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What’s the Story? The Director
Meets Their Screenplay

A structured perspective on the crucial interface of director and screenplay,

this book encompasses twenty-​two seminal aspects of the approach to story
and script that a director needs to understand before embarking on all other
facets of the director’s craft.
Drawing on seventeen years of teaching filmmaking at a graduate level
and on his prior career as a director and in production at the BBC, Markham
shows how the filmmaker can apply rigorous analysis of the elements of dra-
matic narrative in a screenplay to their creative vision, whether of a short or
feature, TV episode or season. Combining examination of such fundamental
topics as story, premise, theme, genre, world and setting, tone, structure, and
key images with the introduction of less familiar concepts such as cultural,
social, and moral canvas, narrative point of view, and the journey of the
audience, What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay applies
the insights of each chapter to a case study—the screenplay of the short film
Contrapelo, nominated for the Jury Award at Tribeca in 2014.
This book is an essential resource for any aspiring director who wants
to understand how to approach a screenplay in order to get the very best
from it, and an invaluable resource for any filmmaker who wants to under-
stand the important creative interplay between the director and screenplay
in bringing a story to life.

Peter Markham is a creative consultant, teacher, author, and former directing

head at the American Film Institute Conservatory. His alumni, award winners
at major festivals, have notable careers in film and TV. Prior to teaching, he
was a director in the UK, and worked with filmmakers including Anthony
Minghella and Martin Scorsese.
What’s the Story? The Director
Meets Their Screenplay
An Essential Guide for Directors
and Writer-​Directors

Peter Markham
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Peter Markham
The right of Peter Markham to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Markham, Peter, 1952– author.
Title: What’s the story? the director meets their screenplay :
an essential guide for directors and writer-directors / Peter Markham.
Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020024639 (print) | LCCN 2020024640 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367415891 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367415877 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780367815363 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures–Production and direction. |
Motion picture plays.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.P7 M327 2020 (print) |
LCC PN1995.9.P7 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/32–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024639
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024640
ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​41589-​1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​41587-​7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​81536-​3 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
To Barbara Tfank, for her unwavering belief and support
Contents

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction  1

PART A
The approach  3

1 What’s the story?  5

2 Premise  10

3 Theme  16

4 Genre  21

5 World/​setting  39

6 Cultural, social, and moral canvas  43

7 Tone  49

8 Structure  55

9 Passage of time  63

10 Character  69

11 Narrative point of view  85

viii Contents
12 Introduction of the protagonist and main characters  99

13 Key images, objects, and motifs  106

14 Opening image, frame, shot  110

15 Closing image, frame, shot  119

16 Endings  124

17 The 5-step creative analysis of the screenplay  131

17.1 A brief summary of the scene 131
17.2 The journey of the protagonist 131
17.3 The journey of the audience 132
17.4 The turning point of the scene 133
17.5 The function of the scene 134

18 The director’s statement  135

PART B
The case study—Contrapelo screenplay by
Liska Ostojic and Gareth Dunnet-​Alcocer  137

19 Screenplay  139

20 Contrapelo case study  162

21 Conclusion  181

References  182
Bibliography  183
Index  184
newgenprepdf

Acknowledgments

I would like to give my thanks to the following, without whose ­inspiration,

insights, guidance, and encouragement I could not have written this
book: Dubois Ashong, Ari Aster, Zal Batmanglij, Pieter Jan Brugge, Lee
Citron, Richard Cottan, Paul Cronin, Neil Dickson, Aihui Dong, Sabrina
Doyle, Joseph Garrity, Julian Higgins, Dean Israelite, Mick Jackson, Asher
Jelinsky, Leqi “Vanessa” Kong, Stefan Kubicki, Perry Lang, Tal Lazar, Moya
Lee, Shiyu “Rhyme” Lyu, Rebecca Maddalo, Manjari Makijani, Theoline
Maphutha, Jim McBride, Joel Novoa, Chloe Okuno, Joseph Oppenheimer,
Matthew Pancer, Philiane Phang, Charlie Polinger, Asaph Polonsky, Justin
Rhodes, Barry Sabath, Daniel Sawka, Chris Schwartz, Omer Ben Shachar,
Matthew Specktor, Rob Spera, Courtney Stephens, Greg Takoudes, Tomas
Vengris, Max Weissberg, Amelie Wen, Hao Zheng, Quan Zhou, Shu Zhu, Dr
Mahlet Zimeta, others whom, with my apologies, I have no doubt omitted
to mention, and the many Directing Fellows and those of other disciplines
I was fortunate to come to know during my career at AFI Conservatory.
I also wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Steven Holt for his meticulous,
informed, and enlightening copy-​editing.
I am indebted to Gareth Dunnet-​Alcocer and Liska Ostojic for allowing
me to use their screenplay of Contrapelo as the case study.
Note: several categories in ­chapters 5 and 6 are taken from the class
handout of Robert Boyle (1909–​ 2010), AFI Conservatory Production
Design Faculty and Production Designer whose credits include North by
Northwest, The Birds, and Marnie. Of all the remarkable guests to my class,
Bob was surely the most distinguished, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for
the insights I was able to put to use in these chapters. I hold the memory of
AFI Conservatory colleagues Gill Dennis and Frank Pierson, who taught me
so much, similarly dear.
Introduction

