FILM - Narration and seduction E-Book

Trine Breum

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 425

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

FILM – Narration & Seduction gives a comprehensive insight in the essential elements of the modern Scandinavian screenwriting and filmmaking – it so to speak maps the newly discovered land. Through this book the reader will understand and learn more about modern film making than from any other book. FILM – Narration & Seduction goes several steps further and deeper in the psychological and dramaturgical aspects of screenwriting than other books and goes far further in dealing with the practical implications of professional work in the early stages of development. From the reviews: “Finally it is here - the book the professional community has looked out for, the educational institutions has begged for and the general well-informed public will find useful, enlightening and in-expendably informative” Kjeld Veirup, former Script editor at DreamWorks in California and leader of the European Film collage in Denmark. “… let it be clear from the beginning – it is an elaborating and inspiring book of methods. Breum is a contagious and stimulating reader of film and television … Everything is delicately and convincingly described and arranged, and in the repeatedly pedagogical way that characterizes a textbook. You can use her book - and learn from it.” Bo Tao Michaëlis, Politiken ”Written with considerable gusto, inspiring and easy to comprehend.” Mette Damgaard-Sørensen, former consultant at the Danish Film institute “I am overwhelmed the insight and overview Breum possess … the book is damned good written and packed with great expertise” Kim Bruun, Pråsen

Leseprobe

Table Of Contents

Preface

[1] The strategy of seduction

[2] Conflicts

[3] The characters’ dramatic function

[ 4] First act

[5] Second act

[6] Third act

[7] Familiarisation and identification

[8] The narrator

[9] Suspense, surprise and credibility

[10] Moving pictures

[11] Time

[12] Dialogue

[13] Working out what you want

[14] Finding and formulating your story

[15] Getting it to work

Fade-out

List of litterateur

Copyright

Preface

You´re coming out of the cinema. Pleasantly preoccupied. Still caught up ind the mood of the movie. You´ve had this feeling before. You were gripped. Excited. Terrified. Sad. Elated. You were conscious of your emotions. Your own body. You let yourselv be seduced...

Human beings have always told stories. Not just to entertain one another, but also because we need to tell stories in order to communicate and to understand ourselves – to get beyond the conflicts we encounter in our everyday lives. We hold up a mirror to ourselves. We recognize and discover new sides of ourselves in an attempt to explain our own behavior, and to find meaning in our own lives.

When we make up our minds to go the movies, though, such rational considerations don’t really come into it. We don’t tell ourselves that stories can help us acquire self-knowledge. We go to the cinema because we want to. We want to experience emotions on the grand scale. We want to feel the intensity and excitement. We want to be seduced.

Whether it takes place inside or outside the darkness of the cinema, a good seduction isn’t a matter of being taken unawares, but of being led by the hand to a new level of experience and awareness. So the good seducer and the good writer aren’t content just to satisfy the wishes of the seduced – to give the audience what they want. The good writer also makes us desire something we don’t yet know of - something that seems both scary and fascinating, and maybe literally enriching, too, because our eyes are opened to thoughts and emotions we didn’t know we possessed. If we’re lucky, then, we’re not simply entertained – we also get to know ourselves a little better when we sit in the darkness of the movie theatre.

This assumes, of course, that we have been seduced by someone who genuinely wants to give us a meaningful experience. One who has something heartfelt that he wants to express. A story he or she believes in and is burning to tell.

Imagination, talent and a beating heart are the first prerequisites for becoming a good scriptwriter. But they’re not enough. Without a proper grounding in the craft of writing the result will tend to be hit or miss. Perhaps deeply original – most likely just plain boring. But the worst of it is that, regardless of the result, you as a writer will have no clear idea of how you achieved it – or for that matter, what it really is you’ve produced.

You won’t learn anything from your mistakes, and you’ll have difficulty in repeating any successes you may have had, because the result you achieved was due for the most part to chance, rather than to deliberate work and skilled craftsmanship.

So you as an author must know what you want and how to achieve it. Otherwise your projects will almost certainly fail, and at worst become just an inferior copy of what others have done already.

This book is nor about the art of film per se. It’s about the art of telling a story in film – and in a way that will make the public want to come and see it. For why go to the effort of trying to tell stories if no one can be bothered to listen? Why write a script no one wants to produce?

Doubtless no one sets out to do that on purpose. But many end up doing it all the same. Not necessarily because their stories are bad, but because they’re not able to tell them well enough.

There are no ready-made formulae for writing one brilliant script after another. But there are a great many simple guidelines for how to build up believable characters, and how to create and narrate a plot in an exciting, compelling way.

There are also a great many good films whose inner workings it’s worth taking a look at. Films that at first glance appear quite different - but if you examine them more closely a distinct pattern begins to emerge. In both form and content they have many features in common. It’s above all these common features that this book is concerned with.

In particular, we’ll look at films such as Thelma & Louise, The Celebration, Fight Club, Shrek, Italian for Beginners, As Good As It Gets, Pretty Woman – and many other good, well-narrated films will be used in passing as examples.

This book is intended both for experienced scriptwriters who want to go into their stories in more depth and to make their work more effective, and for serious beginners who don’t want to repeat all the usual beginners’ mistakes, purely for the sake of learning from bad experience.

And mistake number one is a bad script – the surest way to a film that’s even worse. 

