This week I'm digging into some of the films released around Christmas time that are getting a lot of buzz.
Today, rather than picking any one film in particular, I want to highlight a technique in the opening I've seen in a number of them, and that is ENTERING ON THE PROBLEM.
One thing I've noticed in a number of the scripts that I've written is a tendency to give a couple of scenes of introduction before establishing clearly what the main character's problem is. It makes sense, right? You want to give people a chance to get to know your characters and world before you launch into the thing that's going to drive the story.
But in fact a lot of great stories do not adopt this step-by-step approach, instead opening on the problem and allowing that in itself to also be a moment which helps us understand who the characters are and what's this world they're living in.
A "soft" version of this: DON'T LOOK UP, the new Adam McKay satire about a massive comet that's coming to destroy the world. The opening scene has one of our leads, grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), discovering the comet. She doesn't know it's a problem yet, that won't happen until she tells her boss and at the celebration party he clarifies the trajectory. In fact that opening scene is much more about establishing who she is and that this world is going to be a little kooky--there's just something about Jennifer Lawrence in this role that naturally seems a bit off.
But the moment the comet is discovered really is the start of the crisis.
A much harder version of this: THE POWER OF THE DOG, the Jane Campion film starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons as brothers running a cattle business in the early twentieth century. The film opens straightaway on Cumberbatch's Phil looking to his brother George to be right there with him remembering what today is, and George is just not interested. And the entire opening sequence is really just a long series of this same issue, and the mounting anxiety this brings out in Phil.
And each of these moments tells us more about both characters--the wildness and scariness inside Phil, the grief inside George. And it's all occurring as they lead their cattle on a trail, establishing the world.
A "middle" version which you find in a lot of films today is the opening time jump, which THE LOST DAUGHTER uses. We open on Olivia Colman's character staggering down a beach and then collapsing at the ocean. That's it; then we jump back to her arriving in this seaside Greek town and getting to know everything, with no real conflict other than a certain standoffishness in the character for some time.
Sometimes the Time Jump is all about establishing some kind of ticking clock or twist that we'll spend the film looking to see coming or worrying about. In the case of DAUGHTER, it's actually a bit of a con job. It's there to create a sense of conflict, to tell us there is a problem, but in fact when we come full circle it doesn't amount to much. Certainly it's not the heart of the conflict of the film. (And the film truly has some fascinating conflicts in it. So good.)
One screenwriting idea that I heard recently that has really stayed with me is the idea that you want every scene to be serving at least two purposes. You've got so little real estate to work with; you want to use what you've got as much as you can. Entering on the Conflict is a great example of that at work.
If you're looking for an exercise, why not pick a script you've worked on and see how that opening scene goes. Is it doing more than just introducing the world and characters? Does it present the problem in some way? Could it?