There are many who imagine the director’s job is restricted to directing the
actors, that above all it is about getting good performances. There are those
would go on to say it’s about deciding how to shoot those performances, in
the process “covering” the action of a scene adequately so that its footage
will cut together. Among directors, some approach their craft by deciding
on a moment in the screenplay and working towards, then away from it—as
if those gradients might be the sole contours of dramatic narrative. Indeed,
although most filmmakers acknowledge the task of bringing the screenplay
to the screen, they perhaps do not entirely appreciate the nexus of dra-
matic construction and filmic discourse—by which I mean the visual and
auditory language of cinema and TV, the tone, the rhythm, the aesthetics,
the manipulation of time, and the nature of a film’s address to its audience.
I used to believe that when a director considers a screenplay, if they are
doing their job, they think about the merits and demerits of its story, what
the characters want, what their goals might be, what is text and what sub-
text, and how, artistically, logistically, and fiscally, the film might be made.
I knew they should know how to “break down” a scene. I knew they should
have opinions and insights as to how good or bad the script was, and what
elements might need fixing, but I did not know of any structured approach
by which the director could engage with the screenplay in order to under-
stand it at both the granular and the architectural level, to mine the deep
strata and foundations of its narrative, to trace its connectivity and fathom
its identity in order that this comprehensive understanding might inform
each and every subsequent area of filmmaking craft. It was in teaching
Directing at AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles, as Discipline Head for eight
years and as Senior Lecturer for over six years beforehand, that that short-
coming, thankfully, evaporated …
While working with the directing “fellows”—some directors, many
writer-​directors—in the thesis presentation class throughout those fourteen
years, also as an adjunct before that, and in teaching some 450 young, tal-
ented, and diverse filmmakers from around the world, I developed more
clarity and greater method, one that has been proven to work. Indeed, many
of the “fellows” in my classes have gone on to achieve great success in film
2 Introduction
and TV, winning awards at Cannes, Sundance, the Motion Picture Academy,
Busan and other major festivals throughout the world.
Writing What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay has
given me the opportunity to evolve that process considerably and to pre-
sent—untrammeled by time constraints and the limitations of a three-​hour
class—a guide to the essential understanding that, by way of forensic ana-
lysis of story and screenplay, together with an accompanying imperative
of creative vision, must inform the director’s approach to all areas of their
filmmaking. This book provides a key to the director’s and writer-​director’s
engagement with their film, whether feature or short, or their TV episode or
season, at the fundamental levels of story, screenplay, character, and image,
these forming the bedrock of all subsequent processes—creative, technical,
logistical, and budgetary.
While there are many books about screenwriting, and many about
directing that focus on performance, on camera, on physical production,
and on the industry, and while many of them are very good indeed, it seems
to me there is a dearth of guidance when it comes to considering how the
director might engage with the screenplay at the key creative level. What’s
the Story?, by contrast, looks in both directions—at the screenplay one way,
at the shoot and the cut the other. With some twenty-​two essential topics,
explored and then applied to the case study of the included screenplay of
the short film Contrapelo, co-​written and directed by my alumnus Gareth
Dunnet-​Alcocer, this book addresses the problematic lacuna of much film-
making literature, with each topic being explained in its own right while the
various topics are tied together through their connection to the overarching
craft of the visual storyteller.
Here is an approach that will appeal not only to students but to practiced
filmmakers too. It will be of value not only to directors and, I hope,
screenwriters, but to filmmakers of all disciplines. Cinematographers, pro-
duction designers, costume designers, editors, and producers (in no particu-
late order) all practice crafts rooted in story and storytelling. I hope that
What’s the Story? can be not sectarian but unifying. Feeding our common-
ality as filmmakers, it’s a foundation on which to build the mutual trust and
insight that going forward makes for a coherent and productive collabora-
tive process, understood by everyone.

A note on references
Specific films are referenced in order to illustrate specific points. While it is
recommended that the reader go on to watch those films, they will not need
to have seen them in order to understand the points made within their par-
ticular context. Few will have seen each of the films mentioned—this book
is not a test for cinephiles but an exploration pertinent to all filmmakers.
Part A

The approach
1 
What’s the story?