Trine Breum

Thanks to:

Anders Thomas Jensen, Anthony Dod Mantle, Eric Kress, Ib Tardini, Ingolf Gabold, Jannik Hastrup, Jens Arentzen, Jonas Elmer, Jørgen Johansson, Kim Fupz Aakeson, Kit Goetz, Kjeld Veirup, Knud Wentzel, Lars Gudmund, Lone Scherfig, Morten Kaufmann, Natasha Arthy, Nikolaj Arcel, Nimbus Film, Per Fly, Rumle Hammerich, Thomas Vinterberg, Tom Dissing, Zentropa

and

Nordisk Film Fond, The Danish Film Institute, Media Desk Denmark, Filmkopi and North by Northwest, who have provided financial support for the English translation.

Translated by Sally Laird

About the writer:

Trine Breum (1962) earned a Master Degree in film and psychology from The Institute of Film, TV and Communications at Copenhagen University (1989), specialising in scriptwriting. Since then she has worked freelance, becoming one of the most widely-used script consultants in Scandinavia. Among the films she has work on is: A Royal Affair, All Inclusive, Welcome to Norway and King´s Game,  

Trine Breums first book, FILM - Narration and Seduction, was published in 1993. The present book, FILM - Narration and Seduction 2 represents a more in-depth study of the subject, was published in Danish in 2001, 2. edition 2004 and 2006. The English version was printed in 2006 by Frydenlund Grafisk. 

If you want a printed version of the book contact the writer at www.trinebreum.dk

[1] The strategy of seduction

Both in film and reality, seduction isn’t really about playing a shrewd game or having devastating good looks. Looks are important. But they aren’t the only thing.

Looks can catch our attention and help to stir our interest, but much more is needed if the seduction is going to succeed. For seduction isn’t primarily about the seducer him or herself, but above all about their ability to put themselves into the shoes of the person seduced.

Just like the seducer, the writer must know how to play on the audience’s inner strings. That’s why he or she needs to be aware of the most fundamental human needs. For when it comes to telling stories that will seduce not just one individual but a whole cinema full of very different people, the starting point must necessarily be what is universal to humankind. The universal feelings and needs we all know and all have in common. To put it another way, a story must have its starting point in ourselves as human beings.

Our own story

Nobody enjoys being out of kilter. We feel out of sorts when we’re unbalanced or stressed. By contrast we see it as something positive, as a goal in itself, to be well-balanced people, in harmony with ourselves.

Like all other forms of life we constantly seek this state of harmony, where we feel in balance with ourselves and our surroundings. That’s why we react to every change that throws us even slightly off course. If our body lacks liquid, we feel thirst – an urge to drink so that the liquid balance in our body is restored. If we find ourselves mentally or emotionally out of balance, we try to solve or get rid of the underlying problem.

We may well try to pretend there’s nothing the matter when we quarrel with a lover. But in our heart of hearts we feel the lack of balance. An unresolved discomfort stemming from a problem we’d rather be without – or would rather get solved.

In order to get out of this situation we have to do something straight away. Either leave the person we love, or try to sort out the problem.

Butterflies in the stomach, cold sweat, a pounding heart: whatever the symptoms, lack of balance always involves a more or less uncomfortable feeling of tension – one that calls for some kind of action that can eliminate the tension and restore the balance.

Of course, not all forms of tension are associated with something negative. On the contrary. But even when the tension feels good and stimulating – sex is the perfect example – our actions are all directed towards relief, resolution and thus a restoration of balance. For we can’t bear a long period of tension – whether physical or psychological. Long-drawn-out tension leaves us frustrated, gives us stomach aches or makes us nervous and jumpy.

It’s this fundamental need among human beings for balance and harmony that creates the foundation for dramatic storytelling. For even though many of the stories we see and hear may have little directly to do with our own lives, there is nevertheless one feature common to them all: the need to create order out of chaos.

The need for security – and excitement

We thrive best when there is balance in our lives. A steady relationship. Secure home. Steady job. The same old daily routine. It all feels so safe and secure that it quickly begins to verge on the boring. For nothing much seems to happen. Increasingly, we start to notice in ourselves a need to break out of the predictable, familiar rut in order to experience, if not total chaos, then at least a bit more excitement in our lives.

For precisely the same reason you can be sure to bore your audience to tears if you start your film with two people who fall in love – and proceed to make the rest of the film about their happy relationship. It’s simply too dull to sit and watch. For no matter how delightful harmony may be, it is dreadfully unexciting.

By contrast, there have been countless variations on the story of how hideously wrong things can go for the otherwise happy and enamoured pair. That kind of film is exciting in the sense that something happens. We know trouble’s brewing. The situation is untenable. Tense. Full of conflict. The audience’s curiosity is stirred. What’s going to happen? Will the conflict be solved? Will order be made out of chaos?

So the dramatic story deals not with harmony in itself, but with the struggle to achieve, defend or reclaim it. And a really good love story doesn’t deal with a happy couple. It deals with jealousy, longing and the desire for revenge. Uncomfortable and conflict-ridden emotions that create action and excitement.

We need harmony and balance. But we also need excitement. Partly because we know that it’s only through crises and conflicts that we develop and become more intelligent about ourselves. Partly because our consciousness enables us to fantasise. We can easily imagine both the heart-stopping excitement and the satisfying resolution when the excitement is over. And that doesn’t just apply to sex.

