a difference he wants to bring them back together he wants to be part of something and in this sequence we're going to dramatize how johnny works quite hard to give his life meaning and then when they come back together the objective that he has been looking for it's by accident it's kind of ironic and he recognizes the irony and he stands there in the in the wasteland and these two people are kind of swearing and kicking each other behind him and they don't they've forgotten he exists and all the action that he has taken has brought into a position where he understands that he's meaningless in the eyes of the people he's been trying to help there is that's what it's about and.

I think the pirates carries being just sparked me in the head because it is a good contrast there is a version of this scene probably on tortura or whatever island where jack sparrow agrees to like stay with the maiden and this person goes off you can see how that works and he goes and rambles he's like i'm hungry you come with me and we and it plays for last but the ending would be different because Jack is a different character right it wouldn't be pessimistic it's either the magic magic jack just somehow, coincidences everything together as happens in the pirates movie or something else it would reflect his character differently and the world view of that film differently than the world view of naked.

But if you then look at naked what happens after that so that sequence comes on and basically you have this as it were story that's been driven by action to a degree up to that point and then you got this kind of plot character sequence which kind of shows that Maybe action can't be trusted. Maybe things don't make sense. Maybe doing things for a reason, you know, like I'm going to get these people back together. You know, what happens is he gets them back together in some strange way, but they forget about him instantly. There's no consequence. And so the consequence that he gets is basically the lack of meaning or importance of him to them is underlined.

Well, that's what I was going to say that might make it feel different from Pirates of the Caribbean is that the sequence, as much as it's a plot driven sequence does not then lead to the next, Plot sequence. And that's what, I mean, road movies often have that feel as well, where a plot sequence or even a plot character sequence ends, and they're still on the road and they're still going in the same direction. The overall plot question of the film has not really changed. That's why they feel episodic.

That's what's really interesting about, if we jump for a moment, to think about road movies as a form. You really want to make a road movie, don't you? If you think about the relationship between form and structure, and something I always get very excited by, how does the structure of the writing and the organization of the story reflect the thematic concerns of the writer? If you think about a road movie, broadly speaking, thematically, what a road movie is about is that the journey is more important than the arrival. You know, so in road movies, people start off with an objective, which is to go somewhere. And what it turns out is the journey to get there is more important than the arriving there. Okay. But at the beginning of the road movie, it's all about plot. You know, you have to set up, these people have to be set up in such a way that they have an objective. And so you plot it. But in the middle of the story, what's going to happen is these people who are on the way somewhere are slowly going to realize that it's not so much about where they're going as what they're doing right now and therefore who they are. So the beginning of a road movie is plotted. Where do we want to go and why? And then once they're on the road, that plot kind of falls away. It's a more consideration of who are we and what will we learn about each other on this journey? and at the end you get this kind of combination of okay we are arriving where we set out but we have learned this about ourselves and i think where.

People often struggle in writing or enjoying road movies and i think that's why there's a lot of bad ones is that bit in the middle doesn't feel driven.

And that starts to feel yeah and why is that and that's because the bit in the middle is because when you are in the middle of this understanding yourself it becomes a character driven story it's no longer so basically if you had to say how would you organize in terms of sequences of road movie, it goes plot sequence, plot sequence, plot character, plot character, character, plot character, plot character, plot character. So if you're doing a sequence stuff, well, maybe you might even go plot character, plot at the end, and you might have a kind of more plotter sequence at the end. So it's about driven action at the beginning, driven action at the very end, and as it were, character evolution through the middle. Once you are on the road, and you're beginning to think about yourself, then you begin to ask the question, is even important whether I get there which which the characters are asking the question does the plot that started this film actually matter anymore. That's what the character's doing. Maybe action, maybe going to Acapulco or wherever I'm going isn't the point. Maybe the point is being on the road. Motorcycle Diaries is a really good example of this. There's a lovely Spanish movie called Living is Easy with Eyes Closed, which is the true story of a teacher in the 60s in Franco Spain who taught English by using Beatles lyrics for his kids. And he copied the Beatles lyrics down off the radio. and he had a book with lyrics in and he heard that john lennon was making a film in almeria and so he decided to go to almeria to find john lennon to ask him to look at his book to correct his lyrics so he has a clear objective will i get to almeria and find john lennon that's there as it were the arc plotted journey on the journey which is a classic road movie he meets a number of people and he begins to realize the problems these people have and they get into his car they're hitching and he lets them in and he begins to realize these problems these people have are much more important than the question of whether or not he gets John Lennon to, you know, correct his lyrics. So the issue from the character becomes, how do I sort out these people's problems whilst at the same time getting Corral Maria? So what started off as a plotted objective becomes a plot character objective. Then in the middle of the story, one of these people is in such crisis that the question then becomes. How do I sort this person out? And if that means I will never go to Almeria, it's of no consequence. This person's problems are so profound. So it goes from plot question, how do I get to Almeria? To plot character question, how do I get to Almeria whilst dealing with these people? To character question, how do I sort this person out? Who is this person really? How do I understand who they really are? And that's the structure. And what's wonderful about it is if you think about, okay, we go from plot to plot character to character. You say, what is the journey of the character in the story? It's the journey of a person who begins to realize it's not where you're going. It's how you behave to the people that you meet along the way that is really the key to everything. And so the structure of the plot sequences, which go to plot character sequences, which go to character sequences, mirrors the evolution of the character. The content, as it were, of the story determines the form. Those sequences work like that because that is the demonstration of the journey of the character. And that's, I mean, in some sense, when you think about it, it's obvious. What happens in a story depends on who the people in the story are. And what happens in the story, which is the plot, depends on the character. So if you say the character is a person who is beginning to learn that my external objectives about my life, how do I get what I want, are less important than how do I help other people get what they need, then what that means is action, what I want, becomes less important. So the plot of the story must become less important. And so, in some sense, your sequences are connected to your characters, which are connected to your theme. And that's why I think now you get to a really complex kind of understanding of the interplay of the way you structure your story with the evolution of the character and the themes you're playing with. I want to put it in.

Pin in that idea i think it's a very strong idea but it feels like something we should talk about more towards the end about how you can use that as a generative tool or a rewriting.

Tool oh i was just going to draw the parallel with the film that we looked at also in our plot light which is chef where it felt like a plotless movie when we analyzed it that we both saw that the first act was an extremely traditional, highly plotted structure. It's just that the plot ended halfway through the film. And we were looking at what is sustaining the back half of this film when the character question is resolved. Like, will this guy learn to be a good father? He learns how to be a good father. And then it's like, what is sustaining the rest of this movie, which is what we were looking at.

Speaking of road movies, I actually want to come back to naked because we've got the second sequence with the security guys talk about. But what's interesting about naked is it's kind of a road movie on foot, right?

Johnny boy is kind of an example. the main character, is an example of the kind of person that in Britain at that time was essentially being thrown away. The political calculation by the ruling class was that those people don't matter. And so what you see is, as it were, the journey of someone like that to rejection. And that's why there's a kind of anger and brutality and vitality in that character, because that character comes out of anger and despair. And so there's an amazing intensity in him and i think the the question again we talked about intensity at the beginning the thing about johnny boy and in the two sequences that come you have the maggie sequence we've talked about and then you have the the next sequence which is johnny boy kind of meets a guy security guard in a in a in a building and the he he's cold and he's sitting outside and eventually security guard says come in and they have a conversation and the end of that conversation which goes on for 20 minutes, Um, and it really is just a conversation and the question, where is the conversation going? What is it leading to what, you know, what as an active question, could you put into the sequence and say, okay, what's going on here is this, none of this question is answerable. There is no, it's not going anywhere. And you had Johnny with Maggie and, uh, Archie trying to find meaning and trying to do something that made a difference. And he fails utterly. And then the next sequence, You get this, what I would call a character sequence, where the character is just who he is, but he has no objective. All his objectives are short-term. Can he get in from the cold?

You've got nowhere to go then? I've got an infinite number of fucking places to go. The problem is where you stay. You with me? Indeed.

And as soon as he gets in from the cold, he wants to know, can I have a cigarette? Can I smoke here? And then when he's- He's drawing a parallel to.

Will I get the bird out of the apartment?

Yeah, it's all short term. And when he goes to a different room, he says, well, can I smoke in here? Whenever he goes to a new room, he goes, can I smoke in here?

This is an observation on a statement. It's almost like an act, it feels like an acty, like an actor thing having the objective of the scene like just simply playing the tactic of the scene like given that mike lee draws on rehearsal as part of his writing rehearsal it kind of doesn't surprise me.

But at the same time the character has what's happening is he's beginning to understand and i think the film the scene is uh i have to say my view one of the great scenes of british cinema there's a scene where he describes to this security guard his view of the nature of reality, which is that, you know, everything is prophesied and he has this mad insane conspiracy theory.

I'm not talking about astrology, I'm talking about astronomy. They're going to line up in the fixed signs of Aquarius, Leo, Taurus and Scorpio, which just happen to correspond to the four beasts of the apocalypse as mentioned in the book of Daniel. Another fucking fucker!

And as he rants about this, you kind of realize this guy is completely detached from reality. That he has no, you know, his theory about the way the world is, is completely mental. And then you, for the first time in the film, you realize the kind of gap between this character and any way that he's going to be able to engage with society. And you see kind of yawning open the kind of chasm between this character and any possibility of salvation. And you begin to fear for him for the first time. and he at that point is giving up he no longer cares when he was with maggie and archie he was kind of trying to make things okay he's saying look if you go here i'll stay here you do this i'll do this he kind of had a plan which if they stuck to it would kind of probably work but the trouble is he's working people who don't care about his plans and they go off on their tangents well he also goes off and gets chips but in the next scene he no longer cares even when anyone's listening to him. He doesn't care if the person he is theoretically trying to convince of his theories actually is convinced at all. He begins to become this kind of lunatic, where he's kind of ranting into the night, you know? And he's just kind of lost. And at that point, the story becomes only about character. You begin to realize there's nothing he can do. You know, previously, in the previous sequence, it was a plot character sequence. The notion of action being valuable, that there are things you can achieve by doing things, was still alive. And now we're in the sequence, and you can begin to realize there's nothing this guy can do. There's no action. There's nothing the person he's with can do. It's not going to stop him talking. That this is just people kind of ranting at each other. Many people turn off from this at the moment when they watch that. The audiences don't like it. Loads of people kind of turn away from the film. That's because what you're presented with here is a kind of pure character sequence, and very few stories have them. Would you call it a character-driven sequence? Or would you call it a character? You say, what drives the action here? In the action of this sequence, what question could you articulate? And you'd say something like. Will Johnny Boy come to understand that his peculiar way of understanding the way the universe is related makes no sense to anyone other than himself? And if he keeps talking like this, all that will happen is that he will alienate himself from everyone else he talks to. Now, that's a clumsy, long-winded question. The way that you define character questions and character sequences, apart from plot questions, are that the plot questions should be short and concise and comprehensible. And character questions should be long and meandering and incomprehensible.

And plot questions, I think part of what makes plot questions plot questions is that there is a clear, often visual answer for the audience. Will Maggie and Archie meet? Yes. And we, the audience, know that question has been resolved.

It's almost like there's a physical outcome.

Physical outcome. Dramatized, for lack of a better word.

It's expressed as will X do Y? It's do. It's a question, will they do it? and that do the thing they do must be clearly observable so it's without question true in a plot question in a character question and the character sequence say there is no plot question if you say look at that sequence with johnny boy in the room with the the security guard in the building say what 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 which actually articulates the organization of the story at that point there is a character question. Will Johnny understand? And that's why it's a character question.

And it's inward focus.

It's not about what will happen, it's what will the character come to learn? Or will indeed they learn at all?

And it is one of a question, and I'm not saying all character questions would be like this, but it's one that the audience is coming to, themselves, in a way. It's not like another character is putting it to him in dialogue, saying, you do understand that if you keep talking like this, blah, blah, blah, will happen.

It's not a Marvel film.

As soon as you get to this level, what happens is your audience falls away because an audience brought up on plot questions, these things are obvious. Will they save the world? Will they do this? Will they do that? Within a character question, in some sense, the audience has to articulate it to themselves. I understand what's going on here. If Johnny doesn't understand this, then he'll be in trouble. And that's kind of what the audience has to do, that work. And some audiences go, I don't come to the movies to do that. I want something else. And that's fine, you know? But the audiences that love it, love it.