Directors are storytellers. In order to tell the story in their screenplay, they
need to understand what a story is.
When filmmaking students (and some teachers too) are asked to tell the
story of a film, they will often begin by saying “It’s a story about …” or even
simply “It’s about …” Say Wong Kar-Wai In the Mood for Love is the film
under consideration, they might offer “It’s a story about two lonely people,”
or “It’s a story about two lonely people in a relationship,” or simply “It’s
about loneliness and love.” None of these sentences describes a story. “Two
lonely people” refers to the film’s main characters. “Two lonely people in a
relationship” describes characters in a particular circumstance. “It’s about
loneliness and love” is more of a thematic than a narrative notion, a con-
cept, an abstraction. Of course it’s important for the director to know their
characters, to grasp their condition, their circumstances or state of being,
and of course it’s helpful to have a sense of the thematic aspects of their
movie or TV episode and what these may be about, but unless the director
understands what a story is, they won’t be able to tell one, and if they can’t
tell one they won’t be able to incorporate those other aspects—characters,
circumstances, theme—into the elements of their craft.
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines story thus: “A
narrative of real or (usu.) fictitious events, designed for the entertainment of
the hearer or reader; a series of traditional or imaginary incidents forming
the matter of such a narrative, or a succession of significant incidents.”
A story is a progression. Two lonely people fall unexpectedly in love but,
faced by their mutual sense of guilt, find themselves unable to maintain their
romance, so they go their separate ways. That’s a story.
Evident in this progression, as it pertains to dramatic narrative, is an
element of conflict. There is an obstacle that the lovers face—their sense
of guilt, which conflicts with their mutual attraction. A tale of the couple
meeting, falling in love, and living happily ever after might be a story but
would be unlikely to prove a very compelling one. Devoid of suspense and
dramatic tension, it would pose no questions and would leave an audi-
ence with nothing to want for the characters, whom as a result it would be
unlikely to care about. Also integral to story, at least in its manifestation of
6 The approach
dramatic narrative, is the element of sacrifice. Something is lost in order that
something might be gained, the togetherness of lovers, for example, so that
their love might be affirmed, or the life of a protagonist, so that their sense
of meaning might be encapsulated.
The Shorter OED further defines story as plot or storyline, thus begging
the thorny question as to whether plot and story are the same or, if they
are not, what the difference between the two might be. Views on this are
contradictory.
Plot can be seen as the causality of events, how one thing leads to another.
Story can be understood as the delineation of events, one thing after another.
Here plot is why what happens happens, whereas story is simply what
happens.
This would appear not to take into account the emotional core of dra-
matic narrative, however, so in order to accommodate this lack, the dis-
tinction might be reversed, plot defined as the listing of events, story as the
underlying emotional journey(s) of the character(s). Here, plot is surface,
story essence.
The term plot might also be applied to a non-​linear sequence of events
in the storytelling as opposed to the linear sequence of the underlying story.
The audience journeys through the plot’s reorganization of incident in order
to discover the story and its chronology, as it does for example with Quentin
Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or Christopher Nolan’s Memento.
(Plot can also mean conspiracy, suggesting perhaps the formulation of a
transgressive act—a fundamental ingredient of drama.)
For the purposes of the director meeting the screenplay, however, either as
writer-​director encountering it wearing the director’s hat for the first time, or
as director encountering it simply for the first time, the following distinction
might prove the most useful.
Story is the essence that underlies the narrative, the character’s journey of
wants, needs, and motivation at the heart of the film. It’s the emotional and
cognitive journey that the narrative embodies.
Plot is the mechanism by which the story moves forward.
Thus, to relate the plot of a screenplay or film is to relate the raw events,
one after the other. To relate the story is to reveal the emotional narrative
of the main character(s). Plot prompts the audience to ask “What is going
to happen next?” Story engages emotionally. Both compel, but whereas the
audience may never have experienced the specific events of a movie, will
rarely have lived through its plot, it will, to a greater or lesser extent, have
experienced the emotions, wants, needs, and fears of the film’s characters as
manifested in the story. Indeed, in Lessons with Kiarostami, master director
Abbas Kiarostami says “What happens on the screen has no impact without
past experiences brought by audiences.”
Returning to In the Mood for Love, its plot might be set out as follows:
Hong Kong. 1962. Chow Mo-​wan, a journalist who aspires to write mar-
tial arts serials, rents a room with his wife in the same building and on the
 What’s the story? 7
same day that Su Li-​zhen, secretary to a shipping manager, arrives with her
husband. The spouses of both tend either to work late or travel away from
home so that, although their neighbors have formed a bustling social group,
the two find themselves solitary in their respective apartments. When they
go to the noodle shop, however, they encounter each other. Their loneliness,
accentuated when Chow’s gambler friend Ah Ping takes advantage of him,
and when Su has to cover up for her boss’s extra-​marital affairs, brings them
together. In realizing that their spouses are having an affair with each other,
they decide to re-​enact its possible beginnings in order to learn how the rela-
tionship might have started. By spending time together, however, they find
themselves falling in love. Chow is to leave Hong Kong for Singapore and
suggests Su should go with him, but, after waiting for her, leaves without
her so that when she arrives late, she finds him gone. Some time after, she