Some would prefer to take their lives into their own hands by scaling a sheer mountain face, while others get their thrills from growing vegetables in the back garden. But all have one thing in common: their pleasure is inextricably bound up with hard-won victory, be it the satisfaction of having conquered the mountain, conquered themselves, or done down the insects that are attacking their strawberries. Over the long run, though, excitement isn’t very comfortable to live with. For even though that inner buzz feels wonderful and we long at such moments to be in that state of intensity for ever, it’s an intrinsic part of intensity that it’s fleeting. We can’t for ever stay just as newly in love or just as thrilled over reaching the mountain peak, and nor can the flutter in our stomachs go on for ever.

In other words, the positive experience of excitement is linked to change – with the movement from chaos to order. A movement that is prompted by the discomfort of feeling out of balance and the desire to reclaim the familiar order and harmony.

Fear of failure

We dream of great challenges and wild adventures. But as a rule the dream stays a dream. Our courage lets us down. When it comes to the point, we don’t dare.

The problem is that real life gives us no guarantees whatsoever. It certainly doesn’t guarantee success. And the very fear of being disappointed – the fear that success will elude us – can prevent us from taking action or lead us to repress our deepest longings. For just as we seek to avoid directly unpleasant experiences – everything connected with anxiety, sorrow and pain – so too we try to avoid the discomfort that comes from failure to obtain gratification.

Plainly it’s frustrating to write film scripts that never get made into films, or to be in love when the object of your dreams isn’t interested at all. Most of us have experienced what it means to be thrown off balance in these ways: trapped in an unpleasant chaos of unsatisfied longings, with no idea what the eventual outcome will be. There is no sense of meaning in such chaos, no sense of direction towards a solution. Everything seems arbitrary and trivial. You are stuck in a feeling of discomfort that seems both dreary and insoluble.

Total chaos is not just disturbing. In reality is it just as monotonous as peaceful, well-regulated order. It’s like any good form of play – there’s no fun in it if there aren’t any rules to the game. There’s no point in playing hide and seek or Ludo if the participants won’t accept the rules. But at the same time the rules have to leave room for spontaneity, surprise and unforeseen manoeuvres so that the game isn’t too predictable.

The same principle applies to a good story. It isn’t very exciting if the plot is so neat and predictable that we can guess what’s going to happen right from the start. On the other hand, the story mustn’t be so unpredictable – cryptic and apparently haphazard – that we give up trying to guess anything at all. For then we’ll get bored and our thoughts will start to wander.

Excitement lies in the movement between two static extremes, each of which is boring in its own way: predictable order and totally unpredictable chaos. And it’s only in the movement from one point to the other that we are truly able to enjoy the tension.

The dramatic story

The telephone rings. A voice at the other end of the line tells you that there’s a time bomb under your sofa! Before you can speak, the line goes dead. You look under the sofa. There’s a small parcel lying there. You’ve never seen it before. It’s ticking.

What are you going to do? Open the parcel? Chuck it out of the window? Or rush out of the house? Try to solve the problem or run away from it? One thing’s certain: you won’t just sit there twiddling your thumbs in the hope that the problem will solve itself. The situation calls for action. You have a problem. You’re forced to do something - to take a decision and act accordingly.

Change is what sets the dramatic narrative going – something that intervenes and upsets an otherwise harmonious state of affairs. Almost always, it’s a question of some outward event: a bomb under the sofa, a rebellion, a vengeful psychopath who’s escaped from prison, or a lover who’s found someone else.

The event lays the basis for the conflict: a conflict that forces somebody to do something in order to solve the dilemma and thus restore harmony or create a new balance.

The conflict is the axis that the drama revolves around. Thus the dramatic narrative exists only in its movement - from the moment tension arises till the moment it’s resolved. Without this movement the narrative ceases or changes into a different, non-dramatic story. In other words, through the resolution of the conflict the dramatic narrative dissolves itself – dissolves the basis of its own existence.

This can be seen most clearly in the classic fairy tale, where the prince has to go through countless terrible ordeals before he finally wins the princess and half the kingdom, whereupon the tale immediately comes to a close. The struggle is over. The goal is reached and the pair are destined to live happily ever after. But we are left to guess how things will really work out - because unless a new conflict arises, the story quite simply comes to a standstill.

The story ends when the conflict is resolved – when order has once more been made out of chaos and the main character has got the fate she or he deserves. As a rule things either go very well – the prince and princess get one another in the end – or they go terribly badly, with everyone getting killed or being separated forever.

The same is true for most modern films. For although the stories told nowadays in films appear much more subtle and complex on the surface, the vast majority of dramatic narratives are nevertheless constructed, more or less consciously, on old fairy tales and myths. The story may be longer and more convoluted, and the moral may perhaps be more ambiguous. But essentially we tell the same stories over and over again, giving new twists and turns to the same fundamental human conflicts, precisely because these conflicts arise from universal human feelings and needs that we know from ourselves, from our own lives – because they are simply part of what it is to be a human being.

The first prerequisite for a good seductive story is thus that it echo the audience’s own mental and emotional experience. The other is that it be well told.

The good storyteller

We are all familiar with the situation where someone in a group has missed out on a funny experience, and everyone in the group points to a particular person and says: You should tell what happened – you’re such a good storyteller. For it’s not just the experience or the story itself we find interesting – to a great extent it’s the way it’s told. The good narrator knows his dramaturgy – though in most cases without being aware of it, for dramaturgy simply puts into words, and explains, a number of dramatic and narrative rules that we know instinctively.