But it can work, because I think, and this is throwaway, and I haven't analyzed it, but I was thinking about as a reference point, weirdly, because we're talking about the relationship of plays to this, which is Moonlight, right? So Moonlight feels like It's got three distinct movements and they all feel like plot, the middle movement, definitely plot question, um, plot character. But even the third act when he goes to the diner, which is amazing, is plot character. But then in a comment, the plot questions kind of resolved very early and it becomes complete character question. And it has that. We don't, people found it some, I know some people found it unsatisfying because it is that kind of meandering self-actualization, but obviously Moonlight, a wide audience and there's a whole bunch of reasons i think that worked but perhaps because it just had that little surface skeletal structure of plot of the diner cooking the food i'm going to make you the best you know sandwich all that stuff whereas ticking underneath you don't quite have that in that this thing the writers need to understand is.

That the if you think about a story broadly speaking the easiest way to get an audience interested in the story is to say what happens next, which is, say, the area of the plot. So, you know, things happen. Something happens, something else happens, and, you know, we throw the audience into the story, and they want to know what happens next. The question of, who are these people really? What do they really care about? What is their true nature? It's something that's much harder to unfold for an audience. So, you will normally start a story with plot, so you get them hooked into the story on the basis of what happens next. As the plot moves forward, you start to unfold the nature of the characters. At a certain point in the story you can then go well hang on a minute let's not worry so much about who's what's happening next let's worry about a bit more now about who these people are if you look at naked even though it's a very unconventional art house movie it works in the same way johnny boy is thrown into the world he's on the run and it's kind of like who is johnny boy what is he doing what is he running from these are all plot questions who will help him. And then as he goes into London and he meets his friends and eventually alienates himself from his friends, he then goes on this odyssey through the middle of London, through the middle of the film, and gradually becomes less worried about what's going to happen to Johnny and more about who is he and how will he find a way of relating to the world. And then gradually you realize he isn't going to find a way of relating to the world. And you realize that there is no place in the world for him. And actually, his way of understanding reality doesn't even make much sense to everyone else. he's becoming more and more isolated. And so you watch a person kind of thrown into a story for plot reasons. And as it was, the more the story goes on, the less important plot is. And that's, as we said at the beginning, because he's losing the plot, literally. There is no meaning in his life. There's no causality. What he does no longer has an effect. He's inconsequential. He doesn't understand anything. He doesn't listen to people. He doesn't take account of what they say. he doesn't care about other people's feelings. He's not as a social in any way. And gradually, as all those boundaries that most of us have fall away for this character, he has no way of taking consequential action. So at the end, you have a character who kind of is doing meaningless things. And for the audience, you realize that there is no meaning to his action. It's all character. And actually, it's a very despairing kind of journey. So. The point I want to make in terms of structure is how does Naked work in terms of sequences? It's a plot sequence in the beginning, then it moves into plot character sequences, which is where the character is doing things in order to try and understand. As the character loses the plot, it becomes character sequences, i.e. there is no relationship to action anymore in this character. Now, the point I really think is really important to understand is that in order to illustrate that character's journey, you can only do it using plot sequences. Followed by plot character sequences, followed by character sequences. If you look at the Bourne story, normally these films, and it's a genre film, unlike Naked, which is an arthouse drama, when you have a genre film, if you're thinking in terms of organization of your story, you have to ask the question as a writer, normally, how do these genres work in terms of sequences? You know, an action movie, we have a Bond movie, for example, prior to Bourne, is essentially driven by plot sequences. So you ask yourself the question as a writer, do I want to organize my sequences in that way, the way the genre like this always does? Or what if I want to change the genre? What if I want to provoke the genre? What if I want to, you know, in some way, try to move things forward? What if I take a story that is normally structured through plot sequences, and in the middle of the film, I drop in a plot character sequence? Right. That's going to change everything because these stories are normally structured in this way. So if you're writing genre, you have to ask yourself a question in terms of your sequence analysis. You say, okay, well, how does a film like this normally work? And you have to go and watch a lot of them. And you have to understand this is a plot sequence. This is a plot character sequence. Normally, this is where this will be. This is how they're generally shaped. And then you ask the question, do I want to obey that? Am I being slavishly faithful? what happens if i change and the question of whether you change or not it's the first question not you know what do i change it to the question should become do i want to change and what's the effect if i do now the effect on born when they dropped in a plot character sequence into a story that normally has plot sequences is that it became impossible to make bond movies the same way after that moment because as soon as you make a shallow character complex which is what happens when you take a plot sequence and turn into a plot character sequence is that the plotting becomes less important. The character becomes more complex. As soon as you make that as a action character complex, then your Bond character, your previous Bond becomes idiotic. When you have Bourne being a character who is just as active as James, can have just as many car chases, just as many relationships with women, just as much excitement, but then also says, as he does in the middle of that film what if i didn't do this anymore what if i stopped what if he ran away would it be possible to escape could i be happier all those questions you can't make a bond movie like you used to as soon as jason board asks those questions because he makes everything that came before fatuous have you seen the king that was the point where bond movies change kingsman.

Is but in turn that's becomes thematic.

Yeah i mean have you seen the kingsman Kings Kingsman So it's a Matthew Vaughan Uh, almost satire on bond movies in the same way that he did kick-ass which was a satire on um superhero movies i think they were because the writer writes them as a satire and he.

Directs them straight.

That's my opinion right but um it it is a superhero origin story but it's what's wonderful about it sorry no um super spy super spy origin story but what is quite interesting threaded throughout it is is classes is very classist so um the it is very much going back to the old school bond where it is largely just plot sequences without and it varies kind of glitzy and superficial and and in a way fun another distinction is it's quite r-rated so there's lots of blood and gore and sex and what have you but i think the one thing that allows it to go back to that model where it is far more plot than character is the thematic stuff where the kid who's the main character is someone who's from a he's almost out of naked or from this is england or he's like a shane meadows character whose father died in a war mission and so this secret society of spies look after him and raise him up but then he has to learn And because it's a Bond spy, he has to learn how to be a gentleman as well as how to be a spy. He's like much better at all the spy stuff than being a gentleman. But what sustains it is not... Those, those are all character kind of related questions, but it's. Characters were complex though.

Isn't it?

And there's a complexity of characters.

And there's a world and it is kind of hero's journey, ordinary world sequences of the early when you see that he lives at the projects and he's getting bullied and he's, he's a petty criminal and how that then contrasts to the world of the James Bond upper class. But they are plot. I think they are plot character questions that those.

Some of them.

Yeah but i think they ultimately do are there to serve.

A reveal question in each case if you think of the born story or for example you know when you have a plot sequences the action is very driven and very fast and very active when you get to the middle and you and jason starts saying who am i really then what you have is instead of having as it were fireworks on the surface of the story you start to dive down into the depths of the character you start to ask philosophical questions you know how should i be what kind of person should i be what how meaningful is the action that I take. And so the question of where the energy of the story goes, the word we used before was intensity. The energy of the story starts going away from us were the surface action into the complexity of character. And again, if you're going to have that complexity of character, you can't have too much complex surface action. Because if Jason was running around shooting people and punching people, he wouldn't be able to ask these questions. So you have to relax the the driven plot in order to get the intensity of character there's always a payoff here and in uh interestingly naked when you look at how johnny boy's character the most intense version of johnny boy is when he's in that sequence with his only character stuff his vocabulary the language you know you have never seen dialogue like it if you you know for the most. This is baroque extraordinary dialogue this character is consumed with passion, meaningless passion he he cares deeply for something that is completely pointless, but the performance and the intensity of the dialogue and the and the attack of the character is incredible and it has to be because there's no plot yeah you know if it wasn't intense yeah you'd have your story would just limp the story would become limp well what about.

When we were trying to decide what films we should look at for this it then prompted me to ask well what about films that start, without uh those plotted sequences to ground the audience in the story and the two that we came up with with diving bell and the butterfly and there will be blood because both of those start.

No no i i i want to address them i'm just going to finish the kingsman discussion okay because i I think this relates to what you were saying, because I was thinking about the Bourne identity. The Kingsman, ultimately that moment where he confronts who he is, and I can't remember the name of the character, and the world, Eggsy, is ultimately he's asked to shoot this dog that he's raised, right? And he accidentally got the runt of the litter. And...

It pains me to admit it, Eggsy, but I think that one day you might be as good a spy as any of them. The dog. This weapon is live. Shoot the dog. Give me the gun. At least the girl's got balls. Get out i knew you couldn't make it, go home.

But ultimately they found a way to dramatize his i don't know if i can do this jason born 15 minute sequence to a very simple character choice of can you kill this dog because your um commander has asked you and he can't so he leaves and that's it and it's a plot question that reflects character right but it is not a pure character moment and i just think that is an interesting example of they found, the writers have found a moment to bring all that down in a way that the Bourne movies went for something that was more meandering, well, than a specific moment of specific choice.

It's an interesting question about what is the difference for an audience in experiencing, if you like, a... Plotted sequence and experiencing a plot character sequence and experiencing a character-only sequence. And I think the answer for, broadly speaking, is an audience, as it were, follows a plot sequence, is following the action. So basically, you have to pay a lot of attention to what's going on on screen. You're in it, and you have to understand what's going moment by moment. When you're looking at a plot character sequence, like the Bourne sequence we talked about, you begin to realize the character is beginning to ask questions about whether they should be the person they are and they're kind of beginning to become introspective and at that point there's a kind of connection between in a very not in a profound way but in a gentle way between the audience's notion of okay this character is asking questions like who should i be and how should i live my life and in some sense that some that mirrors my own activity. I i do this in my own life too i'm you know i ask these questions so there's a kind of affinity of you know of of uh if you like mimetic affinity between the characters when you have a story where there's no action the and the character simply is that we're asking character questions you're looking at uh for example johnny boy and you're looking at him thinking this person has no connection when he's at his most intensely characterful as we're in in naked you're looking at him thinking this person has no connection with the way that reality is which means that you are kind of saying to yourself i understand how what really i understand what this connection and it's making you think a lot more about yourself and as it was what i'm broadly saying is that the more characterful you get the more is it where it makes the audience introspective makes the audience ask questions about themselves rather than necessarily about what's going on the screen because again because in terms of plot there's nothing to understand there's nothing happening johnny boy will rant for the next 10 minutes and in terms of action of story nothing is going to happen because i think going back to that drive.

Example i think the the audience question that you end up asking if you hold on that beautiful Ryan Gosling look with that Cliff Martinez soundtrack in the background long enough is.

What would I do if I was in his position? Talking about diving down the butterfly.

After murdering segues for 20 minutes.

Now we can try to maintain your... Well, we can prolong your life today. Is this life? Yeah. Is this life? We can prolong your life. There you are. Well, I won't put any patience here, my friend. The paralysis is complete. Okay? You... Well, you've noticed you're not able to speak. I can't speak. I can't speak. So you have what's referred to as a... What? Locked in syndrome. Yeah. Locked in syndrome. Locked in syndrome.

When, if you look at the beginning of Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you know, what happens at the beginning, which is, again, an unusual story because it begins with the character sequence, not a plot sequence. The beginning of Diving Bell and the Butterfly, we see this person waking up and we don't know anything about them. And so, like they don't. And it's an entirely subjective sequence. You put the audience, as it were, in the shoes of the character. And whatever the character is understanding for those ten minutes.

I mean, we're actually seeing it from their eyes.

You're actually looking through their eyes. and so the character has no understanding what's happening and neither does the audience you know who is he what's going on where am i.

All the questions the character.

Is asking the audience is asking.

There is no plot because i mean we have to give at least a brief summary that this guy's got locked in syndrome and the opening sequence is him waking up in the hospital, and we can because we are in his point of view entirely we can hear him talking to these doctors and other health professionals who are talking to him and it's only as that sequence unfolds that we realize that they can't hear, him speaking, that we are entirely in his, it's almost like reading a book, that sequence.

It's deliberately structured, so the audience has to kind of, you know, it's brilliant. I mean, you could do a work, a masterclass on exposition. If you want to say the most brilliant piece of exposition rewriting I know, it's the first 10 minutes of Diving Around the Butterfly. There is an extraordinary amount of exposition in that 10.

15 minutes. I wish we'd done it in our exhibition.