goes to Singapore, where she calls him. He picks up but says nothing. When
he returns to his apartment, he discovers lipstick on a cigarette butt, so he
knows she’s visited. He tells a friend how, in the past, people would whisper
their secrets into holes in trees, which they’d block with mud. Years after, Su
returns to the apartment building in Hong Kong, asking her former landlady
if her room is for rent. Chow returns later, to be told that a woman and her
son are now resident in the building. He leaves, not realizing that this is Su
(with a boy who is perhaps his own son). Later, visiting the ruined temple of
Angkor Wat in Cambodia, he whispers unheard words into a hole in a wall,
which he then plugs with mud.
The story of the film might be described thus:
A man and a woman, lonely because of the absence of their respective
spouses, discover a painful truth—that their unfaithful mates are having an
affair. In trying to work out how this began, they re-​enact the possibilities,
but by doing so fall in love themselves. Shamed in the realization that they’re
behaving in the same illicit way as their spouses, they contrive to end their
romance although remaining unable to deny it.
As is the case above, the description of a plot is usually much longer than
that of a story. Such is the case with Andrea Arnold’s short film Wasp:
Zoeˉ takes her three girls and baby son along with her when she reprimands
a neighbor who has intervened in a scrap between their children. On her
way home after fighting with the woman, Zoeˉ encounters Dave, who invites
her for a drink. Claiming her children are not hers but belong to a friend,
she agrees, saying she will meet him in the pub once they have been picked
up. At home she calls a friend to ask them to take care of the children, only
to learn she’s unavailable. A wasp buzzes at a window, which she opens in
order to free it. Zoeˉ then sets off for the pub with her children. Leaving them
outside, she enters to find Dave. He invites her to a drink but then suggests
she buy the first round. Zoeˉ buys crisps for the children as well as Dave’s
lager but without sufficient cash foregoes her own drink. When, outside the
pub, the children complain that they wanted fries, not crisps, she changes
the subject, inviting them to dance to the pub’s music. After she’s gone back
8 The approach
inside to take Dave his lager, darkness falls and the children run wild in the
street, while in the pub Zoeˉ and Dave grow more intimate. Dave suggests
they go to Zoeˉ’s home, which she says is not possible. He lives with his
mother meanwhile, so his home is not an option either. When Zoeˉ sees one
of the children tapping at the window, she pretends to Dave that she needs
the restroom and leaves him, passing her adversary from earlier in the day,
who repeats her threat that social services will take her children. Angered
when one of them asks if she’s going to have sex with Dave, Zoeˉ tells them
that they must wait a little longer for her while keeping out of sight. In his
car, Dave wants to drive off, but Zoeˉ asks that they remain in situ. While
they make out, the children spot a passer-​by discarding a takeaway and one
of them collects it. When a wasp from the garbage lands on the baby’s face,
one of the girls screams, prompting Zoeˉ to leave Dave and rush over. The
wasp crawls into the baby’s mouth, terrifying Zoeˉ, but after a while flies out.
On seeing the food around his mouth, Zoeˉ blames the girls for the wasp,
upsetting them but then comforting them when they cry, an action Dave
witnesses on arriving at the scene. Shortly after, while the children eat fries,
he tells Zoeˉ he will take them all home so that they can chat.
The film’s story, on the other hand, might be described as follows:
Lonely and trapped in impoverished single motherhood, Zoeˉ, who is des-
perate to engage the affection of Dave, frees a wasp trapped in her kit-
chen before taking her children along with her as she goes to meet him.
Neglecting them, she tries to win his love, but is interrupted in her efforts
when she finds a wasp about to sting her baby son. The threat prompts Zoeˉ
to realize that her love for her children is paramount, which in turn moves
Dave, who at last shows concern for her.
The director should not only know both the story and the plot of their
screenplay but also be capable of telling them to their creative team—pro-
ducer, production designer, cinematographer, costume designer, editor. They
might initially ask these key collaborators themselves to tell the story. If
they can’t, perhaps this is because they’re not right for the film, perhaps
they simply don’t know how to tell a story, or perhaps the screenplay does
not make the story clear. Should they all happen to tell the same wrong story,
either the screenplay is suggesting this or the director’s sense of the story is
mistaken. If they tell different wrong stories it may mean that the screenplay
is leaving itself open to individual interpretation and that its story needs to
be made clearer.
The director should be able to tell the story to themself too. If they can’t,
how are they going to tell it to their audience? How are they going to find
the means of telling it? The visual and aural language, the staging, the style,
the modulation of energy, rhythm, tension, suspense, and drama?
Ideally, the director should need to tell the story. They should feel an
urgency that motivates them. The challenges of the physical production of
a movie or a TV show for the director are considerable indeed, but if the
filmmaker is possessed by the need to tell the story, coming to see it as a
 What’s the story? 9
story that must be told, this can sustain their energy and focus through the
multiple difficulties of the pre-​production and the shoot.
The director might be telling a story close to their own, or to that of
someone they know, admire, care about, or are in some way fascinated by.
They will be drawn to the protagonist. They will find the world of the story
compelling, whether or not they’re familiar with it. They will feel the story
“speaks” to them. The most powerful reason for telling a story is that only
through its articulation might the answer to the questions it poses be found,
although they may remain ever elusive—mystery at the heart of a story
affords it a resonance to render it compelling in ways a philosophical trea-
tise or a moral lecture cannot match.
A plot should be clear. A story should engage. A mystery should have no
answer.
2 
Premise

