If you want to create a memorable character, start with the choices they make. The toughest choices for any character to face are:
- Choices that make the character question their current life
- Choices that push the character into changing
In “Finding Nemo”, the father (Marlin) and son (Nemo) are both constantly forced to question their current life. Marlin thinks the ocean is dangerous and wants to protect Nemo while Nemo wants to explore the world. Nemo’s excitement about going to school forces Marlin to evaluate his belief about the ocean being dangerous – and then those fears are actually confirmed when Nemo gets abducted by a scuba diver.
Of course, Nemo only gets abducted by the scuba diver after Marlin yells at him to get back and Nemo rebels by swimming out to the scuba diver’s boat. Watch this scene from “Finding Nemo” and you’ll see that what makes the scene interesting is the action but what makes the action meaningful are the choices the characters make.
In any scene, characters take action but in bad movies, the actions they take don’t change their lives in any meaningful way. In good movies, characters take action based on the choices they make, and those choices change who they are.
In “Green Book”, a white man gets hired by a black musician to drive him to play concerts in the Deep South. Throughout the story, the white man constantly tells the black man that he doesn’t even know his own black culture and people. The black man argues that not all black people are the same and this argument eventually blows up into a fight in the following scene:
After this confrontation, the white man suddenly realizes how lonely his black employer really is, but he would never have reached this conclusion if they hadn’t had this argument. By the end of this scene, the white man hasn’t taken any action to show he’s changed, but the expression on his face shows that his next action in a future scene will show how much he really changed after all.
More action is never the answer to making a better story. More meaningful choices that change a character’s life somehow is the answer to making a better story. Now that you know something that Hollywood forgets every time, you can write stronger screenplays by focusing less on action and more on forcing your characters to make difficult choices that will force them to change by taking action.
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