We know that the joke is spoiled if the punch line is given too soon or in the wrong way, and we often sense what direction the story is going in. Now the main character is bound to fall in love with that one with the dark hair – and then there’s going to be trouble, because her father…. We know that good stories always contain trouble, problems and difficulties. We also know very well that the main character doesn’t suddenly abandon his plans or die halfway through, even though we’re on edge throughout for fear that he will.

Dramaturgy tells us why the main character can’t die. It can also tell us how madly he will fall in love with the dark-haired girl and when he’ll get into trouble with her father. In other words, it can reveal why the story is organised as it is – or it can work the other way round, to organise the story so that it gets properly told.

Dramaturgy, which is simply another word for the theory of plot composition, is thus the toolbox you use in putting together a good story. A story that’s at once surprising, exciting, funny, touching, credible and meaningful.

Classic film dramaturgy – or, as it’s often called in Europe, American film dramaturgy - is neither a new discovery nor, for that matter, a particularly American one. It’s a way of telling stories that is rooted in ourselves – in our eternal urge to create order and find meaning, to understand ourselves and the world we live in. Dramaturgy thus existed long before either film, or Americans, came into being.

The Americans have been particularly inspired by the work of Henrik Ibsen. But dramaturgy itself has a much more ancient history. Aristotle was the first to write about it. And although many weighty volumes have been written on the subject since, they all embark from the same fundamental rules of drama and narrative that Aristotle laid down more than two thousand years ago in his little book Poetics.

The audience

By far the majority of the films we see are constructed as classic dramatic narratives. But as a rule we don’t pause to reflect on the fact, for we don’t usually analyse films as we watch them.

But we do make guesses – and it’s remarkable how often our guesses are right, precisely because the films we see are generally constructed on the same basic plan. And that doesn’t just apply to old films. It’s simply that with older films the construction may be more readily apparent.

When we re-see the films we loved as children we’re often surprised at how obvious and predictable they are. Often they don’t seem nearly as wonderful as we’d remembered them. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they were bad films at the time. But time has moved on, both we and the world we live in have changed – and in the process films have changed too. For although the nature and structure of the narrative haven’t altered in any fundamental respect, whether over the last ten years or the last two thousand, the way we express ourselves – just like language as such – is in constant flux. And one of the greatest changes relates precisely to predictability.

Today we are constantly bombarded with images. We’re also therefore quite used to sorting them out – to catching and decoding our visual impressions at amazing speed. And we aren’t put out if at first glance there appears to be no logic in what we see. On the contrary – we take it as a challenge. For we know very well that there is a meaning – a message. We just can’t quite catch it now – and that stirs our curiosity.

On the other hand, we’re quickly bored and irritated by bad TV commercials that address us as if we were total idiots. They may possibly succeed in getting us to buy more washing powder, but that doesn’t alter the fact that we find them bad – an insult to our intelligence. Yet it’s funny to think how we might have reacted to films such as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Lars von Trier’s TV series The Kingdom or David Fincher’s Fight Club if we’d happened to see them just ten years before we did. In all likelihood we would have found their stories more or less meaningless, messy and badly narrated.

Audiences are getting more and more bright. And that poses a considerable challenge, especially to scriptwriters. For of course it’s a question of striking a balance, where you both play to the audience’s expectations – and yet surprise them by doing something slightly different from what they’d expected, ensuring that the story is at once recognisable and unpredictable.

To put it another way, it’s a question both of embarking from the audience’s intuitive sense of dramaturgy, and daring to rely on the fact that the audience can think for itself.

Doctor Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Jägergård) in Lars von Triers The Kingdom. Photo: Henrik Dithmer:

Genre conventions

Part of our ability to make a qualified guess about the plot of a film derives from our general understanding of genre.

When we know the genre of a film we have a sense in advance of what to expect. We know that what we’re dealing with here is a certain type of film to which a number of more or less fixed conventions are attached. By the same token we also feel disappointed, almost cheated, if a thriller isn’t spooky or a comedy fails to amuse.

Genre represents an indirect promise to the audience – a binding promise. That’s why a thorough awareness of genre is one of the prerequisites for writing good scripts. For it’s not enough to know that a comedy has to be funny. That goes without saying. You also need to know what sub-genres you want to work with, for the humour in, let’s say, a farce or a sitcom, a romantic comedy or a black comedy is in each case different, just as the excitement in a thriller is created in a different way from the tension in a detective story.

The same goes, of course, for numerous mixed genres, which indeed are more common nowadays than pure genre films. For even if the genres are mixed, it doesn’t mean that the scriptwriter is entirely free to pick and choose. On the contrary, the writer must be just as aware, if not more so, of which genre elements to use, where to use them – and why.

We like to be told stories – to see a good film in the cinema or on TV. Some may prefer French-style dramas based on the eternal love triangle, others may go for American action films or romantic comedies. We all have our favourites when it comes to the actual content of the different genres. But despite our differing views on what a good story should be about, we all agree that it has to be well told.

[2] Conflicts

The idea for a film can arise out of numerous different things. Meeting an interesting person, having an odd experience or playing with the thought what if…

But before you go too far in the actual writing process, you have to make sure you know what it is you really want to say. What’s the theme of the story? Where should it take place – what is its arena? What sort of problem does the story illuminate? Who is it about? And above all, what does the conflict consist in and how will it be resolved?

