Q: How necessary do you think it is for an audience to understand why a main character is a certain way?
Pie? Read on…A: It depends if the information is needed…or wanted.
Providing characters with a backstory is one of the most common requests we get from executives and producers. The rationale is easy to understand. In order for a character to behave credibly, the audience must feel that the behavior is properly motivated. One way of establishing motivation is to give the character a history that provides an insight into why they are the way they are.
The problem is that this can lead to some horrendous and annoying cliches.
When I’m thinking about my characters, I ask myself if the audience really needs to understand how they became the way they became, or if the audience might merely want to know.
Wanting ain’t good enough. Just because the audience wants something doesn’t mean you should give it to them. It’s a bit like rationing out candy for your kids. Unsatisifed wanting is part of the fun of going to the movies. Anyone who saw Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation probably wants to know what he said, but it’s best that we’re left filling in the blanks ourselves.
This isn’t a new literary technique. Nietzsche, for instance, prefigured that moment by more than a hundred years when he wrote this passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra.
—Thou thinkest thereon, O Zarathustra, I know it—of soon leaving me!”—
“Yea,” answered I, hesitatingly, “but thou knowest it also”—And I said something into her ear, in amongst her confused, yellow, foolish tresses.
“Thou KNOWEST that, O Zarathustra? That knoweth no one—”
What did he say into her ear, amongst her confused, yellow, foolish tresses? You’ll have to think about that after reading the book, now, won’t you? Ted Elliott told me about a great term that Gore Verbinksi has called “pie talk”. The idea is that after the movie is over, you want at least a few threads dangling, a few questions remaining…for the moviegoers to discuss and debate over pie.
One of the greatest pie talk characters ever is Thelma Dickerson from Callie Khouri’s screenplay Thelma & Louise. Louise refuses to travel through Texas, even when that refusal puts her and Louise at great risk.
Why? Oh, sure, there are some obvious answers we can imagine, but the movie refrains from backstorying us to death with some awful speech about what happened That Terrible Day Way Back When.
This doesn’t mean you should never do backstory. Sometimes, it really helps. For instance, when I was adapting Mary Chase’s play Harvey, I noticed that practically no one had a backstory.
Did Elwood Dowd, the odd drunk who claims to see an invisible rabbit, need a backstory? Did we need some insight into his past to explain how it was that he went from a pillar of the business world to an odd, Zen degenerate?
I decided that we did not. The audience would identify with the Christ-like qualities of Elwood without knowing what happened to him. In fact, I went one step further. I created a sequence that wasn’t in the play, in which the doctor treating Elwood thought (as would the audience) that there was a terrible thing that happened to him. The doctor takes Elwood to a theme park, a place where Elwood indicates something awful occurred when he was a child.
What the doctor learns in that scene is that, in fact, nothing that bad happened at all. There is no neat explanation for why Elwood is the way he is. There is only a pie talk explanation. He has become Christ-like…as can we all.
I did say, though, that I engaged in a little backstorying. In my adaptation, there’s a nurse that the doctor is falling in love with. She’s extremely reluctant, and I felt like the audience needed to know why. Otherwise, it felt as if her behavior would be simply there out of screenwriting convenience, i.e. a pointless obstacle to love.
I decided that she had been left at the altar. I had a secondary character reveal that information to avoid the awful “I was left at the altar!!!” speech.
Boy, that was a looooong answer, huh? Sorry. I guess it boils down to this: give ‘em what they need, but be careful about indulging them with what they want. Some things must be spelled out.
The rest should be whispered into confused, yellow, foolish tresses.
Craig, great post — but Nietzsche aside, I think Lost in Translation is a dubious example. Bill Murray’s whisper is the biggest screenwriting cheat ever perpetrated. Nothing artful about it.