But it's completely, you know, the audience doesn't notice, you know, but if you stop the film and say, tell me what you know about this guy, the audience could tell you an enormous amount about him. Because they keep repeating, you know, this is your name, this is where you come from, this is your family, this is what you used to do, this was your job, this is what happened to you. But the person isn't registering it. And because the character doesn't quite understand what's happening, all these characters are saying things to him, but he doesn't get it. And the audience doesn't quite get it, because they're kind of, as it were, subjectively experiencing the moment like him. It's an entire character. The question, if you say, what's the plot question of the beginning of this film basically you have a man who has had a stroke and is waking up slowly so he's only gradually becoming conscious of the world around him and how it works and what the logic is and he's in and out of consciousness and the audience experiences all of that entirely subjectively so if you say what is the plot question will jean dominique bobby which is the name of the character will jean don dominique bobby understand what is happening to him is kind of the only plot question that question is answered immediately he kind of does so it's not it's not in dispute it's not i would say here's.

Where i kind of disagreed with you to the extent that i don't think there is a plot question such that there isn't a question posed about that can be physically visualized or dramatized observe like a scientific i want to do something but i think there is very much an audience question it's almost like a murder mystery it's like let's figure out what the hell is going on right here that is very much driving interest in that sequence like why are these people acting like they can't hear what he's, saying you know.

From the writer's perspective i agree that's absolutely right from the audience perspective the audience is asking and i put it in this order who is this person and what has happened to him i think is what the audience is asking but the reason you organize your story and say okay well in this situation what i'm going to do is rather than for example uh dramatize like you could start with jean dominique um getting into his car because he has a stroke in his car you could say what if we started with him getting to his car going to pick his kid up and then he's going along the road and then he has a stroke and then we see him picked up by the ambulance and whatever you could tell it straight like and then that would be very much question bobe bobe die before he gets to hospital or whatever so you could start it that way and the the writer goes no i'm going to do it this way i'm going to have a character question so you say what question drives from the writer's point of view drives the opening of that question it's will john dominique bobe fully understand the implications of his condition i think it's probably as a character question that drives that sequence. And from that, the audience will then go.

Okay, well, I have to understand who he is and what happened to him. Can you tell me, from your perspective, why that's not a plot question? Why that's only a character question?

Because it's understand. The question is, will Jean-Dominique Bobi understand? Which is to do with an internal process for the character. It's a character question. Will the character, as it were, come to an understanding of their essential problem. It's not what will he do.

But interestingly, that coming to the understanding is actually the, in a way, the inciting incident for the plot. Because as soon as he fully understands what has happened to him, then he's got the question of, What do I do with the rest of my life?

Okay. And what's the answer?

I'm going to write a book with my eyelid.

But that's the end of act one.

Yeah. The writing book. There is a sequence where he's like in despair and trying to learn how to communicate and all that kind of stuff.

And that's largely act two from memory, right?

So there's a plot in the middle.

But that's pure character being a character at the end.

So that's what Stuart said is really important because if you look at most stories.

I don't think anything Stuart said is really important.

That's because you just don't want to read my notes on your scripts.

Most stories, most stories are essentially the plot starts and sets a plot question, which is driven for the rest of the story, which is explored for the rest of the story, and then at the end is answered. And that's the end of the story. And underneath that, you have a character question. So for example, Dorothy, the example I always use, Dorothy is, you know, Dorothy, will she get home? And I'll be more precise about that. will Dorothy find Auntie Anne, which I think is the deeper question of Wizard of Oz. So she wants to get home to Kansas to find Auntie Anne, not to go to Kansas. She has no great affinity with Kansas, but she has a specific affinity to Auntie Anne. So Dorothy is, as it were, thrown out of paradise. Will she get back to Auntie Anne? Okay. Now, and that's the plot question. What will she do? Will Dorothy do the right things in terms of action to get her back to where she wants to be? That's a plot question. That's, as it were, the arcing question of Wizard of Oz. Um, in Toy Story, the same question is, will the toys move successfully? You know? And that question overarches everything else that happens in the story. Underneath that question is a character question for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, which is, will Dorothy learn to care for other people more than she does for herself? Which is and that's the transformation of the character same question for woody you know exactly absolutely and when dorothy realizes that she does that then the fairy comes down and says dorothy you had the you know they were you were wearing the emerald ruby slippers the whole time all you ever had to do was tap your heels together there's no place like home but of course dorothy hasn't understood as in a profound way there's no place like home until that point which is to say she's come home to herself when dorothy comes home she can go back to kansas now the important something to understand is that the character question, will Dorothy understand that she needs to care for other people more than herself? When the answer to that is yes, that makes the plot question possible to be answered. And it's that connection that's deeply important. And this is true in Children of Men.

We'll talk about when we get, that's exactly...

If Dorothy never understood the character question and could never answer it, she would never go back to Kansas. If Woody didn't understand it, the character question in Toy Story is something like, will Woody understand? And again, it's understand. It's an internal journey. Will Woody understand that life is richer with Buzz than without? Once the answer to that is yes, he does understand that, then the question is, will the toys move successfully? It's answered because together, Woody and Buzz light the firework and get off and arrive home. So the plot question overarches the character question. The plot question is first in the story it's set first dorothy has to go back to you know auntie m will do the toys have to move successfully only once that question is up and running does the other question the character question unfold and the character question is answered before the plot question is answered and in fact the answer to the character question makes the plot question answer possible that way you connect plot and character yeah that's the overarching shape of the story, In Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it's reversed. The character question comes first, unlike, you know, Toy Story, unlike 90% of stories. The character question is, will Jean-Dominique Boby find a way to make this existence palatable to himself? And that's not an action. There's nothing he can do. He's paralyzed. He's only got one eye.

The only thing that he's bled is will he find a way?

Will he be able to reconcile himself to this life? Okay, that's a character question. It's, well, will he, as it were, affect an internal transformation in himself to become able to exist in this way? And that question is asked first, and then the plot question comes after. Will Jean-Dominique Boby write a book? And that question, will he write a book, is the question that finishes before the answer to the question, will he find a way of reconciling himself? And the answer is, will he write a book? Yes. And because he writes a book, he finds a way of making his life reconcilable to himself. Okay. So as it were, the character question is asked first, and the plot question makes the character question possible to answer. It's exactly the inverse of the other stories. It's exactly the inverse of Toy Story. It's exactly the inverse of The Wizard of Oz. 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.

But what makes those sequences?

Because... And for those who haven't seen it, writing a book is a big deal because he can blink. That's it that's easy so it's basically his therapist reads out a series of letters and then he blinks when she has to stop something like that so yeah yeah or in the english as we'll probably play because we have a dub.

I'll recite this alphabet i'll go one letter at a time and slowly all you have to do is blink at the first letter of the word and then i'll write it, the whole process starts all over again and so on we might just get some words and phrases Two more things for you. When the word is complete, indicate it with a double blink, like hitting the space key. And if there's an error, just keep on blinking your eyes. I know it seems terribly arduous, but it'll work, I'm sure of it. Your family, your friends will be able to use it too. Want to try, Mr. Bobby? Look at me. Do you want to try this? Have you thought of something? That's great. So let's try it. I don't know what I want to say. Um, E. The first word begin with E? No, not. Okay, first letter is not E. No, it's not an E. I don't even know what to say. I know how hard this is. I'll say them slow. E, S, A, R, G, N, T, U, L, O, M, D, P. I can't keep my eyelid open anymore. F, B, V, H, G, I. I. I. I. The word? You got it. I is the complete word that's right i begin with myself now let's go on.

And so that is like it is a huge thing it's not like i'm just gonna sit down and write i'm in a book and i got writer's block because you know i'm a struggling screenwriter it's like literally the process of writing a book is physically impossible i think that's important because it is a reflection of his willingness to confront his locked in situation his determination yeah.

Yeah yeah, this will never work it's a nightmare it will never work should i go on i don't feel like it.

What i was going to say is so what makes that sequence compelling then if we've opened with a character sequence because it's not like a johnny boy level of intensity so where does the compulsion come from i would say if you watch the film okay and i'm not saying it's not compelling I'm just saying it's not.

Watch the film and look at the intensity of the way the film was working. Okay. The problem for the director here and the writer is there's no plot. Okay. There's nothing happening in terms of, you know, the audience going, okay, what happens next is not the issue. The audience is like, where am I? How do I understand this? What's going on? I don't get it. That's what the audience is thinking. And then, so what you have as an intensity of narrative is that you are literally put inside the character's head. You know, you're literally seeing the world as he sees it. When his vision blurs, the character blur the camera blurs when he becomes unconscious we fall into black so how time is working the intensity of the way the storytelling is his thoughts yeah he's his voice over is we're here we can access him we can access the character like just putting.

This the other way if we were external to him as.

We are from that the first act yeah the end actually halfway through the first act yeah.

So that sequence I don't think would be as compelling it would be very, It's difficult watching someone, doctors, trying to communicate to an inert being.

What I'd say to the audience listening to this podcast is go and watch Naked, and go and watch the character sequence, which is him in the security guard, which has no, as it were, ostensible plot in it. It's just meandering around. Look at the intensity of the dialogue. Look at the intensity of the way that performances are. Then go to the beginning of diving bell and look at how intense the intensity of the way the narrative works look at how subjective that perspective is you hardly ever see a film as subjective as that look at how you are you're visually thrown into a kind of storytelling that you don't normally get look at how how hard this film is working to engage you because there's no plot yeah okay now that's the issue if you have no plot if you don't work that hard like naked works in one way and like diving bell works another the audience will drift away because the thing that they're most used to being pulled into a story by is plot so when you don't have plot you have to work intensely hard one way or another stylistically particularly in terms of dialogue and naked in particular the dialogue is extraordinary well what about there will be blood then where there is no dialogue.

For the first is it 19 minutes of the film or something extraordinary.

I want to finish off on the diving bell and the butterfly because i think it's not just worth watching the film. I think it's worth reading the script. The script is incredibly well-written. And even though the film was... Filmed in french even though we haven't been playing english excerpts the script was written in written in english because particularly the challenge is it's easy to go off stylistically the filmmakers had to work really hard to up the intensity and fill the vacuum as directors and composers and and cinematographers and absolutely if you if you're a filmmaker and i mean that broadly yeah um it is absolutely a film that you should watch but if you're a writer read the script No.

I mean, the thing about, let's talk about, and just for a moment, just walk off the main subject. Ronald Harwood wrote the script, Sir Ronald Harwood wrote the script. When you understand that the book he was given, because it's based on a book by Jean-Dominique Bobie, the person who's the subject of the film, when Jean-Dominique Bobie wrote the book, he had no idea he would die. Okay? And the fact is, he died after he wrote the book. The film is an adaptation of a book written by a man who had no understanding of his own imminent death, and had no knowledge of it. And so the book is not at all, what the film is. Because in the film, we see the ultimate fate of the character. So he's given a book to adapt, which most of the most important action of the story is not contained within the book he's given to adapt. Certainly the meaning of the story, which is to say, if you look at the film, the film overall is asking the question, how do you find meaning in existence in a thematic sense? Where is the meaning of life? Now, that question was never harassed by the book that he was given to adapt because the writer of the book had no understanding that his life was limited he didn't think he was going to die very quickly um so harwood has brought an enormous amount it's one of the most beautiful complex profound and skillful adaptations it's a different subject altogether but that you will ever read it's an amazing piece of screenwriting um it's profound and beautiful and uh it kind of if you read the original book which in itself john dominic bobby's book i'd recommend to read too which is a lovely beautiful profound piece of work and then you read the screenplay and you read the two one after another which i did you just it's it's it's like a it's a embarrassment of riches you have two wonderful pieces of work one of which is inspired by the other but you know most of what this film understands life to be about and the message of the life of the of the film is not contained in the original. It's the as a relationship between the original the screenwriter ronald harwood um and the uh and the original book it's a profound piece of work it's a great great script it's one of the very very best adaptations i've ever come across.

And in just two words on the page, and this will be the last I want to say it, but I'm going to read some because we've talked a lot about writing the experience, and you've talked about how that experience makes you ask those questions. I mean, it writes in blackness silence, but this on the page, writing in the experience, whether you as a reader ultimately think it's got the same intensity of what they produce on the screen, it doesn't. To me, it's irrelevant. A sudden flash the faces of two nurses one male the other female then just as suddenly blackness again the male voice no no no john dominic open your eyes terrible french accident my behalf like a flickering eyelid a picture begins to take shape a small bare hospital room the faces of the nurses either side of a bed both looking down expectantly directly into camera in capitals bold the camera is Jean-Dominique Bourbe, known as Jean-Dieu. As his eyes open, he sees the first foot of his bed, then curled, paralysed hands in the yellow sheets, the IV pole hanging over him, the two nurses smiling, leaning towards him. The female nurse pats his cheek.

Mr. Bourbe, keep your eyes open.