All this depends on what kind of claim you want in the end to make – and convincingly prove - to your audience. That’s why you have to know the premise of your story – or more precisely, your own pre-missio, the mission you have beforehand.

The premise

The word premise has become a central term in dramaturgy – one that is often used synonymously with “the moral” or “the message”. But this is a bit misleading, since the premise itself is only a point of departure – a precondition for something else. Even the argument that is needed to convince the audience – to get them to conclude what you want and thus to accept the message of the story – is not implied by the word premise. But it is in the concept. And since there isn’t really any one term that combines the idea of a point of departure, an argument and a conclusion, “the premise” should be understood in what follows as a concept that covers all three elements.

This may sound complicated. But in practice what it really means is that you as a writer must know what you want to express. What sort of statement do you want to communicate to your audience about life or death or love?

 The premise is always a statement – a claim that there’s a certain causal relationship or a certain connection between two different circumstances. And it’s the business of the story to argue and thereby prove the truth of this claim.

When, in his story The Ugly Duckling, Hans Christian Andersen asserts that, provided you’re a real swan, it makes no odds that you grew up in a farmyard full of ducklings, it isn’t hard to discern the thinly-veiled premise: namely, that inherited characteristics are more significant than environmental influences. The whole of the duckling’s story, indeed, convinces us that this is so. For the ugly duckling turns into the beautiful swan without sustaining the slightest injury from his unfortunate upbringing among the ducks.

In a very charming and funny little animated film - The Further Adventures Of The Ugly Duckling - the grand old man of Danish animation, Jannik Hastrup, embarks from exactly the opposite premise. The story begins where Andersen’s breaks off. The ugly duckling is back on the lake with the swans, and at first glance the grown duckling does look just like a real swan. And yet – he quacks and waddles just like a duck! And besides, he gets dreadfully bored among the fine swans on the lake. He’s different from them. The swans don’t understand the duckling and have a hard time accepting him, because he doesn’t behave like a real swan. So the duck gets more and more lonely and of course ends up an environmentally damaged outcast who can’t fit in anywhere. The premise – that environmental influences are more significant than inheritance – is thereby proven.

One story argues – and proves – that it’s genetic inheritance that counts most of all; the other story shows that it’s your upbringing, and the social and psychological influences you’ve undergone, that are crucial.

 Both stories, however, are equally true – or false, if you like, even though they contradict one another. But this is precisely what that tells us that we’re dealing with two different stories. They resemble one another, but they’re constructed on two different premises.

Thus the premise is not just a statement. It’s also a statement that is artificially turned into a fact. Partly through the development that the main character undergoes, and partly through the resolution of the main conflict.

The main character is thus the duckling, who develops in the course of the story either into a beautiful swan or into a frustrated mutant.

The main conflict is the conflict that the main character finds himself in. It’s implied in the very premise of the story, since it’s the resolution of the main conflict that will constitute the final proof of the premise’s validity.

For Andersen’s duckling, then, the main conflict consists in the fact that he’s actually a young swan growing up in a yard full of ducks, who constantly torment him because he’s different. For Hastrup’s duckling, by contrast, the main conflict consists in the fact that, having grown up among ducks, the ugly duckling has to live among swans and behave like them, even though he’s been brought up as a duck.

The main conflict is resolved, in Andersen’s story, the moment the duckling returns to the swans, having turned - despite his awful upbringing – into a normal and well-adapted swan. In Hastrup’s story the main conflict is resolved when the duckling, because of his upbringing, definitively gives up his attempt to become normal and instead - being the frustrated mixed-up creature he is – sets off to America to try his luck there…

But wouldn’t it be possible to give a slightly more subtle account of the inheritance/environment debate? Couldn’t you create a story based on both premises, or a mixture of the two? The problem is that, if you were to do this, the story would either end up with no premise, or with one that was far too weak. And the audience would rightly ask: what was the point of this story? Was it simply to tell us that both inheritance and environment have an influence on our development? As if we didn’t know that to begin with!

The story will seem tame and trivial and at worst make the audience feel that they are being patronized. Or else it will end up being two stories. Which doesn’t matter at all, so long as you simply make two different films about it.

Things are bound to go wrong, however, if you set out in one and the same story to argue for both Andersen’s and Hastrup’s premise. The poor duckling can’t be both a well-adjusted swan and a frustrated duck.

If there are several premises in a story, then you’re actually dealing with several different stories. And though some films can manage this, very often you’ll end up with a self-contradictory muddle if you set out to tell several conflicting stories at once. By the same token, things will often go wrong if you start to alter the premise or replace it with a new one one halfway into the story.

As we can see in the two versions of the duckling story, the setting of the story also plays an important role. Hastrup’s story begins precisely when the duckling is coming home to live on the lake with the swans. And it’s essential that it does start there, for it’s precisely in this arena - where the duckling ought to feel at home – that his problems of adjustment become apparent. Similarly, Andersen has obviously chosen to place his duckling in the farmyard, for it’s crucial to his whole story that this is where the duckling grows up – right there among the ducks who bully and tease him, without in the end doing any damage to his development as a swan.

In other words, the choice of the arena where the story is to be played out is an integral part of the premise and the conflict.