In its usage, the term premise has more than one meaning. This can lead
to confusion, so it’s important to understand the implications of each
interpretation.

Meaning 1:
The premise is the foundation of your story—that single core
statement, says James N. Frey, “of what happens to the characters
as a result of the actions of a story.” For instance, the premise of The
Three Little Pigs is “Foolishness leads to death, and wisdom leads to
happiness.”
(Writers’ digest.com, March 11, 2008)

Similarly, in The Art of Dramatic Writing, long a mainstay of manuals on

dramaturgy, Lajos Egri maintains that premise is the truth that writers seek
to prove, at least to themselves, by way of their stories: “poverty leads to
crime” or “bragging leads to humiliation,” for example. But is this what the
director should be looking for in their screenplay? Do the best stories really
prove anything? Don’t they instead pose questions, perhaps questions that
have no solutions? Anton Chekhov, master of both theatre play and short
story, said that the job of the writer is not to solve the problem but to pre-
sent it. More recently, writer and director David Mamet wrote that drama
is about irreconcilable opposites. Indeed, the French word dénouement,
which we use in English and tend to interpret as the wrapping-​up of a story,
translates in fact as the unraveling—the opening up, unwrapping, or untying.
The problem so often with a story that attempts to prove something is
that it can lend itself to moralizing, to teaching the reader or audience how
to behave. It can tend to be judgmental, proselytizing, banal even, and ultim-
ately limiting in its dramatization of contradictory human nature and the
inner paradoxes that make for the most compelling characters. Most import-
antly perhaps, it can undermine drama, reducing the inevitable and peren-
nial friction and conflict of life and human interaction to a foolish mistake,
 Premise 11
something that a moral lesson could have put right all along if only the
characters had been lucky enough to know it or be allowed to put it into
practice. This can be an approach that soothes and reassures rather than
engages and challenges. It sends out a message rather than posing a question,
reinforcing a sense of certainty instead of leaving the audience to figure out
their own solutions after the film or TV show is over. Another danger this
risks is the tendency of the story to conform to conventional wisdom. The
best stories, perhaps, help us to find revelatory and even transgressive insights
we wouldn’t have understood or even thought of without having undergone
the intense emotional experience of watching or reading a narrative as it plays
out. The best stories do not confirm the beliefs we have, left-​wing, right-​wing,
rational, mystical, but lead us instead to those we did not know we have.
On the other hand, a proof, in the Egri fashion, might indeed lend itself
to the uncertainties of paradox. Here’s an example of a dictum that contains
an interesting contradiction: “One finds one’s destiny on the path one takes
to avoid it” (Carl Jung). Doesn’t this apply to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, one
of the earliest of known plays, in which Oedipus, in attempting to avoid
marrying his mother, ends up committing that very act? The sentence seems
indicative of so many protagonist journeys, in which character, goal or
objective, and fate are intertwined. Another way of saying that “poverty
causes crime” might be “paupers are fated to become criminals”—and when
they try their hardest to become upstanding citizens along the way, then
there is a story. Such a premise might more usefully be thought of as a theme.
But more of that later …

Meaning 2:
The premise of a film or screenplay is the initial state of affairs that
drives the plot. Most premises can be expressed very simply, and many
films can be identified simply from a short sentence describing the
premise.
(Premise (filmmaking), Wikipedia)

Thus:

A chemistry teacher is diagnosed with terminal cancer … (Breaking Bad)

A photojournalist immobilized with a broken leg becomes convinced a
man across the way has murdered his wife … (Rear Window)
A woman is the sole survivor of a car crash in which she has lost both
her husband and her daughter … (Three Colors: Blue)