That is the experience. I'm having flashbacks to watching the film. Like, it's not as, like, visually poetic, but the experience, those questions, what am I doing here, the grabs of imagery, are all there on the page.

The point I would make is if you had a plot at this point, you couldn't write that. It's only possible to have that intensitive experience in that way because there's no plot to be worried about.

And the detail, like this is quite detailed. Like to take your time with that description and there it is earlier. Like, yeah, like we've had this argument developing a script where it's like tighter, tighter, tighter. You want that on the page when you're writing an intense action sequence. It is like you read the Bourne scripts and it's like dash, dash, dash, like a fragment of a sentence, dash, dash, fragment of another sentence. This is quite languid, for lack of a better word. Speaking of languid, now I think we can move on to...

Well, I don't want to spend too much time on There Will Be Blood. It's not even my favourite P.T. Anderson film. But...

Ladies and gentlemen, I've traveled over half our state to be here tonight. I couldn't get away sooner because my new well was coming in at Coyote Hills and I had to see about it. Ladies and gentlemen, if I say I'm an oil man, you will agree. I'm a family man. I run a family business. This is my son and my partner, H.W. Plainview.

It made me when we were thinking about this it very much opens with definitely micro plot questions but because there's very little dialogue, you're very intensely put in the in the shoes of the character of the daniel day lewis character because you're going, what would it take to be him and you've got an idea of his character in terms of someone who's so committed to what he's doing that he's willing to put up with the isolation and the loneliness and the the risks because they establish stakes very early on with the um with the death of his um partner yeah his business.

Bar is just one.

I think it's someone he brings on to work with would you say the beginning of that of the section you're talking about would you say that it's clear to the audience.

What he's trying to do.

No so there is like a tiny bit of mystery this is it's really hard i think to detach movies from their marketing but.

What happens then therefore when you don't know what's going on what does the audience do and i think the audience goes to a different place which is okay i can't know what's going on because i'm not being shown it so i'm going to ask a different question who is this man what's his nature how do i understand him what drives him and you drive the audience into character because you simply deprive them a flop.

But but how long can you do that without giving an answer because it doesn't give an answer for the longest time like you don't hear you barely hear a word you realize that they're digging for oil eventually and.

A johnny greenwald son a greenwood soundtrack adding just unbearable tension.

Yeah absolutely so you know you can't take i mean you've got the benefit of a writer director here and you've got benefit of an amazing soundtrack as you had and drive, you know, contributing to mood. But those are not enough, I think, for a screenwriter to rely upon in terms of creating compulsion. And look, maybe I'm asking the wrong question because maybe a lot of people don't find it compelling. Maybe there are a lot of people who just switch off. I mean, the flip side of that is Cloud Atlas, which because it was introducing like six different stories... It was so heavily plotted that in the end, I had to give up. I had to just let go of trying to understand what the hell was going on and just sit back and let it sort of wash over me.

For me, it's like, um, uh, you know, the, um, Christopher Nolan movie with different levels of reality.

Inception.

Inception. Which is, you spend so much time working out how the plot works, you don't care about the people. I understand what's happening, I just don't care. You know, I get it because I'm, it's like playing three-dimensional chess. I've worked out the orientation of the story so i understand the layers but because i have to spend so much energy doing that the people in the story i don't care about you know i literally don't care because all my energy has been taken away i i honestly think there's a law of there's an there's only certain amount of things an audience can care about the you know the audience has as it were a limited amount of engagement with the story and you choose to whether you take up that engagement with plot or character and if you as it were taken up entirely with plot then you have to have incredibly clever and beautifully plotted stories so you have a farce for example where the question of who are these people really it's like well you know in a classic farce it's a landlord a lover a thwarted wife a fat bloke you know whatever they're types and you don't go in a farce if it's working properly you don't go i'm dissatisfied with the types you just go i'm this is making me laugh so and and but the types have to be types because in order for the plotted action to be funny they don't have to think about you have to spend so much time doing it you know because you have to organize the plot so hard because you have to have all sorts of coincidences and if you look at um casual fault it's a great example you know you you organize the farce in such a way that you don't have they're just types and as long as it's funny you don't care about the fact they're types. Because it's all plot and that's as a demonstration of the kind of story that's all plot you don't really care about the people you understand them as exemplars of things and and you know the there may be blood, again, it's like, there will be blood, it's kind of like, I don't know, do you have to worry much more about, I'm.

But what is it that keeps you watching? You know, he spends so long, like, tapping at rocks and looking at them and then sitting out and looking at the sunset.

Yeah, a lot of people didn't like it.

Yeah, and I'm one of those people that's kind of on the fence where I'm glad I've watched it, but I don't re-watch it in the same way that I've revisited other P.T. Anderson films.

I think it's an interesting contrast to other kind of really plot-heaveny cold opens which also raises a mystery like these are the weird ones that come in my head like minority report and midnight special right drop you in the same thing drop you in the middle night of in all the action don't explain what going on but they feel like plot right even though part of what you're doing as an audience is like you know minority report is about them or the matrix right we've talked about in the style rule of the world it's the whole we demonstrate the rules of the.

After the first five ten minutes explain what's going on you know special does that as well right what is it maybe there will be blood is doing exactly the same thing it is not telling you what the rules of this world is right and letting you explore it it's just that it is deacon it is decompressed in.

Terms of i would say you know.

What i would say about they will be bloody what i think is compulsive.

About the opening is the intensity of the character dan de lewis plays.

You have this guy who just looks to me like a kind of bomb's about to go off and you're kind of waiting to see when will he explode i mean one of the i think connection to oil there's just that little moment where they do the sign of the cross on the baby with oil.

Right like they dip into it it's like there is this like almost religious connection to oil so the characters feel intense about their situation so we feel.

Intense i think one of the things that it does with that sequence by not actually revealing too much about his character other than his it only reveals one aspect about his character which is like his obsessive commitment to this thing like the the extent that he's prepared to give up to find this oil is that before you learn he's a monster you're you know if you if you're on board with the movie after 19 minutes of dialogue-less action about, you know, finding oil and pumping it, then you are wanting to be on that character's journey before you find out how despicable a person he is.

I mean, Don Bell and the Butterfly is a simple thing. He is actually not a kind, because he has an accident because of his affair, right? If I'm remembering Diving Bell on the Butterfly correctly.

Oh, it just kind of happens. It's more like the fact of God.

I mean, you know, I know you live in France, so it's like, he's just French. But from what I remember, he just was kind of slightly, he was kind of a shitty person.

But it's not a, he's not punished by God. It's not like a God's judgment. Going back to, uh, There Will Be Blood, I mean, I would go back to this discussion we had earlier about Tarkovsky and stuff. You see, what compels you about There Will Be Blood? I would say is as much the kind of poetic, metaphorical, you know, ideas of the way that story works. I mean, like I said, there's a limit. When you say, okay, I'm going to organize my story in terms of plot sequences, plot character sequences, and character sequences, there's another way of organizing a story, which is imagistic sequences, which is an entirely different way of thinking, which is I'm going to have an image logic. I'm going to have a character who is, as it were, striving in a wilderness, which brings connotations of christ and connotations of sacrifice and all sorts of different. Resonances and pioneers and the earth birth of america and whatever and now none of those things to do with plot or character or plot characters it's actually an imagistic sequencing and then you have this intense and i think what there with blood marries is the kind of character driven intensity of johnny boy in daniel lewis's performance which again you have the intensity of performance so it's a character sequence married with if you said what is the beginning of that film i'd say it's a character stroke imagistics it kind of works differently yeah thematic it's not actually interesting in plot or character logic it's interesting a different kind of logic which is here's a landscape here's a character in the landscape and here are the obsessions the character has and kind of as long as you get that that's kind of what you need to know in order for the story to work i.

Can see it playing projected on loop in a gallery there's.

I I mean, I hope I'm correct in this, but I remember listening to interviews with P.T. Anderson where his initial attempts were to make an entirely dialogue-less film and he only got... I think it's 19 minutes, however many minutes in before he had to kick in with character and plot questions in a more traditional sense before it became essentially an art installation.

Absolutely. And that's what it would be.

All right. Should we try and wrap this up with Children of Men? Because you disagree with my take.

I thought you wanted to talk about Fargo. and for whatever reason, like, given that scene sticks out like a sore thumb in the film, maybe we should talk about it now so it sticks out. Like, just get to fucking Children of Men, guys. And it's like, so let's just talk about the date scene in Fargo.

Jeez. Blood has been shit. We don't want the entire 80,000. I answered the darn, I'm cooperating here. You have no call to get sniffled with me. I'm just doing my job here. What do you fellas got yourself mixed up in? Police! Flo! Is there anything else you can tell me about him? He wasn't circumcised. Oh, yeah?

But I picked this scene because when we were talking about it, it was the idea of there are films that are following a fairly conventional, and not in a negative way, but following the conventions of the storytelling rules that they've decided to follow.

So do you want to do a little brief summary of Fargo?

Yeah, sure. So, um, it's, uh.

We're talking, we're talking the movie now, not the TV series. We've done the TV series.

The original 95 movie, uh, written by the Coen brothers, but back then it was only directed by one of them and produced by the other one.

No, that's only because of DGA rules.

Okay. All right. Okay. How they actually find it. Um, and it's, it's essentially, uh. I mean, structurally, it's a fascinating film because it starts out being about a film of a man who's trying to arrange for the kidnapping of his wife so he can get the insurance money to make an investment. It also then follows the hard luck story of these two criminals who are thrown together who take on this job. And then it finally, I think the protagonist of the story arguably is only introduced almost to the first act turning point, which is the cop investigating the disappearance and subsequent accidental murder of, well, not accidental, the murder of this guy's wife.

And I mean, I don't think, I think her being introduced late is fairly common in this kind of crime noir. The detective appears later.

A lot of the crime noir films, it starts with the detective discovering the uncovering of the crime. you don't see the unfurling of the crime it.

Depends on pace like zodiac opens with the crime before we meet the detectives.

Yes zodiac being a true life story that is almost three hours long that is quite apart from the crime genre you know looking at david fincher in seven it starts with the two detectives finding the body typically typically the genre begins.

With a crime and then the.

Investigators and it's usually told from the protagonist's point of You agree with Steven, not with me, you bastard.

No, but you're right. You're right. No, you're right.

He's pointing at me. I just- But he said the quiet first.

Then the detective. Probably not as late as the first act, but this is all- Okay. Because no, but that's plot. That's interesting. That means that he's opening with plot. And I think the Coen brothers, broadly speaking, from what I've watched are actually very plot writers. They're amazing writers that execute kind of plot character sequences very well in some incredible plot sequences.

Yeah.

There are moments such as you will get to where they actually explore character uh.

Well i think they've got really great handle on characterization throughout plotted sequences and i think that's because they deal with quite eccentric and and they're fascinated by dialogue and.

The way that people speak and i think that's a.

Reflection of the minutiae and that's why they set fargo in minnesota where they've got this i think i've heard enough argues for and against whether it is actually a real accent or if they've completely made it up, but they've, you know, based it on some reality. But the scene happens. So the cop who's played by Frances McDormand is heavily pregnant, married, is the, you know, local detective, is following this crime as it's unfolding. And then at some point she's been asked by an old high school acquaintance to meet up for dinner because she happens to be she gone to brainerd i don't know she's gone to a different town and then you see minneapolis minneapolis yeah yeah that's right she goes to minneapolis, and she um in and the scene is just her meeting this high school friend.

Mark, jeez oh you look great yes so do you oh easy there easy easy there easy there you do too, Oh, I see that. That's great.

And it is completely unhitched from the plot in every single way. It has no impact on the crime. And it is a completely self-contained scene in that you could pick that scene out of the movie. And I'm not saying the movie wouldn't be better or worse, but from a plot perspective, you would not have noticed.

Well, no, except in the following scene, what happens is because what happens in the scene is that this guy says, you know, I was she says, you know, how have you been? And he's a little bit kind of pushy with her as if he's trying to get some relationship going and she's pregnant and married and she kind of puts him in his place a little bit.

It's an awkward moment he tries, like, can I sit next to you? And he puts her arm around her.

She goes, yeah, she kind of goes, no, sit over there.

I was married. I was married to, you mind if I sit over here? I was married to Linda Cooksey. No, why don't you sit over there? I prefer that. Oh, um, sorry. Oh, no, no, just so I can see. I don't have to turn my neck. Oh, sure, sure. I understand.

And whatever. Then he tells about his wife and he says, you know, my wife died.