The premise of the story must come across as true, even though there cannot be – and shouldn’t be - any question of some incontrovertible truth. For a claim that is really an incontrovertible truth is not a claim. It’s also important, therefore, that the premise can be contradicted. Or rather: a premise that can’t be contradicted is not a premise – it’s merely a trivial fact. And no one wants to see or hear stories that deal only in trivialities.

It’s the story in itself that must prove the premise. The point is not that the message should be explained or the moral preached. That’s why we get irritated if the premise is mentioned directly in the dialogue or indirectly pointed out through a cardboard cut-out version of the story. This grossly underestimates the audience, who then feel indirectly blamed for being unable to think for themselves – when in fact modern audiences are perfectly capable of working things out independently.

The premise is important for the whole construction of the story. For that reason it’s also important for the author. But it isn’t per se particularly important to the audience. In principle the audience couldn’t care less whether the film is based on this premise or that, so long as the story is exciting.

For the same reason there’s no need to worry about how often the premise has been used before. It certainly has - but that doesn’t matter.

Think, after all, how many stories have shown - like Jannik Hastrup’s version of The Ugly Duckling – how a bad upbringing creates misfits, or dealt with an underdog who rises up in rebellion, as happens in Ridley Scott’s film Thelma & Louise.

Thus what is interesting about the premise is not the premise in itself, but the defence of it, which is the story. And that in a way leads us back to the real meaning of the premise. The premise as such is just a point of departure for an argument - a story leading to a conclusion, or a narrative with a moral or a message.

Genuine conflicts

The dramatic narrative arises when a change creates a conflict. Without the conflict there can be no drama. Often several sub-plots may develop along the way, but the story itself is always constructed around one principal conflict. The whole story thus stands or falls according to whether the conflict is a good one.

A good conflict is a genuine one. An impossible choice – a real dilemma. That’s to say, a conflict that has no easy or obvious solution. At the same time the conflict should have a certain outcome – certain inner and outer consequences that have a universal human relevance.

Whether or not a conflict is genuine depends of course on how the person in question experiences it. Here, the person’s will and motivation play an important role. What is it that she or he wants? Why is it so important? Decisive? Urgent? What is at stake?

In The Further Adventure Of The Ugly Duckling the duckling has the will to become a real swan, and the motivation to adjust to life on the lake. He’s simply unable to do so. The duckling is both physically and mentally different. That’s why the conflict he finds himself in is real. For what is he to do? There is no obvious solution.

It’s almost always an external change that creates the conflict. And when one talks of the story’s main conflict, it’s likewise the outer conflict that one is referring to. But the conflict itself must be both external and internal if the audience is going to be genuinely touched by it: able both to get into the story and identify with the characters.

Thus Hastrup’s duckling is faced not just with a practical, external problem as to where he should live if he is banished from the swans’ lake. The external conflict also gives rise to an internal psychological conflict – an identity crisis that borders on a real personality split. And although the immediate plot revolves round the concrete external conflict, concerning the duckling’s problems in adapting to life on the lake, it’s the duckling’s inner emotional and psychological conflict that affects us most.

We’re caught in the first instance by the story’s external conflict: by the tension as to what will happen – as to how far the duckling will succeed in his project of adaptation. But if we sympathise with the duckling it’s because of the internal conflict in the story - because we can see that the duckling isn’t thriving in his new life. And even if the poor duckling does succeed in adjusting, will he feel all right? Will he ever become not just a real swan but a happy swan? Or for that matter duck? This is what we’re most concerned to find out.

Personal lopsidedness

A great many dramatic narratives are basically about one and the same thing. They’re about how bad it is to be one-sided! The classic version is that we can’t be happy if we live a one-sided life governed exclusively by what’s sensible. We have to dare to go with our emotions if we’re to become healthy, happy, integrated people.

It sounds banal – and it is banal. For although we’re often reluctant to admit it, life’s big conflicts are often quite banal: as well as being eternally recurrent. That’s also why they’re important – and good to use in films, even though they’ve been used ad nauseam already. For no matter how trivial they may be, we find ourselves again and again in situations where we’re confronted with the choice between sense and sensibility – or with the other great universal conflict: the choice between adapting to the family, the farmyard or society’s norms – or breaking out and going our own way.

It’s difficult not just to find but also to hold on to our balance in life. Which is why we like to see films that deal with the conflicts we know from our own lives - conflicts that somehow seem to recur time after time.

As we saw earlier, all of us strive to be integrated, healthy and harmonious people. Nevertheless, our lives have a tendency to become lopsided. We are prone to get too single-minded and to close our eyes to the things we lack – the things that could make us more whole. For fear that we may not be able to fulfil them, we tend to reject and deny a great many of our inner needs, focussing instead on outer goals that are easier to grasp. But deep down we know very well – one-sidedness is no good. And it’s also symptomatic. For it’s always a cover-up for inner needs that we dare not acknowledge.

This is easy to demonstrate. Take, for instance, the story of the businessman who is so preoccupied with his work that he completely loses contact with his wife and children, so that he eventually ends up being lonely and unhappy. Or take the story of the self-sacrificing housewife who drops her job for the sake of husband and children, only to become a frustrated and unhappy woman who never achieves the career she once dreamt of.

The two stories of the businessman and the housewife directly contradict one another. One story asserts that it’s essential to give higher priority to your family than to your career, the other that your own self and your own needs should be given priority above all else.