This is the easiest kind of premise to articulate. It’s the germ of the story,
the starting point for the sequence of events to follow. It’s the set-​up, the
thing that goes wrong in the story’s world and needs to be put right in
12 The approach
some way or other so that order can be reinstated, or it’s a crime that’s been
committed so that justice needs to be done in order that moral equilibrium
be restored. The director needs to understand the set-​up their screenplay
establishes. When they tell its story they must be sure to make this cru-
cial component crystal clear. Novice screenwriters and directors often set
about being deliberately vague or try to be clever because they’re afraid of
being too “on the nose.” They imagine that obscuring basic information is
a sign of sophistication. Not only are they wrong, but they are failing in
their first duty as storytellers—the communication of the information an
audience needs in order to remain engaged with their film. The nature of
a set-​up is essential information the audience must have. The fact that it
needs to be clear does not imply that it has to lack drama or emotion. When
such information is delivered forcefully, it can seal the audience’s connection
to the movie or TV show; and when, in particular, that audience is in the
protagonist’s narrative point of view (see chapter 11), it will have no choice
but to ask itself “What is he/​she going to do now?” (see the example from
Three Colors: Blue in chapters 11 and 12).

Meaning 3:
This next definition, which can be expanded to premise as log-​line,
includes both the set-​up and the course of action the protagonist takes
in order to rectify its consequences. This is the hook of the story, after
which the audience should be unable to tear its eyes away from the
screen. “Where is this course of action going to lead the character,
and can they make it work?,” it wonders. A story will be all the more
compelling if such a course of action is one audiences both want and
do not want the character to take, one they even fear them succeeding
in taking. Does the viewer want Walter White in Breaking Bad to be
able to provide for his family after his death? Yes! Does the viewer
want him to cook crystal meth, with all the misery that will inevitably
follow for his customers? No. At least, one assumes, that will be true
for most viewers.

Now the premise begins with the word when:

When a chemistry teacher is diagnosed with terminal cancer he resorts

to cooking crystal meth in order to provide for his family after his
death …
When a photojournalist immobilized with a broken leg becomes
convinced a man across the way has murdered his wife, he seeks
proof of the crime …
When a woman is the sole survivor of a car crash in which she loses
both her husband and her daughter, she resolves to bury her grief
by destroying all traces of them …
 Premise 13

Meaning 4:
This leads to the sense of premise that’s perhaps the most useful for
the director in understanding the narrative drive of their story and its
shifting of impetus, which is a combination of the above two elements
plus the question the protagonist comes to confront as a result of the
new and worse problem their action causes. (In trying to make things
better they make them, at least at this stage, worse.) In Genre 1 (see
chapter 4), thrillers, action movies etc., this frequently involves phys-
ical, often mortal danger.

Thus:

When a photojournalist immobilized with a broken leg becomes

convinced a man across the way has murdered his wife, he seeks
proof of the crime. As his discoveries bring him to the attention of
the killer, how can he keep from becoming a murder victim himself?
(Mortal danger).

In other dramas, the peril might be emotional or moral—in other words,

the character faces some figurative death.

When a woman is the sole survivor of a car crash in which she loses
both her husband and her daughter, she resolves to bury her grief by
destroying all traces of them. As she’s forced to confront the emer-
ging truths of her husband’s betrayals, how can she find a way to
overcome their implications? (Emotional danger)

A combination of the former and latter can pack a powerful punch

indeed:

When a chemistry teacher is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he resorts

to cooking crystal meth in order to provide for his family after his
death. As he battles with murderous rivals, how can he keep his
family ignorant of his worsening crimes? (Mortal and emotional
danger).

