Every movie should really tell just one story. If you’re telling a mystery, every subplot should also be a mystery. If you try telling different stories, you’ll wind up with a disjointed screenplay, much like a horror movie with a subplot that’s trying to be funny. You can have comic relief, but you can’t dilute […]
One hallmark of a bad movie is that at the end, the villain has to explain everything for the benefit of the hero and the audience. Just telling something to the audience is dull, yet it’s often necessary. At the very least if you have to tell information to the audience, do it through another […]
Your main characters should always be interesting in some way. That doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be likable, but that they need to grab our attention in a way we can admire and respect. In “Die Hard,” the villain, Hans Gruber, is simply the leader of an armed gang of well-trained thieves. What makes […]
Many people worry about creating original stories that have never been told before. That’s pointless. The real secret is not to create an original story, but to create original characters in an original world pursuing a goal that we care about. Whether we’ve seen this plot before is irrelevant if we like the characters in […]
Nobody will care about your story if they don’t like your hero. Even if your hero is actually the villain, you must make the hero likable and sympathetic in some way. When the hero is trying to pursue a noble goal against an evil villain, your hero needs to connect with the audience and that […]
Every important story plot must be set up ahead of time. First, this item must be highlighted somehow to make it memorable although initially it may seem trivial. Second, it needs to be repeated somehow so we don’t forget it. Third, it needs to payoff somehow so we realize why it was important in the […]
At the very least, your screenplay needs a hero pursuing a goal. The pursuit of that goal creates conflict that makes your story interesting. The first part of your hero’s goal is a physical goal. That’s something concrete that we can see and understand. For example in “The Martian,” the hero wants to get back […]
The ending makes the biggest impact so you need to plan your ending before you start writing and write yourself straight into a dead end. That’s actually what happened with Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur” where they couldn’t figure out the ending so they dumped their original story and rewrote the whole script, which is why […]
Watch a typical baseball game and at the very least, it’s interesting because you want to know who will win in the end, even if you don’t know when that end might come. That’s the first rule of every scene. Make that scene interesting because you want to know who’s going to win in the […]