But although the two concrete premises are very different, both stories prove the same general statement: if you don’t break out of your one-sidedness, your life will be pure tragedy!

Regardless of whether you choose the tragedy and tell the story of how wrong everything can go if you don’t get rid of your one-sidedness – or choose the positive development story, which shows how happy you become if you do – the story in principle is one and the same.

Although the vast majority of films are about getting rid of personal lopsidedness, the concept can also be used in a broader sense. A film may deal with lopsidedness in the social or political sense, focussing not on one particular individual, but on a political system or a whole culture.

The story may also of course deal with how such lopsidedness arises – and how it can be avoided.

The theme of lopsidedness is a simple but very practical way to ensure that the conflict in the story always has two sides: an inner and an outer. For by treating the outer expression of lopsidedness as a symptom, one is automatically forced to answer the question. A symptom of what?

Outer goals and inner needs

“If the story is just about what it is, you’re in trouble”

Jan Fleischer

 A good story is not about what it’s about - meaning that it’s of course indirectly about the premise, but outwardly this is not what the concrete plot revolves around. For the story must not merely show, but prove its premise.

Outwardly, The Further Adventures of The Ugly Duckling is about a duckling with genuine problems of adjustment. Inwardly, it’s about a swan that, because of his outer conflict with the other swans, is gradually forced to recognise that he isn’t really a proper swan at all. A recognition that eventually forces him to admit that he has to find a new way of relating to the world.

In James L. Brooks’ film As Good As it Gets, the misanthropic and unspeakably boorish Melvin (Jack Nicholson) is suddenly forced to take care of his neighbour’s little dog when the neighbour gets sent to hospital. Melvin only grudgingly takes on the job. Or rather, he’s more or less forced into it, because earlier on he chucked the self-same dog into the garbage chute – and the neighbour’s bodyguard is now threatening to get his own back. And since Melvin is just about as compulsive and neurotic as it’s possible to be, he doesn’t dare refuse.

But as if this weren’t enough, Melvin is also threatened with exclusion from his local café, because by making the remark We’re all gonna die soon. I will, you will and it sure sounds like your son will, he has deeply offended the waitress Carol (Helene Hunt), whose little son, if not actually dying, is certainly very ill.

Carol, who until now is the only person to have accepted Melvin as he is, is so furious at his cynicism that she decides enough’s enough and starts giving him a piece of her mind. And that is evidently just what’s needed. For gradually the thick-skinned Melvin begins to understand that his remark has caused Carol pain. And that hadn’t actually been his intention.

At the beginning of the film Melvin is completely incapable of relating to other people and all their feelings. That’s why he has totally cut himself off from the world around him, hiding behind such a thick shell of irony and cynicism that he can successfully hold most people at bay. But by the end of the story, through his forced contact with others – first with the neighbour’s little dog, who for some unknown reason is crazy about Melvin, and later on with both the neighbour and Carol – Melvin has developed, if not into a profoundly harmonious person, then at least into a significantly more sympathetic and sensitive man than he was at the outset. This is “as good as it gets”: Melvin can’t go any further, but he has made huge strides when you consider what he was like before his development began.

There’s no doubt that Melvin is personally lopsided. But Melvin himself hasn’t given any thought to the matter. Nor does the development he undergoes begin because Melvin himself plans to correct his deficiency – to change his one-sided and lonely life. Melvin’s development would never have got going at all if it were not that his neighbour had fallen ill and the waitress had turned her back on him. Thus Melvin develops only because the outer story forces him to relate to the surrounding world – and thereby also to his own feelings, especially towards Carol.

So the main conflict in the story is not directly about Melvin’s lopsidedness, but about the symptoms of it. Melvin’s extremely hostile attitude towards other people – like all his compulsive behaviour – is only a way of covering up his own feelings. And Melvin does have feelings. But they find expression only in his exaggeratedly romantic books: the sixty-two (!) very popular love stories he has written. So Melvin must have something to offer. He just hasn’t shown it up till now.

The reason why it’s so important to let the inner story be expressed through external events is that the film would be quite unwatchable if the characters’ outer goals were identical to their inner needs. This would simply make the characters seem unbearably arrogant.

That’s why the story is not about what it’s about. As Good As It Gets is not about a man who has set himself a goal, that of becoming a sensitive and friendly person, because he wants to escape from his own loneliness. In his heart of hearts that is what Melvin wants (or needs). He just doesn’t know it. But we, the audience, do. It’s easy for us to recognise Melvin’s need to experience in his own life the love that flows in such abundance from his books.

But the tension – and not least the humour – arises from the fact that Melvin himself doesn’t want to acknowledge his inner needs. And it’s this tension between the characters’ conscious outer goals or wishes and their unacknowledged inner needs that captures our interest. For we can clearly see Melvin’s problem and inwardly hope that the outer story will force him not only to open his eyes to his inner needs, but also to do something about them.

In comedies the characters’ inner needs are almost always very obvious, because a large part of the comedy consists in making the conflict as extreme as possible. In most other films the audience will have, to begin with, only a vague sense of what these inner needs are, and therefore also what the inner conflict is about.

Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogma film The Celebration tells the story of Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) who comes home from abroad for his father’s sixtieth birthday. Not to celebrate his father’s life, but to expose him. In other words, the outer conflict in the story concerns the truth – or the need to uncover the truth. Has the father (Henning Moritzen) really abused his children, or has Christian’s imagination run away with him?