It's not that, uh, it's not that things didn't work out. It's, uh, uh, Linda, uh, had leukemia, you know. She was, uh, she, she passed away. No. Uh, it was tough. There you go. was long uh she fought real hard martin.

You know they have this kind of conversation and it's a little bit awkward but actually the next scene she's on the phone to her friend or sister or whatever and she finds out that he's lied to her that his wife has not died that that woman that he says was his wife that he married from school he never married and that he kind of hung around for a while and she eventually got some kind of you know order to get him go away from her and that he's a kind of weird, pesty kind of character. And so everything that in that scene that has happened was not true. Everything that he told her was a lie. And she kind of goes, but you know, because well, you know, you never quite know what people are like, but there's no, there's no consequence of it. It doesn't mean anything.

But it's not, it's not from a plot perspective. I think those are all very influential on her character determination because she's all like, the whole film is an exploration of, I guess, what are people, what are, Slightly ordinary people capable of. Yes. Under the right conditions. And it's almost a naturalist. You know, you could imagine this being a Zola novella or something.

But what does the scene serve then?

Yeah, exactly.

I think there's two things. On a micro level, I think there is kind of a little bit of a plot ticking along, which is we know it's a date, which means that he is an objective. He has. It's like the Bourne thing. He is imposing on her. she i think is there feels unconnected for the motivation because i don't think she's there to even talk to about him about the crime right she doesn't want to talk about it when he pushes her.

What brings you down are you down here on that side if you're allowed you know to discuss that oh yeah yeah but there's not a heck of a lot to discuss okay.

She's just there to have dinner with an old high school friend yeah.

She's a nice.

Person so she is has no objective but he has an objective that he is imposing on.

And they establish very early on like he hugs her and and you know establishes very clearly that she's pregnant that he realizes that she's pregnant and then he even says oh so you married you know son of a Gunderson you know so it it's made.

Very clear that even.

Though that's his objective he is aware that she is.

Yeah unavailable no no no that's why he does a tactic shift right he actually does a actually shift which is the midpoint of the film of the scene when he talks about his wife dying of leukemia so he plays on her sympathy so he's hoping to get basically a pity fuck right oh.

And then i saw you on the tv and uh i remembered you know i always liked you well i always liked you so much you were such a super lady and then i've been so lonely yeah.

I know but i'm talking about the stakes of the scene in that he doesn't come into this scene, thinking that she's still single or anything like that you know the it's not like.

But i mean in terms of the story overall say why is why is this why is this scene in the story overall is it not i mean the truth about what we understand from the the overall story is that marge doesn't solve the crime through detecting i mean that's a really interesting character she's a female character, and you know fargo she gets to where she wants to get to at the end you see if you ask the question why does marge get there it's because she understands people and in many ways she just allows them the space to be who they are and most of her conversations with people she doesn't say she's not a male detective who says you know i know where you were i know you did this i did this i did that i did that she's not a plot driven character you know because i did these things She basically goes, I'm going to allow you the space to describe to me who you really are. And as they do that, all the things they've done become apparent. You know, if you like, in that scene, what you see is, you know, she goes, basically she allows the man space. And he reveals he's a creep. He reveals that he's interested in sex without very much else. He reveals that he's shallow. You know, and then she finds out in the next scene that he's a liar. So basically everything that she needs to know about this case the case of the date she finds out and she does virtually nothing in terms of action she doesn't drive the story she just keeps conversation going she's nice to him she's sympathetic she's very.

Good when she gets him to sit back.

Yeah when the other side of the table when she diffuses that situation and it's very authoritative she can get over there and it's like she drives the story for she's very as it We're driving the action for that second. But basically, the scene shows the nature of the character, which is that, again, it's a character scene, and this is who she is. This is a woman who is intuitively, and it's not just intuitively, because that makes it sound like it's not a conscious thing, whose strategy... Is that she understands enough about the world to let people be themselves. And if they're bad people, the fact that they were bad will be revealed. She doesn't have to force them into revealing themselves. And in fact, if she forces them, they may lie. If she lets this guy, Mike, whatever his name is, if she just lets him talk, he will reveal all his flaws and all his insecurities and everything. And she does. She basically says nothing. And as he jabbers away, the audience watches and goes, this guy's a fuck up. You know, he's a mess. He's a, you know, he's an, he's an idiot. He's, you know, he's incoherent. He doesn't understand it. And she's amazingly controlled. And that's the way the story works. Why does she solve the case? Because she doesn't get that bothered, you know?

And I think on a plot level, potentially, I'm not saying this is exactly how I remember, but I think it's her going, huh, he, he had no, he lied over, yeah. Her realization that he lied about something so profound made her kind of question other facts that she was given at face value so i think from a character journey moment it's the kind of scene that you add which is i need my character go from a to c and then i can create this moment this character moment that makes them come to an understanding which is maybe maybe one that they revealed things to her and that bad people revealed to her but also that people are capable that seemingly normal people are capable of.

Lying and actually lying about a being married and b so you know as regards the scene you then say what's the question that drives the scene and you say well you know um how.

Is marge going to handle mike i think.

It's like it's established quite early on you know i i does that is that what really drives him will marge i think his intentions are made clear quite early on and her intentions to not.

Engage that established quite early on so the conflict is there.

But at what point in the scene if you say let's let's say it's a plot question will marge be seduced by mike or will marge rebuff mike or whatever, that question is answered at the moment she says go and sit over there at that point it is clear in the scene and we're only a third of the way through the scene there is no way, he's going to get what he wants so in terms of he keeps escalating his tactics yeah he does but you know if you say to the audience okay stop the movie do you think there's a likelihood that he's that he's going to get to sleep with her tonight. The audience goes, no way is he ever going to... So in terms of the plot question, there isn't... The plot question's not lying.

And that's why we're looking at this scene because I feel like it is just a few of characters. It's a character question.

The character question is, it didn't say, okay, will she understand or will Marge... Understand that she shouldn't take what people say on faith on face value.

That's not what i don't know but i think it does i think she's right in that by the that that following sequence where she learns about him because there's there's two things about her yes that her strategy in life is to let people talk and she's very non-judgmental and i think part of that you know, early on, she, she seems to have an attitude that is supposed to be almost like the Americana ideal of the region that she's in, of seeing the best in people. And she no longer, by the end of the movie, sees the best in people. I think, you know, even when she's driving the Peter Stromer- There's a lovely scene at the end where she's- I don't understand.

Yeah. Why can't you people just be nice? Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. There's a scene at the very end, isn't there?

Yeah, exactly. After he's just tried to mince his friend up in the workshift, that she just, she realized, and, and, you know, it was that realization that allowed her to solve the crime to an extent, or at least be the victor of this journey.

If you had to take that scene though and say, what question could you say that, articulates the fundamentals of the scene? You know, would it not be something like, I mean, in terms of thematics, you'd say, will Marge's essential goodness overcome, you know, um, whatever it was, Harry's creepiness?

Which is actually the plot question of the TV series is at what point does decency win?

Yeah. And I think that's a good question for that scene. Thematically, we said in terms of character, will Marge understand that he is not to be trusted? The answer is no. Should have started in the next scene, but not within the scene.

After having spoken for two and a half hours straight, we're going to try and wrap this up with Children of Men.

Should I mention we're two and a half bottles of wine into here as well? Maybe that's why we're so loquacious.

The world was stunned today by the death of Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet. The youngest person on Earth was 18 years, 4 months, 20 days, 16 hours and 8 minutes old. The ultimate mystery, why are women infertile? Some say it's genetic experiments, pollution. Why do you think we can't make babies anymore? Doesn't matter. It's all over in 50 years. It's too late. Move along! Move along! Hello, Theo. How have you been? I'm sorry about theatrics. Police have been a pain lately. I haven't seen you for nearly 20 years. I need your help. Not for me. A girl. I need to get her to the coast, past security checkpoints. It's hard for me to look at you. He had your eyes. So why did you come to me? I trust you. Show him. Now you know us at stake. We have to meet the bull. What is this boat? The human project have sent a boat. The human project? Yes, the greatest minds in the world working for a new society. We're almost there, kid. We're almost there.

And I think Stu foreshadowed that he disagreed with me in this. So, Children of Men feels like a very plotted, traditional, in that sense, high-octane narrative thriller.

I disagree with any of that.

Okay. But I'm just saying the way that it's experienced or felt, but there is a sequence in there, and it's probably more of a scene than a sequence, but where it does, the plot just stops...

I don't think it stops.

Okay.

And this is where I disagree with.

Okay.

Right. So I think one.

Should we introduce both the film and where it's at?

Yeah. So we should play the trailer. Playing the trailer.

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right. And so this is film set in 2027, so not that far now, in kind of fascist England. No one can have kids anymore. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Science fiction stuff. Dystopia. Fascism. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Theo, our character, when we first introduced him to him, And this is important overall because it's actually a character question that opens the film. And on the page specifically, he is described as someone who gave up on the world before he's helpless and you can remember.

He's a veteran of hopelessness. He gave up before the world did. That's his intro in the big print.

And you don't necessarily feel that. Well, you kind of, they dramatize it in the film.

The very first scene is everyone staring up at the TV, mourning at the death of baby Diego. He doesn't even look at the screen. He barges through everyone, gets his coffee, turns around and walks out of the coffee shop.

And there's a terrorist bombing behind him.

In that coffee shop.

In that coffee shop behind him, right? That's very important because I think that character question about Theo ultimately drives the film. And there's a series I originally thought, I'm maybe over prepared that we're going to go and look at this film in terms of, Hey, look at how it breaks down all of its sequences. But I think for this exercise, now what we've all have talked about, it's actually kind of pointless.

But the opening sequence is interesting.

The opening sequence is interesting because a lot, because then he goes and visits his friend, Michael Caine.

Because there's no plot questions per se.

Nothing.

Especially because he is a veteran of hopelessness. He doesn't want anything.

He is literally not driving any drierly says to his boss, I'm more affected by the death of baby Diego.

So what is the character? If there's no plot question, can you articulate a character question for the opening?

I think ultimately, for me, it's about exploring what has happened in this world.

Yeah.

Right? That has led people to be so hopeless. So it is like the, there will be blood and it's a slower version of the minority report is to me, the science fiction cold open, which is what has happened to make people change.

Because I can say there's something to question like, will, what's his name, the character? Will Theo find a reason to live?

That's imposed on him. And he tries to reject it.

And it's not overly in the first sequence. The first sequence, I think it's one of the best expositionary sequence. We actually studied it, I think, in either character intros or world building.

But basically, every single frame of that film is giving you new information.

Walking out before the bomb goes off in the street, there's, um, Indian tuk-tuks. So obviously there's been like some downgrade in technology, you know, and then there's, uh, you know, the bomb goes off.

Or just a kind of more of a Blade Runner-ing of the universe.

Yeah. And then as he's going on the, you know, he leaves his office, uh, he's on the train and there's all these billboards about fertility testing is mandatory. There's, um, people, refugees locked up at the train station and like the domestic.

Train station so does he care about that.

No he doesn't.

So it's not the character question that's being in as it were implicitly asked throughout this is will it's not being presented he find a way or will this character engage with the world.

Will the world find a way i think this is interesting because i think as i've been thinking about a lot about with like spec i'm going to use not just science fiction speculative fiction is often about the world as a character and i think children of men the world is a character and then it personifies it in personifies it in yeah i.

Think that's right.

And because i mean you know game of thrones is about the world it's about the world questions of that show and the thematic implications of that right and we'll we'll get to your saying because i'm just trying to trying to skip over it because this is interesting because then it's a character thing we explore him and ultimately the plot is imposed on him which is that he is kidnapped by um what are called the fishers which are basically domestic terrorists, who are led by his ex-wife yeah right which we don't know until that point we know he has an ex-wife because when he visits um jasper earlier so that's he goes and smokes blunts like this is like opens with a terrorist bombing and his character is so indifferent he goes to work whinges about him feeling affected in a dry glow quite their own way and goes and smokes blunt with Michael Caine.

But it's so much exposition. So like there's billboards on the train, there's these refugees at the train station. When he goes to Michael Caine, Michael Caine, while they're, I think they go from like Bob Dylan to then like death metal or something. But he tells a joke about the human project which is like the sort of saviors of this world.