Yeah, I’ve always liked how Calli Khouri avoided the bad backstory aria or “Rubber Ducky”. My other favorite non-Ducky is from Buffy:
Buffy: Puppets give me the wiggins. Ever since I was eight. Willow: What happened? Buffy: I saw a puppet, it gave me the wiggins. There’s no story there.
Disagree with you on Lost in Translation, David - thought it was just right, at the end - I loved that film (maybe it hit me harder ‘cause I’ve spent time in Japan, I don’t know) though a good many of my friends think it’s overrated (my buddy Adam thought the title should have been Scarlett Johannson’s Ass) but for me it gets stronger each time I watch it, and I think if I’d been a party to what Bill whispered at the end, it wouldn’t have had nearly the intimacy at the end that it did.
And it was definitely a pie talk subject later on.
I have a theory that Sofia was writing about a fling with Harrison Ford she had in Japan while she toured with her husband’s film Being John Malkovich and Ford was there doing commercials- but it’s just a theory - I have no proof.
Nothing artful about the whisper? Difficult to swallow. In a film that thrived on saying so little, what five words could contend in the place of silence? Okay, I’ll give you ten.
Was it a cheat move? Maybe. Was it perfect? Maybe.
Did I just play the ask a question and answer it card…Oh, yeah.
David:
Was it a cheat?
In a sense, if you think of it as a tactic that was easier to write than, say, a speech.
On the other hand, we don’t get points for effort. :)
All that matters is…does it work as part of the story being told, or does it not? I’ve sweated over scenes that ended up dying and being cut, and I’ve dashed off scenes in about four minutes that became audience favorites.
One of the frustrating things about what we do…
My favorite backstory in cinema is provided in a line of dialogue.
In ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ (screenplay by Richard Tuggle):
Charlie Butts: What kind of childhood did you have? Frank Morris: Short.
Everything you need to know about Clint Eastwood’s character is in that one word answer.
Well Gore Verbinski may have come up with “pie talk,” but Hitchcock anticipated him by at least three decades. He called it “refrigerator talk.”
The ending of “Lost in Translation” is perfect. I have always subscribed to the “less is more” theory when writing for film. I have also heard Tarantino attributed to a pie-like quote. Now I’m beginning to think he ripped it off.
Craig, we don’t get points for effort? Now you tell me. But seriously, aren’t we talking about artful writing? We aren’t just going to count on lucking into good scenes, are we? Are we?
I accept that I’m in the minority on this one, but the whisper made me want to throw my popcorn at the screen and stalk out of the theater. Imagine if Bogart had whispered his lines in Bergman’s ear at the airport in Casablanca. Bah!
But in the interest of national unity, I will say no more on the subject.
Mr. Insufferable, are you referring to “refrigerator logic”, where the viewer doesn’t realize there were plot holes in the movie until he’s standing in front of the fridge getting a midnight snack? I don’t think it’s quite the same as “pie talk”.
Now I’m hungry.
You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.
Maybe an aspiring screenwriter, who thinks he’ll someday do better, might think that Bill Murray’s whisper is a “cheat.”
Maybe a screenwriter who is already doing it, who isn’t trying to prove anything, can just write what needs to be written, no matter what aspiring screenwriters may say about it later.
I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The very fact that we’re all talking about the whisper at the end of Lost In Translation is proof that supports Craig’s/Gore’s “pie-talk” thesis.
David:
It’s funny that you mention Casablanca. I can imagine the same LiT tactic working perfectly at the end of that.
Bogart’s lines about regretting it is you don’t get on that plane (sorry, I don’t have the movie memorized) are truly great lines. But if Ingrid Bergman had been pleading to stay with him, and he suddenly drew her into a clinch and whispered something into her ear… then she slowly, with all the same drama and pathos in her performance, turned and headed towards the plane.
Forgetting for a moment that it was a dialogue-heavy movie and that whisper would have been out of character for Rick and for the whole movie, I think that ending would not only have been just as effective, people would still to this day be pondering what Rick could have said to change her mind.