For Christian the immediate story is also about getting revenge. He could have chosen to talk to his father in private. But he doesn’t do so. He chooses to make a speech at his father’s sixtieth birthday party precisely because the ultimate revenge lies in having all the guests – his father’s friends and the entire family – hear the truth about who the person at the centre of the party really is. One could scarcely imagine a more perfect setting for the planned unmasking.

Outwardly, then, the story is about Christian’s desire to avenge himself – to punish his father by telling the truth about what he has done to Christian and Christian’s twin sister. But the inner story is not about revenge. It’s about Christian’s need to free himself from his traumatic childhood and to get on with his own life as a more complete and vital person.

For Christian too is lopsided – and in a way that reminds one a good deal of Melvin, except that it’s expressed in a slightly different manner, for Christian’s problems are turned inward on himself. The same could not be said of Melvin. On the other hand, Christian and Melvin have in common the fact that they both have successful careers – it’s only the business with women and love that neither of them can work out. But Christian himself doesn’t apparently consider this a problem. Or at least, he pays no attention to it – just as he pays no attention either to his own feelings or to those of Pia (Trine Dyrholm), his one-time girlfriend, when at the beginning of the film she lies on his bed chatting and flirting away, while Christian significantly just falls asleep.

Christian’s other sister Helene (Paprika Steen) also lives in a state of lopsidedness that is symptomatically revealed. One symptom is that she is studying anthropology …which takes her as far away from her involvement with her own family as it’s possible to go. Another is that she lives at exceptionally high speed. Such high speed that it looks more than anything like desperate flight – a flight from something of which Helene herself is only unconsciously aware. On the conscious level Helene has absolutely no desire for the surface to be scratched.

Right at the beginning of the film we see how Helene gets the taxi driver to drive like crazy to get to the party on time. It’s her father’s big day and, along with her brother, Helene has been given the task of receiving the guests. So she doesn’t want to arrive too late. She doesn’t want to let her father down.

But Helene does come too late – a little too late. This makes no difference to the story on the concrete, outer level, but it does give us a hint that, despite everything, Helene has an inner need – an unconscious desire to drop the outer niceties and the superficial rush. She just doesn’t realise it - yet. That’s why she’s not particularly delighted, either, to see her other brother Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen) who hasn’t even been invited to the party because of his tendency to cause a scandal when drunk.

Even though Helene would rather carry on skating over the surface, her inner need is so pressing that it doesn’t merely make her arrive too late. It also drives her to begin searching for the farewell letter that her sister wrote. And Helene finds the letter: the letter that reveals that her sister committed suicide because she could no longer bear her incestuous relationship with her father.

The letter comes as such a shock to Helene that she has only one thought: how to hide it so that no one else will get to see it – so that the surface will remain intact. Helene hides the letter in her painkiller container.

Luckily, however, Helene’s attempts to suppress – to hide and forget everything – are thoroughly spoiled by the outer story: by Christians’ persistent struggle to get revenge in the family and to uncover the truth. Significantly, too, the whole incident gives Helene such a terrible headache that she finds herself needing to take her painkillers…

Helene (Paprika Steen) with the letter in Thomas Vinterbergs The Celebration. Photo: Anthony Dod Mantle

Although he isn’t aware of it, Christian’s outer project to get revenge sets in motion violent changes not only in himself, but also in Helene.

We don’t know what Helene will do when the film is over, but we do know that – like Christian, who invites Pia to come with him to Paris – Helene has been released from her flight and from the “ghost” which she sensed in her dead sister’s room at the outset of the film.

Like As Good As It Gets,The Celebration would have been a terribly self-righteous and utterly unexciting film if Christian had not had his outer goal – his desire to get revenge. And if Helene had not had precisely the opposite outer goal – namely, to get the party to run as smoothly and painlessly as possible.

If there had only been an inner story, Christian would have had to go round talking about his wounded soul. Talking about how badly he needed to free himself from his father and mother in order to live a normal life, not least in relation to the girl he loves, but whom he can’t manage to relate to because he was sexually abused as a child.

To be sure, this is what the whole film is about. But what makes The Celebration a fantastic film is that all this remains unspoken – the inner story is not told directly, but is expressed only through the outer story, and hence through the actions of the various characters.

In Vicky Jenson’s and Andrew Adamson’s computer-animated film Shrek, which tells the story of the ugly but very charming green ogre Shrek (Mike Myers), not much is said about the inner story either. Indeed, Shrek doesn’t have much desire to talk to anybody. He just wants to be left in peace – to live alone in his swamp in self-imposed isolation.

Thus it isn’t Shrek who sets out to seek company, but a rather large company, consisting of an army of fairy-tale figures, that virtually invades Shrek’s swamp. And in order to get rid of them Shrek does a deal with the revolting Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow), who wants to marry Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz). Not because he loves her but because that will give him royal status. If Shrek can free Fiona, who is being held prisoner in an old fortress, Farquaad promises in exchange to free Shrek’s swamp from the unwanted guests.

Shrek’s outer goal is thus to be permitted to live in peace – permitted to be alone. And it’s this that on the face of it motivates him to do his deal with Farquaad. But… of course this goal conceals an inner need that involves precisely the opposite – a longing for love. Just like Melvin in As Good As It Gets,