No, I'm not telling it now. No, come on, Jasper. No, fucking don't. Okay. The Human Project gives this great big dinner for all the scientists and sages in the world. They're tossing around theories about the ultimate mystery. Why are women infertile? Why can't we make babies anyway? Some of them say it's genetic experiments, gamma rays, pollution, same old, same old. Anyway, in a corner, the scenic man's sitting. He hasn't said a word. He's just tucking into his dinner. So they decide to ask him. They say, well, why do you think we can't make babies anymore? And he looks up at them, and he's chewing on this great big wing. And he says, I haven't the faintest idea, he said. But this stork is quite tasty, isn't it? Eat a fucking stork. Eat a stork. Italia.

So it's full-on exposition. And the only way that that bit of expository dialogue gets away with it is because it's Michael Caine who's delivering it.

And he's telling the joke about the nature of this world, right? So it's character building, building who Theo is and his hopelessness and the world building. And then the plot's imposed to him. The fishers kidnap him.

Get your fucking head up! Okay, okay. Get him in! Step! Get him in! Step! Get him in! Get his fucking legs! Go, go, go, go! You are under the jurisdiction of the Fishers. The Fishers are at war with the British government until they recognize equal rights for every immigrant in Britain. We're not gonna hurt you, we just wanna talk. But don't do anything stupid. Uncover him. It isn't safe. Do it. Hello, Theo. It's me, Theo. It's Julian.

And we meet his ex-wife, which we knew. And they've also planted with photos the picture of him, Julianne Warren, a child. So that's something that will build in his context, right? So this is all set up. And then basically they ask him to help them out.

Why am I here, Jules? I need your help. I need transit papers. Not for me. A girl. She's a Fuji. I need to get her to the coast to pass security checkpoints. I haven't seen you for nearly 20 years, and you come asking me for transit papers. Can you do it? I don't see how. You could ask your cousin. The government finances his arc of the arts. He has access to papers. Yeah, but he'd never do it. He would if you asked him. I can't. It's too dangerous. I can get you 5,000 pounds. I know you need the money. What are you talking about? i don't fucking need your money right sorry my mistake, and then.

He goes and visits his.

Cousin but the plot question you know that he's kidnapped right so suddenly it introduces the plot has started you know something exciting and he's like in a in a very small room with three different terrorists bright lights on him and it's all taped up with paper and then he realizes that it's his wife so then there's like a sort of relaxing and then she's like let's get out of here she opens up the door and they all walk out of the room and it just again all the stakes and sort of plot questions to an extent a let go so it's a lot a lot of this film even though it's feels like a very it feels like a thriller for a lot of but so many of the scenes and so many of the sequences are, at least plot character sequences, where there is an overarching plot question, but a lot of it is character questions coming to the top of it.

And, well, you know, we've talked recently about worldview and the important characters espousing worldview. There is a world with a particular situation and the characters have opinions. Jasper's amongst them, Theo's adopted hopelessness, but Julianne Moore's character tells that story about tinnitus, right?

But the reason it feels different is because, generically, this kind of a story would have a much more plotted structure.

And so you know what.

You so you'd normally have a much more.

Plotted kind of driving driving yes which gives them almost permission to do it right and i'm and then you're right and then if we fast forward he accepts the mission from the fishes he goes and gets papers from his cousin and then again he's a world building character revelation sequence it's it's not like he just goes and has dinner with his cousin and his cousin's like yeah all right i'll help you right and a lot of that cousin scene is about world.

Building like it's because the scene is essentially can i have the transit papers yes okay right plot question result but.

There's this no it's actually what do you need them for i've got a girlfriend that's good for you here like the most minute amount of opposition but there's.

There's this they're collecting it's called the the arc project so they're collecting artwork.

From around the world from around the world to protect david the original statute of david is now in like the tate modern and.

So that And he asked the.

Question like A hundred years from now there won't be one sad fuck to look at any of this What keeps you going? You know what it is still.

And so it's all world and theme. It is character, but the character of his cousin doesn't matter. He's just in that scene.

But what it is though, if you think about it in terms of how his sequences work, if they're plot character sequences as opposed to what we'd normally expect is a plotted sequence. Okay, there's a, I don't know, in this story there is a saviour, there's a Jesus character, there's a baby, it's Mary and Jesus, which is quite deliberately invoked towards the end. Okay, so basically this is a story about there is a world without hope, if you look at it religiously okay and suddenly there is a messiah that is born which is say the baby and the the world which is lost is now has the potential to be saved and this guy has the potential to save the world and that's what the story is okay so it's really about the nature of people and the nature of hope and the nature of redemption and these are all to do with character they're not to do with what it's not so much about you know these issues are as a character issue so you say you take a story that is normally driven by plot and we have plot character sequences and that's kind of what this film is it's much more but i think character it makes you think about the nature of the people in the story yes rather more than the action that's happening so when you know when he's goes and gets her the baby and the mother which is she's in she's in this big action sequence and there's you know people shooting and being killed all the time and he's going through this building to find her and he finds her and then he brings her out and then suddenly all the soldiers stop shooting and they all start going on their knees and you know all that kind of stuff. That is the climax of the film. Yeah. You kind of say, okay, well, what that's really about is character. It's not a climax that is fundamentally to do with action.

I'm going to disagree with you to an extent in that I would go just here and say it's about the world. Because that climactic moment, there's all these people trying to kill each other out of hope and despair, and they hear the cry of a baby. And everyone, characters you've never met before, but all you know about them is that they're trying to kill each other. But some characters you have met. And some of them you have. But the fact that there's hundreds of people that they're walking through, and they all stop, and they all look, and they all have different reactions. Some kneel and cross themselves, others smile, others... Like, it's about the world. But I do think you're right in terms of the world in this film is a character that is often dramatized through Theo.

I think, again, you guys seem to, I'm interested, I haven't listened to your podcast on world, but you seem interested in giving this notion of world as a character. Not in all films.

I just think in this film it's important.

But isn't it just simpler? That really it's not, this film is not really about what happens. It's about the effect upon, for example, in this sequence, it's the effect upon these people of recognizing that a different person than they had thought was possible, i.e. they thought all children were dead, and now there is a live child. And it's really the effect on... So basically, when they're confronted with a live child, what happens is those characters show their real natures. They stop they give up the role of a soldier which is an action role i am a soldier i do these things i am a you know rebel i do these things and they go no no uh they as it was strip off their active personas and they become who they are which is oh my god here is me looking at that child and they become their true natures and it's a story about person has that moment yeah because the whole sequence is about the nature of character yeah but it's not but the character is not individuated in any way.

They all have the same reaction. So that's why I'm saying it's about the world, because it's not about the individual characters. If it was about characters, then they would all react differently.

Stephen just did a face. French.

Because if you thought, I mean, it's like saying, for example, when Jesus is born in the nativity, all the shepherds have the same expression. Well, yeah, it's the messiah.

Yeah, but Pontius Pilate, if he was at the thing, he would have a different reaction.

No, because if once there were three, I mean, let's not get too involved with this particular discussion, but there were three kings from the east and they're all like going. Now, if you were, you know, at the side of the manger and the Messiah was there and, you know, the shaft of light came down from the stars and it became completely apparent this was the son of God. In that situation, there is no individual reaction. It's like the general reaction is awe. Well, that's kind of what you get in children of God is awe. Children of men. It's just like a Messiah. He literally is, that child is, you know, the chosen one. Everyone in that scene reacts in the way which is that he's a chosen one but you know when Hannibal Lecter appears in Silence of the Lambs and everyone looks at him and goes oh that's Hannibal Lecter they all have the same reaction which is here's that horrible monster but Jodie Foster doesn't react in that way and that's what makes Jodie Foster different that's what makes that moment about character so.

That's what I think if you've got a moment where people who you have no idea about you've never met before they all have the same reaction you can't say that is.

About character that has to be about the society that has to be about no no no no it is about character it's about the the scene is about how those people react it's not about what they do it's about who they are and that makes it a character scene okay but that's at that moment because i want to i want to roll back because i think.

This type without going into the pacific specifics pacific right the point where we're trying to say there's plot a lot of plot character sequences early up. There is an action sequence where Julianne Moore, which they're driving the car, they're intercepted, critical action sequence, Julianne Moore characters dies.

And I just want to point out just before that sequence, they make you fall in love with Julianne Moore in one moment where her and Theo are shooting ping pong balls from each other's mouths. And it's one of the most perfect...

Oh, fuck off. You've got to be kidding. You know how many people I've tried this with? I don't want to know. You'll be happy to know out of the hundreds, you are still the only... I'm not doing it. Yes, you are. No, I'm not. The car's moving too much. Yes, you are. You are. Better? Pah! That's hilarious! No, wait, wait, okay. Do it again do it again because.

Again the plot has.

Stopped kind of stopped they're just driving they're exploring a moment we know the plot is for them to go to a safe house with key who.

Even i think it's really simple the film is you know you take as it were a science fiction dystopic she's despairing at us like sorry hijacking but all you're doing all you're doing is saying okay what happens if we tell this story more relation to character than plot, And that is what sets character men apart.

And that makes it different.

Children men. Children men.

It's exactly what it is.

One bottle in.

Too many wines.

Because I'm going to come back to your scene, right? Because I want to point out is they have, that is the distinctive action sequence that we know about, right? And then they stop down. We deal with all the politics of the fishers. And then we have the incredible action sequence when Theo escapes with Key and the Miriam.

The midwife.

Right? The wife. The midwife. And they leave, and that's a plot sequence. Will they escape in time, right? And they're two. Even the first one becomes an action sequence. It's a character road trip. This film is a road trip. The question once he's asked about these papers, ultimately, the plot that set his motion is that the papers that his brother's cousin gives him, and we told this through dialogue, requires Key to be accompanied by someone else. And Theo agrees to do it for money, right?

No, but he deliberately does it. You get that feeling. there's a moment in the pub with Luke.

Here's a photo of the girl in the name. Oh, hang on. We've got a problem. All I could get up were joint transit papers, which means I would have to escort them now. Will you? For a couple more grand? LAUGHTER, Julian, thanks very highly of you. I'll share. Yeah. Thanks again.

So he feels like he's arranged this for two reasons. Because then he has the scene with Julianne Moore in the train station where she's like, you're just doing this for the money, aren't you? And he's like, they kiss. And it's clear that he's doing it both for the money and for her.

To win her affection. Right. But the large part of the fishes, and this is important, is that they want, or at least Julianne Moore's character's objective is to get key to the human project, which we may, we do not know, there is no certainty about whether they'll turn up at the pre-arrange site.

Whether the human project is even real or not.

Which is- This is the people who are the scientists who are exploring- Yeah, on the ship.

On the ship, yeah. Right? Yeah. And stuff happens. And then ultimately what happens, they have to go to this, I keep on saying Box Hill, but it's Bex Hill. Box Hill's a suburb in Melbourne. uh box hill on the sea um bex hill box hill on the sea bex hill which is a refugee camp right and the plot question that is driving this whole sequence right is one that they know they have a very specific this is thriller action movie stuff they have to be there at 6 p.m blah blah blah blah with her to get picked up and if they miss they're fucked right we know the impending pressure that the fishers are planning some kind of military operation and key basically goes into labor so you've got that ticking clock, right? And then you have a series of action and plot driven sequences at that point, right? This point, I would say Theo is largely committed to the mission. Yeah.

I think his character journey ended.

Almost. Right. Because there's one last question for him, right? But this is, it turns into plot stuff because then he is separated from Key. He has to go and find her. Then he delivers the baby. Then he has to, then they get separated. Then they have to leave. He loses Key again. He goes and finds her. This is all the action stuff. What's really interesting about that reaction that you're talking about is that is the plot stopping. Literally, the plot is stopping for everyone. The objectives of the rebels to fight the army versus everyone all stops because of this baby. So it is a character moment. because quite literally they're stopping, achieving their objective. And then he goes to the, and then they have to go and find the boat to put key on there. We discover, we learn that he has been shot. In the end of the film, and this is a massive spoiler, is him sitting in this rowboat in the fog and the human project has yet to turn up. But he is content. He has found hope, right? And then he basically dies and then the boat turns up. And this is interesting because his character question, Both the character question we were saying has been resolved. He has found purpose in life.

So what's the character question? Will he find a purpose in existence?

Will he find hope?

Hope, yeah.

Okay.

It is hope.

And I think that's why it stayed in the big print, and that's why I wanted to say, will he find hope? And he finds hope. And for hope to exist, he needs to – oh, faith is another one. There is a big speech by Jasper about faith versus chance, right?

And that's the scene I actually want to talk about.

Yeah, I thought you wanted to talk about the scene in the hospital.

No, that is the scene I want to talk about.

All right.

Because.

Put a pin in that.

Okay.