As premise in Meaning 1 relates to theme, so the narrative progression of

Meaning 2, Meaning 3, and Meaning 4 relates to structure—how the story
is put together. (See chapter 8.)
The director should distinguish the question the protagonist faces from
the question the story poses. The former often invites a black or white answer,
and is related to what the protagonist’s goal is, so it is usually plot-​related.
For example, “Can the hero succeed in their mission to fit in?” Or: “Can
they get the girl/​boy?” Or: “Can they win the battle?” In a TV season, or
14 The approach
succession of seasons, such a question can grip viewers for weeks, months,
or years on end. It’s an ongoing question that sustains the tension of the
narrative from episode to episode and season to season. Perhaps it’s never to
be answered—as the journey taken transpires in the end to be everything …
(This may be even more the case when a show is cancelled; the story remains
unfinished and viewers are denied a conclusion, a predicament that in many
cases does not entirely diminish the pleasure thus far derived, the journey of
the show proving more important than its destination.)
The next question, the big question, to which the film or TV show or season
itself leads an audience, is a philosophical/​moral/​existential question, a uni-
versal one that applies not just to photojournalists, the abruptly widowed,
or crystal-​meth-​cooking chemistry teachers. It’s one that at its best denies
the audience any easy answer: “Is fitting in really that important?,” “Is love
worth fighting for?,” “Is the battle to be fought at home or in the field?,” etc.
This question, the thematic question, again takes us, as its name suggests,
to the concept of theme, which follows on from premise.
The director should write down the premise of their screenplay. They
should try the first approach, Meaning 1. Is there a moral lesson? Is an easy
judgment being passed, or is there a paradox that will leave the audience
thinking and wondering? They should write down the others, taking them
step-​by-​step. The set-​up. The set-​up and action. The set-​up, action, and the
question the protagonist confronts.
This is not an academic exercise but a preparation for filmmaking. A dir-
ector is a storyteller who needs to understand every element of the story
they are telling, its emotional and tonal path, its surfaces, its depths, its
foundations, and its drive. They need to know the connections between
character and narrative, film and audience, story and “message” or question.
Equipped with a strong grasp of premise, the director can set about designing
an aspect of what might be described as the broad punctuation of their film.
In Krzysztof Kieślowski’s aforementioned Three Colors: Blue, for example,
the director gives weight to the predicament the protagonist Julie faces by
cutting from a hyper close-​up of her eye to a big close-​up of her face—the
first time in the film he has shown this—before cutting abruptly to the loud
and graphic smashing of a mirror (literally what many a screenwriter might
describe as a smash cut!). The arresting shots and the transition between
them mark the end of the movie’s prologue and the beginning of its next act
or movement. In Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York the director marks
the conclusion of the film’s prologue, after the imperative of protagonist
Amsterdam’s revenge on Bill the Butcher has been introduced, through a
virtuoso crane shot (achieved before the era of drones), starting on Priest
Vallon’s face and rising to a dizzying view from the stratosphere of the
entirety of the island of Manhattan, embellished by the title “Manhattan
1846.” The amalgam of bravura camera movement, shift of scope and scale
from the micro to the macro, from a human to a god-​like perspective, and
 Premise 15
the bold announcement in words of the film’s historical period constitutes a
proclamation on the part of the director of the epic genre of his film.
Most directors, even if gifted with Scorsese’s profound understanding
of, and creative agency in the richness and constant reinvention of, visual
language and storytelling, may not have such logistical, technical, or
financial resources at their disposal, but with other, more available cap-
abilities—patience in the creative process, imagination, thoughtfulness,
and collaboration with their creative team—can explore the many means
by which they can bring to their work the punctuation that premise (and
structure) invites. Camera—movement, composition, lensing—lighting,
transitions through rhythm and pace, through tone, through place, through
scale, through emotion expressed maybe through performance, through
sound and/​or music are some of the resources of directing craft available as
the means to announce a significant step in the progression of the premise.
When a director has a strong grasp of their premise, as with the other
topics covered in this book, they will be well set to plan and direct their film
or TV show. Indeed, they need to know this connective tissue—all of the
aspects of story and dramatic construction and how they fit and function
together—better than anyone else, better perhaps than even the screenwriter,
who, if they have been successful in their writing, and even when they’ve
been meticulous in their craftsmanship, will have tapped into much of their
best work through their creative subconscious. It is the director’s obligation
to protect that precious realm while also unleashing it to best effect as they
make their movie.
3 
Theme

An idea that recurs in or pervades a work of art or literature.

(oxforddictionaries.com)

Central to its story, the theme is the truth a film embodies. It is expressed
through drama and conflict, imagery and visual language, and the journeys
of the characters, and it is encapsulated in the sense or question of meaning
the story comes to reveal. How we see the constitution of this truth, how we
define it, follows different opinions and takes different forms.
Lajos Egri, in The Art of Dramatic Writing, talks of theme as some-
thing to be expressed by a single abstract noun. Isolation, war, love, greed,
power, faith, courage, honor, rivalry, revenge are some examples. Krzysztof
Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue might be said to have as its theme the concept
of liberty, while Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window might have voyeurism as a
theme. One might also consider a combination of such concepts: secrecy and
romance, friendship and loyalty, selfishness and cruelty, justice and law. These
notions might be thought of as too general, too obvious to help the director
in the fashioning of their film, however. They serve the purposes of academic
study, perhaps, while affording minimal insight into the creative processes of
filmmaking, tending to close down rather than open up a question. Certainly
the director should be aware of such broad concepts running through their
film’s story, but the insight they need in order to understand the truth at its
heart might be better served by a phrase or sentence conveying a universal
truth, one that crosses geographical, cultural, and ethnic boundaries and
traverses any line of division constructed between one human being and
another. This might be understood to correlate with what Egri sees in his
book as a premise, his commonplace, if arguably simplistic “Poverty leads
to crime” a case in point.
Theme in dramatic narrative might be more effectively expressed in terms
of conflicting concepts such as crime vs. justice, individual vs. community,
revenge vs. mercy, love vs. hate, although again this might seem somewhat
general from the perspective of the director setting out to understand their
screenplay in ways that will inform their craft. What it does, though, is
 Theme 17
provide a broad sense of the nature of a film’s underlying thematic conflict,
an insight that invites representation in the movie’s visual discourse and the
contrasts it incorporates whether through imagery, location and production
design, costume, lighting, casting, sound (which pertains to “the screen of
the mind” and can therefore be construed as a visual resource), or other
elements of craft. In Hitchcock’s classic spy thriller and romance Notorious
such broad conflict might be described as espionage vs. romance, dissimu-
lation vs. honesty, or manipulation vs. intimacy—contrasts manifested
as much within the shifting power play of protagonists Devlin and Alicia
as between the two strands of the film’s narrative: their journey as lovers
from suppressed sexual attraction to emotional intimacy and their journey
as secret agents seeking to uncover a Nazi conspiracy. When Devlin first
rescues Alicia, giving her a pick-​me-​up to help her overcome a hangover,
Hitchcock shows him, as he approaches her, from her point of view so that,
as he towers over her, he’s shown upside down. Devlin’s motives at this point
are far from kind; he’s dissembling, in the process of recruiting Alicia for a
mission that may place her in lethal peril—so the skewed angle transpires
to have been appropriate. At the end of the film there’s a scene that mirrors
this, when Devlin again rescues Alicia, on this occasion saving her life. As
this later scene echoes the first, so its staging reflects the earlier blocking,
but on this occasion, as Devlin approaches the prone Alicia, she’s suffering
from the effects not of alcohol but of a poison administered by antagonist
Alex Sebastian. Now Devlin’s motives are unimpeachable—he’s no longer
acting as an agent but as lover. As he approaches Alicia, the director chooses
not to upend him. He remains as upright as his intentions. Romance wins
out over deception, at least in the story. In the plot, on the other hand, it’s
the deception inherent in espionage that triumphs. Although the opposites
are mutually exclusive, the film seems to be saying that both are necessary.
Irreconcilable opposites provide the foundation of drama, so the lack of easy
answers, of any readily definable message, renders a film less a vehicle for
moral instruction and more a vision of the human condition. Most import-
antly, it makes it all the more compelling.
There can be more than one set of thematic opposites in a film, and
another in Notorious is love for the parent vs. love for the lover. The former
loses validity and function, the latter gains in both. For the male, so the
film suggests, mothers such as Alex Sebastian’s become encumbrances,
entrapping their sons, whereas, through romance, sweethearts such as Alicia
promise maturity. The thematic concern here is universal, not only to much
of this director’s work (think of the mother and son in Psycho), but also
to life in general, not only from Hitchcock’s male perspective—love for
parents generally superseded at some point or points by love for a partner. In
scenes between Alex and his mother, production design, shot composition,
and framing are increasingly employed to entrap the hapless Nazi son. The
director traps the lovers cinematically too, but finally releases them while
shutting the door on Alex.
18 The approach
Another way of positing theme is to think of it as issue: ethnic oppression,
the dangers of social media, corruption in politics, the “War on Drugs,” and
other contemporary concerns—although, as with Egri’s abstract noun, this
fails to get at a story’s core, the heart of meaning that nourishes narrative
and drama.
More useful for the director is to have insight into theme in yet a further
sense: the combination of thematic opposites to yield the single truth of a
contradiction or paradox:

In vulnerability lies strength (Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight)

Love will tear us apart (Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine)
The identity that affords us life, kills us (Darren Aronofsky’s The
Wrestler)

The previous chapter on premise raised the notion of the question a film
asks not of the protagonist but of the audience. This might be called the the-
matic question, and relates to this idea of thematic conflict or paradox. “Do
we find meaning in life through duty or transgression?” might be a theme in
Breaking Bad. “Do we find freedom through our relationships or ourselves?”
is perhaps the quandary posited by American Honey. A film does not need
to give an answer to the thematic question. Indeed, it should avoid solutions,
leaving the audience to ponder. The best films, like the best novels or short
stories, live on in this way, their narratives, characters, events, images, and
questions capable of haunting for a lifetime.
Just as a theme of this nature may surprise the viewer or audience when
it reveals itself, it may have surprised the writer when they discovered it in
their story. Perhaps the director was the writer, and was surprised to discover
it after they had been writing for a while. Often, because the subconscious
plays a fundamental part in the creative process, the most powerful themes
are found as the writing of a story develops. Starting work on a story with a
clear theme in mind can lead to an overly schematic and didactic film. When
the director “meets” the screenplay, they should beware of any narrative
erected on the foundations of philosophical or political certainty or noble
intention. Story is sovereign. It needs to talk back to the filmmaker with its
own sense of theme as it talks back through its characters and their actions.
If it surprises a screenwriter, or a director, when it emerges, the chances are
a theme will surprise an audience.
Thinking back to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, theme might also be considered
as a warning. Unlike a moral, such an admonition is not so much didactic as
chilling. One might see the ambiguous and shocking ending of Lee Chang-​
dong’s Burning as one such example. Take this path of obsession and look
where it will lead you! The emotional experience of engaging with the film
lends the warning a force that a simple caution would lack, the result for
the audience being somehow both chastening and gratifying at one and the
same time.
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