Point is, I'm just saying the whole thing turns into an action movie, but then there's ultimately this question and then will he find hope? And the way to find hope.

So the action question, the plot question.

It's like find the baby. Find key.

Will he get the baby to safety?

Yes.

Okay.

And that drives the home.

And that he and baby.

Not to safety, to the human project.

To the human project.

Okay. Which could be complete fantasy. Like there's this idea seated throughout.

The question is answered at the end, and the answer is yes.

But after he's dead.

It's not fantasy, but it's after he's dead. And that's important. But no, but there's a point when he's like, he could have been, let's get the fuck out of here. And he's always questioned the human project. Even when he's in Bexhill, he talks about, what do you mean it was mirrors?

What time are we supposed to meet the boat? Sunset tomorrow. How do we know that Luke and his mob haven't intercepted him? Luke has no way of contacting the human project, nor does anyone else. Saga? Contact with the human project is done by mirrors. Julian was our mirror. What do you mean, mirrors? Mirrors. They contact one of our people. That person contacts someone else and someone to a word gets to Julian. She tells Luke. You mean you never actually talked to any of them? Uh-oh. Don't fucking tell me you never actually talked to. All right, all right. Shh, shh, shh. Breathe it out. Is she okay? That's it. Breathe it out. Breathe it out.

Always an escape.

Clause for him saying at the end of the at the end of the film he's on the boat with her before the human project has come up and the baby is crying and he says uh put the baby up and pat the baby.

She's probably got wet. Wind her. Put her on your shoulder. Just tap her back. Gently.

Um, and it seems to me that that, having watched it, that's that, that is, is kind of the apotheosis, apotheosis of the character. That's the point where he understands something profound, which is that, and I don't know what exactly how you say what it is, but it's, it's the sense that you have to keep the child alive, that you have to, you know, that you have to keep going. You have to, you, you have to make the child comfortable. It's kind of like, it seems to me that's a point of a kind of realization that he comes to. Just before his death.

Yeah. But a lot- And it's also related to Key, because Key wants to name the child. There's a running joke about names. Yeah.

And he calls it Dylan or something. Yeah.

I mean, in the end, she names a Dylan after his child- She wants to call it Frohley and then Bazooka. Yeah.

And then she chooses Dylan, which was his son's name.

His name. He's dead. And that's what we find out. Like his wound in the past, where his son died unexpectedly.

But so- It sounds an entirely conventional story then.

It's a structure.

It is. I mean, look, some things that I find amazing about it is that it only has three action sequences in it. I mean, one of those action sequences is like 20, 25 minutes of unrelenting action. So it does that very well. But then all the other sequences, often they don't, the plot questions, they are plot character sequences where the plot question is just sort of there to allow these characters to hang out with each other. And so, I think it's a really excellent sort of, they call it elevated genre these days, where they've taken genre and just made it good, essentially. No, I disagree. Okay, but this is the buzzwords that I keep hearing. But there are two scenes in the film that happen quite late. And one is they've escaped from the fishes and it's before they've figured out they even need to go to Bexhill. But they've reached the sanctity of Jasper's house. And Jasper says, don't worry, I know I've got a plan. But then doesn't tell us what the plan is. And then they just have dinner. And that is the scene that you're talking about where they're talking about fate versus chance. And it is essentially a character exposition scene because that is where Miriam and Jasper are talking and you learn that why Theo is hopeless. He had a son.

But they were there because of what they believed in, in the first place, their faith. They wanted to change the world and their faith kept them together. But by chance Dylan was born this is him? Yeah that's him he'd have been about your age magical child beautiful their faith put in praxis praxis? What happened? chance he was their sweet little dream he had little hands, little legs little feet, little lungs in 2008 Along came the flu pandemic. And then by chance, it was gone. Oh, Jesus. You see, Theo's faith lost out to chance. So, why bother if life's going to make its own choices?

And that's when he gave up on life, before the world gave up. And yes, it is there for expositionary purposes, but there is no plot question whatsoever.

It's a pure character scene.

And in fact, it plays it out because the whole thing is actually Theo listening from around the corner in the foreground.

The only reason it's startling, you know, the way you find it startling, is the same reason that, you know, Fargo, the scene in Fargo is startling, which is generically these scenes, as it were, an investigation movie in Fargo or a science fiction dystopic story, you know, is essentially that these scenes are always driven by plot. And then you get these directors and writers to come along and say, what if I don't do that? What if I simply have a story about a scene about character? And what happens is you get this extraordinary effect, which is the reason it's extraordinary. It's extraordinary because you've seen a lot of other films where this never happens. And suddenly you get this scene where the writer goes. And this is what's really important about sequences is that, you know, it's to understand that, you know, what's remarkable about sequences that you can play them how you like as a writer. You can go and it's important particularly if you're writing genre you say okay how does genre normally work how does the genre how does the genre that i really like work so if you like science fiction for example okay science fiction broadly works in one way but look at the science fiction movies you really like okay and say what do i like and i incline to you know each of us will have a different taste and if you look at them you'll go well i tend to incline to stuff that's very plot driven or you tend to incline to stuff that's plot character driven or you might It tends to incline to stuff like Solaris, which is kind of character with a little bit of plot driven. Like Tarkovsky I'm talking about. So, you know, so you say, OK, well, that's what I like. So then you go, OK, well, it works the way I like. The reason it works the way I like is because it's structured this way. The sequences are organized this way. What if I take, for example, a much more mainstream subject and I treated it in the way that Tarkovsky organized the sequences of Solaris? Then would i get this sense of character and this open expansive character but really limited plot and what if i manipulated a little how do i play with it the the reason that you need to understand how sequences work is because you need to be able to play for a writer it's not about okay this is it's not a formula it's not okay well if you write this kind of film that's how they work if you write this kind of film that's how they work you need to understand that you can read any film in terms of its chapters. So you watch a film four times and you get to know it. And then you watch it for chapters. You say, okay, I'm just going to watch the chapter. And you go, oh, there's the end of a chapter. There's the end of a chapter. There's the end of a chapter. And then you go, okay, how did that chapter I just looked at work? What drove it? And you go, it's a plot-driven chapter. That's a plot-character-driven chapter. That's a character-driven chapter. And then you get this sense of how these stories work. And then you, and it's just, it's kind of like becoming familiar with the underlying grammar of narrative. And then as a writer, it's not even necessarily about making conscious decisions. It's if you want to tell a story a certain way once you've as well got an understanding of how different writers and different films have played the sequences in different ways you will kind of write the way that you want it to be and it's not about planning and the thing i keep talking to people when they say well it sounds like you're saying okay here's a kind of formula if you write this kind of movie you write this way if you write this kind of movie it's nothing like that it's like saying, you know, it's, it's like, you know, if you learn the trumpet. Okay you've got a valve you've got three valves and you can play them certain ways and you play and you do all this kind of practice in order to be perfect to doing it that way and that way and that way and then you improvise and then you follow as it were your impulse you don't follow a piece of sheet music you know but you have to know how those valves work before you can improvise and this is for me in terms of structuring a story sequences and you know it's not just sequences in terms of, you know, 10 minutes, it's also in terms of a scene, you know, how do I organize a scene? And if in the middle of that scene, I want some character, how do I, okay, so I say my scene is where a plot scene, but I want in the middle of that scene, I want to have a section, which is simply about character. So I have a plot scene that works for six minutes, but for 40 seconds in the middle of that, there's no plot. I'm just going to drop some character in. And you can write scenes in the same way that you think of it. It works in the same way. And you have to become fluent in this my thing about for writers is that you just have to know this you have to play with it you have to watch other stories and see how they work you have to play with your own writing you have to see what your own predilection is because any writer will have a tendency to work in a certain way yeah and so you go this is how i tend to write so if i'm trying to do something different i need to work against my predilection i need to know what i tend to do some writers tend to be character sequence writers some writers tend to be plot characters some titers tend to be action and then you need to write well you know you just need to work out how do i tend to write and what kind of genre am i writing and what is the tendency within the genre and for example does my predilection marry with the overriding tendency of the genre or is it completely opposed to it because then you might find that you're trying to write i don't know a detective story but you tend to write character sequences. And then you can't understand why people say to you, doesn't kind of hold up. Because you're tending to write about the people in the story, and they're tending to look for the organization of the plotting. And you need to say, okay, what if I write against my tendency? What if I write, you know, and that's why you need to constantly explore this. It's not about, it's not inherent in the stories.

Because one of the things I want to take away from this, I mean, there's, there's, I, you know, all our listeners will know that Sue and I are kind of attracted to quite narrative genre storytelling. Nothing but i think we're both attracted to the not straight genre where it does take it to this additional level like born identity genre is more exciting term than okay but i think a lot of these sequences are often there for pacing purposes like we need to take our foot off the gas before we put our foot back down again right and i'm and i'm totally happy with that but the two questions i've taken away just from tonight not even preconceived which is often how i approach this podcast is what would sustain a sequence if you answered and resolved the plot question really early on like just think about a scene where you're like all right i have to get to this plot point by the end of the scene what if i answer that here like right at the beginning of the scene as they did with fargo we as you said you know right at the beginning of that scene that she's never going to sleep with him but that's what makes it that play out but.

That's what's a midpoint that's what makes it a midpoint.

No but it's not even a midpoint but it is him right at the beginning of that scene.

You get the feeling that he wants to sleep with her. But if the plotted objective of, okay, what does he want? He wants to sleep with her. What happens is immediately she says, it's never going to happen. It's not a plot scene.

And I get that.

The scene is about character.

I'm not, I'm not saying one way or another. I'm just saying that if you are exploring a scene, just as a writer, think about what happens if you took the plot question out or if you answer the plot question right at the beginning, and then how would you play it out? What would come out?

What would you explore? Again, it's really simple. You have to ask a simple question. Okay at what point is the question of the scene articulated and the question is will if it's a plot if you have no plot question it's a character question and you have to say to yourself and again you have to be careful this is not a recipe to write it's a recipe to rewrite okay i think that's where draft zero kind of lives it should really be called like draft 22 you look at it you look at your scene and you say okay there is no plot question to this scene because the plot question he's disposed with early on the question that scene in in the fargo scene is really what does the character have to understand and it's will marge or will mike understand whatever that is and then that's what this what this is seen articulate will mike understand that marge is more interested in uh helping him become happier than she is in sleeping with him for example you might articulate like that and then you say okay that's the scene and then the question the answer Maybe I'll be, no. Mike never understands that Mike, but the audience understands. The audience understands that Mike has not understood that Marge is more interested in helping him than she is with sleeping with him.

Which almost makes him a comedic character because he fails to change.

Right?

I think that's like a lot of where the Coen Brothers comedy comes from is those straight characters who...

Just unaware of their oblivious of their own condition the audience get you know the point is the the these things about sequence questions and sequence sequence sequences and sequence scenes and quest scene questions etc it's always about the audience yeah it's not about the writer it's not about the characters about what do the audience understand now they may not articulate if you stop the film and ask the question what does the character want at this moment they can probably answer and in fact if you stop the film and say what is the character trying to understand at this moment they can probably answer if they if it's not clear to them it's not about what you think it's really what's on the page for the audience you know that's what that's why i think sequences are important because it it forces the writer when i talk to a writer about okay let's. Look at the organization of your story i'm not saying let's look at what i understand or let's look what you understand i'm saying what is the audience understanding from what they see yeah and and the notion of sequences if this if the sequence is not understood the questions understood by the audience it's still a question the writer says well i understand to be this i always go when i'm talking to a writer okay where on the page does it say that when do the audience get it when in this sequence at what point precisely and it's not this when i'm working with writers it's not a vague thing literally i can point to the precise moment on the page tell me when the audience understands the question and it's not like somewhere on page three it's at this line halfway down the line at that word is when it's articulated and if you can't be that precise then you're not doing it properly and i think the i.

I want to i think this is where i've been pushing back at least on the, character thing is i think there is may not be at a sequence level maybe more at a scene level but i do think there is a thematic scene and this is where i was getting at it's a world view you know like the stargate sequence i think in 2001 is a very much about making a feeling like like you said poetry and there's another scene in children of men just before they get on the the armored car into bex hill they're in a school i thought you're going to talk about okay so they're in a school it's an abandoned school because they haven't been children for 20 years right it's overgrown there's a deer running through it and he the the mother still pregnant hasn't had a baby she's sitting in a swing and they're looking at her through broken windows and it's you know, it's not but it works within the film you know they built the world such that that doesn't feel as overt as it does when i'm saying it right and miriam the midwife without real any prompting from character other than maybe people want to fill silence starts telling theo about what it was like being a midwife when suddenly his children stopped being born and she talked about the world's descent into hopelessness.

As the sound of the playgrounds faded the despair set in, Very odd what happens in the world without children's voices. I was there at the end. Now you're going to be there at the beginning. Yeah. I'll be there at the beginning. Thank you.

And it is all just thematic exposition, essentially. It is them taking a moment, breath, the plot has stopped, because they're waiting. They're just literally waiting around for the plot to drive up into the driveway, which it does at the end of this scene. And they're taking a breath, and they're not talking about who they are as people, what they want, where they need to go, what their objective is. They're not even talking about their internal needs. they're talking about the world they're talking about what this movie is about yeah.

But i think on a technical level the scene has got two things going for it right which is we are waiting for the impending arrival of sid so they've got to meet they.

Have to wait for stephen was talking about earlier so long as you've got all the plot questions arranged the audience is happy to sit back because and get taken off the hook as it were because they're confident you're going to pick them back up again.

Right. If Sid was out the front and like revving his Humvee and they're like having a thematic thing. But then also we just, and this is something that we haven't gone into a lot of detail from, but he starts having contractions before she hops into the Humvee. So the question, or is it just, no, she knows, no, no, she knows.

She's in the Humvee.

But I think she hints towards before, right? Cause that's the point is there's a very little gap, but I've got a feeling it's just before they're getting into that plot is resolved and the next plot has already started so that overlaps so there's this transition and there's just this little bit of space and what is interesting i think on a character level about miriam is that she it's this you know we've talked about it's for this side that you you have dialogue to compel action from another person which is theo gives her an option to stay with the fishes right and for reasons that are other than that she is a midwife, She chooses to go with them and Key and keep Key safe rather than deciding with the fishers who want to keep Key with them.

I mean, she's not- she's not a deep character.

I think ultimately no i just want to finish what i'm saying i think she is telling theo this because he wants to understand why she is prepared to sacrifice sacrifice herself for this child which ultimately she does when she stands up and protects key in front of the guard on the armored car so i think it's important it's thematic and world but it is not just thematic as in the theme of the film is the world view of the character that both explains.

Beforehand i mean what you're kind of saying in a broader sense get away from the details of the story is okay we're saying there are plot questions there are plot character questions there are character questions are there sequences or scenes that are driven by thematic questions that are not fundamentally to do with the character and what will happen to them are not and what happens in terms of action who they are is term is terms of character and you know and you know are there questions which are more to do with in scenes and in sequences which are to do with what is this film really about yes so can you say that for example the opening sequence of the there will be men is really fundamentally there we blood it's fundamentally asking the blood there will be it's fundamentally asked the question you know what is this film really about we're going to lay out as well the thematic center of the story i haven't thought about that very much and i think it's a really interesting question and i think the answer is probably yes i think there's probably another question you could ask which is are there also in terms of asking what questions which drive sections of the story, are there also imagistic questions, which is, um, for example, a question like, I'm trying to think if you take, I'm sorry to... Talk about films that people may never have heard of but sergey paranjarov one of my favorite filmmakers a russian armenian filmmaker made a beautiful film called the color of pomegranates. Extraordinary beautiful piece of film uh will be absolutely one of my top three films of all time um which has absolutely no narrative to speak of it's it's a really a non-narrative it's not entirely non-narrative piece it's a film based on a series of poems written by 12th century armenian mystic monk um and but essentially the logic of the story is imagistic i repeated images, and and colors and a kind of thematic resonances and that you understand it's kind of about spirituality in the relationship of man and god and it kind of is about uh as well the color red and circles and that's kind of as much as you can probably say about the film you have to see it when you see it you won't mind that you'll just go oh my god this is extraordinary um but it but And absolutely, you then say, is there a kind of thematic question or an imagistic question? Tarkovsky, I very often think, you could ask, you know, what kind of... Coheres the sequence of the film together. I mean, really what we're asking when we're saying thematic questions or plot questions or plot character questions is what binds this section of the film together.

Yes, exactly. And what keeps the audience watching the film.

Now, some audiences don't like, as it were, imagistic sections. So they will walk away from it, and that's fine. So if you want to make...

Unless it's music videos.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely it will be. So if you want to make a...

But they're only five minutes long, you know, generally.

If you want to make a feature film that is popular to audiences you will tend towards plot on plot character sequences if you want to make as we're a mainstream art house movie then you will make plot character and character sequences if you want to make a film that's right out there you will make a character stroke imagistic stroke thematic sequences but those are the but basically this is the palette in terms of structure that is available to the writer, and it really depends on the it's really the reason i think it's worth exploring is it's like saying to a painter you know you may never think you want to paint in blue but if you knew how blue worked if you played with all the different kinds of blue there are if you ever needed blue you could use it. You know, so if you don't like Tarkovsky, that's fine. You don't ever have to make a film like Tarkovsky. But if you knew how he did it, if you ever do, then you can do it. Or if you ever want to make a movie that looks like a kind of, you know, I don't know, a James Cameron movie where you drop in the middle a Tarkovsky section. You're blue. You know, what would happen? You know, what would happen if you'd made Titanic, but you put in some non-typical sequences? You know, and it's really about being fluent. It's kind of like a language of narrative. And for me, it's not what I find fascinating about it. It's not so much, I'm not a writer and so it's different from me, but it's, it's not so much that, you know, you think I have to write my story in this way or that way. It's simply, this is the palette. This is the way that you, these are the tools you can use. And if you look at a film you don't like, look at Naked. Many people don't like Naked. I don't care if you don't like it. For the most people who like it, they love it. And I'm one of them. Okay. And there are many people who love that film. Now, i don't care if you don't like it or not but if you understand how it works it's like saying personally i don't like titian but i understand how he uses color i understand how he uses perspective i understand how he draws figures okay i don't like it but i understand it and if i ever wanted to do that i could do it because i understand it that's what i think is interesting about this stuff because amongst all this exploration you'll find where your stories are You'll find the way to express the story you want to tell. And it's kind of like, for me, it's like, you know, when you go to art school, you draw nude figures. You may never paint a nude in your life, but because you know about perspective, because you know about proportion, because you know about color, you know, you can do all these things. And for me, this notion of sequences is about organizing narrative.

Well, I think what makes children and men stand apart, having conducted this analysis, is that sequence-by-sequence, questions like the fact that it decides in each of its sequences to make it at least you know more character driven questions in almost every single sequence they're very there's only three or four sequences in that whole film that are pure plot driven as opposed to born where all bar one are plot driven or.

To compare it to another choir on gravity like.

Yeah in terms of use.

The same developed on the same cinematic techniques of but the cuts and stuff like that But it's gonna be Children of the Memory revisit in 30, 50 years.

Yeah, and I think a lot of people disliked Gravity because when it tried to drop in that character-driven sequence, it felt like it was- Artificial.

Yeah.

Yeah, it just didn't feel- Oh.

The dream sequence. Oh, no, we're continuing to explain more and more films.

But the- The thing I would say, the final thing I would say, I think, is that- Final.

That sounds good.

Yeah, the thing to understand is that this notion about sequences and understanding it, it's not about writing. It's not about how do I write the next script I want to write. It's more about understanding how writing works. And I would say it's really useful to look at films you like and to explore films you like and understand how the sequences work and where the sequences are. But if you sit around and say, okay, I'm going to write a new film or I'm going to write a new TV show, and I need to think about the first sequence and whether it needs to be a plot sequence or character sequence, you're entirely missing the point. You know, you need to write what comes out of you, okay? And you absolutely do not need to be analytic in this way. And I think if you start being analytic in the sense of, okay, analyze my, you know, the page I'm thinking of writing or the next four pages that seem to be coming out of my imagination. If you start applying this kind of, this analytic process to your writing process, then you will become, it's fatal. It's once you've written it, then just start thinking about it then. It's not a creative tool. And not to mistake, okay, it's not a recipe. This is how you need to think about the story. It's simply, once you have the story, look at how it falls into chapters and say, okay, what drives that chapter? Is it plot or character? Or is it a kind of blend? And what happens if I made it more plotted? What happens if I made it more characterful? How would it shift? And how much closer would it be to what i feel i want to be doing as a writer.

And i think we've we've we come back to this and it's not just in this episode that we've come back to it been a lot of our episodes it's how do we want the audience to experience our story because that's ultimately why we tell stories and why we are storytelling species is to impact on whoever is the listener or or you.

Know we are our first audience for the story.

Our stories and we less write the stories than we are just the first audience for them and it's about efficiency of that it's like to me often the the the people who i constantly go back to get feedback from are the ones who say rather than this is what i think you should do with this story is this is what i think you want to do with this story and this is how i don't think you're getting there right and then i can go and think back and go you know what maybe this sequence isn't doing what i want it to do because i'm too character driven and not enough plot or vice versa because i recently read i'm gonna sub tweet a listener of the podcast who i read for he's done a he's done a pilot for a tv show that he wants to essentially be the the engine for the tv show is an anthology of short stories each episode and there is not enough in the pilot that i read there's not enough plot questions keeping me going and i'm like why you know i was giving him all these suggestions about maybe make it one short story or what have you but he had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do but he knew what wasn't working and it was this balance of, you know, plot, plot character and your character driven sequences. It was about keeping the audience engaged while delivering what he wanted to deliver.

For me, and I thought this may be a point to end on, but you guys can disagree, which is, I'm going to use one of my terrible music metaphors. It's when I was like learning jazz and you're practicing your scales and your modes. And it's like, why do I have to do all this boring shit? It's like, the teacher's like, so you can forget about it. So you can just play, right you need to know this stuff you learn it and you build it into you so you can just play and you can express and and that you'll find that you're responding to what's in front of you.

Absolutely it becomes the thing about it is that watch stories that you like and watch stories you don't like it's easy when you don't like and just go how do these sequences work where are the sequences where are the end of the chapters where's the new chapter what drives this chapter how is it structured how is it organized get used to reading it like that and after a while when you enjoy something you'll stop doing that you'll just enjoy it and in your writing it's the same thing when you're working hard it'll become apparent when you're flying as a writer it just comes out in your process it's exactly like as you say musical scales i think it's a fundamental part of writing. I think it's something a writer has to understand in the same way that an artist has to understand perspective. If you can't understand perspective, you can never draw without perspective. It's like Picasso said, you have to forget what you know in order to do what you can. And if you don't know it to start with, you can never forget it. And this is what this is about. It's about understanding how it organizes in order not to think about it. And it's a peculiar a thing but you know it's to make it look effortless at the other end yeah it's it's it's kind of like and you know and quite often it's it's annoying with a lot of writers i talk to because we're talking about in an analytic sense some writers i work with do this automatically it's in them, and if you ask them to think about it if i ask them to say okay well how do the structures work they find it quite difficult and they get very very um discomforted about it because it's something they do automatically most writers i work with don't do it automatically they can they can learn it. But a lot of people, you know, the best writers, they don't think about it. It's just an instinctive thing in them. But, you know, you have to, as it were, learn and understand this process of, you know, what drives a section of story? Is it a character question? Is it a plot question? Is it a plot character question? How does it work? Once you understand that and it becomes an automatic process that you ask yourself, eventually you forget that you're asking it. And then you'll kind of write from the soul of yourself, which is, I think, the best place to be but it's it takes you know just like all these artists spend 20 years drawing from life in order to forget what that looks like it's the same thing yeah.

Just watch the journey of kandinsky yeah from.

Air picasso picasso.

You know all this starting realism and you end up somewhere else.

Yeah absolutely all.

Right should we actually end this.

Thing i think that's it i think that was it yeah Yeah.

I think that was it.

We've talked for an inordinately long time.

You like spy movies, Mr. DeVille? Nowadays, they're all a little serious for my taste. But the old ones, marvelous. Give me a far-fetched theatrical plot any day. The old Bond movies. Oh, man. Oh, when I was a kid, that was my dream job. Gentleman's spy. I always felt the old Bond films were only as good as the villain. As a child, I rather fancied a future as a colorful megalomaniac. What a shame we both had to grow up.

I hope you all feel like arguing with either stew or myself about anything on this episode or anything in general and you can find many ways of getting in touch with us at our website at draft hyphen zero dot com at the website you'll also find the show notes for this and all our other episodes as well as links to support us and spread the word for free via a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Very important for spreading the word. Or if you think that what we do here is worth a dollar or preferably more than a dollar, then you can also find links to our Patreon page to support us getting these episodes to you quicker. Thanks. And thanks for listening.