It would have been powerful.
RED
I’m not sure what everyone is talking about. I heard very clearly what Bill whispered to Scarlett at the end of LIT.
“I know it was you, Fredo…you broke my heart.”
French director Mathieu Kassovitz calls “pizza talk” a “pie talk”. (And, to quote a famous line, it is not because of the metric system)
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0440913/
“Refrigerator logic” (or “refrigerator movies)” isn’t the same as “pie talk.” You don’t want a movie that can’t stand up to examination in retrospect (although if the choice is between that a movie that doesn’t stand up while watching it for the first time, go with the refrigerator).
You want a “pie talk” movie, though — and one way to do that is to intentionally leave some questions unanswered or open to speculation, so as to encourage audiences to talk and think about the movie afterwards.
Terry and I also referred to those kind of things as “Clone Wars” stuff — the nine words “I fought beside your father in the Clone Wars” might be responsible for the greatest volume of audience speculation in the history of movies (sadly ended now).
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Great post, good advice. Pie theory is dead on, as are secondary characters hinting at things past. Also flashbacks can come in handy, if done right.
And no need for a backstory, when you paint the characters in one-dimensions, and then expand out. In Hughes ‘Breakfast Club’, the characterizations were all direct, you knew the backstory before you even got to the dialogue, in fact some of the latter explanational backstory was redundantly preachy, Bladerunner VO style. The central theme was not the backstory, but rather the frontstory — the moving forward, the growth process. Sometimes the backstory is obvious from the get-go, and belaboring it, only serves to give the audience ‘soap operaish’ headaches.
But on the flipside, a subtle backstory can be a theme itself, as in Jordan Robert’s brilliant ‘Around the Bend’. And backstories are great for those not on the linear chronology highway, as such is the whole thrust in the Kill Bill’s, shuffling the backstories like a deck of cards. It worked.
From Pitch Black…which summed up a backstory in three words. :)
FRY: I don’t need his life story. Is he really that dangerous? JOHNS: Only around humans.
I vaguely remember a similar Clint Eastwood story. The script gives him a clunky speech telling the whole of his backstory. He said, “Couldn’t I just say … ” and it was shorter and better but gave almost no information.
Does anybody know more about this story? I want to use it as precedent when responding to notes.
Re: pie talk.
Another example of this is the use of the affirmation ending instead of a conclusion.
Aside from it being very Aristotelean by ending with a beginning, it encourages the audience to participate in the story and create the inevitable results in their own mind.
Sleepless in Seattle is a good example. The story has given us enough information about the characters and their situation to take the affirmation of the ending to decide for ourselves if the couple gets together and makes it work.
Gotta wonder what the “Lost in Translation endins was a cheat” crowd would have done differently. What would they have Bill Murray do? Don’t speak at all or let us here him. If that, what would they have him say. Whatever it is, I bet it wouldn’t measure up to an inaudible whisper. As Criag says, you don’t get points for effort. Reminds of an argument I used to have with a friend who turned up his nose at the simple chords the alternative rock bands I liked used. He prefered guitar virutosos who could play anything and everything very fast and all at once…music that always left me cold despite its technical skill.
I have a rival in the insufferability stakes who tells me my sniffy Hitchcock reference is incorrect. It should be “icebox talk” and refers to late-night snackers discussing what Bill Murray said to Scarlett in front of an open refrigeraor. I regret my error and any subsequent anguish it may have caused. (But, insufferably, I believe my original point remains valid. Verbinski’s “pie-talk” is a bit of a Johnny-come-lately.
Um… I’m surprised in all this discussion nobody noticed that it wasn’t Thelma in “Thelma & Louise” who refused to go through Texas on their way from Arkansas to Mexico. It was Louise.
And I think that’s an excellent example of not telling the audience something they don’t really need to know.
It wasn’t Thelma who wouldn’t travel through Texas in “Thelma & Louise”: it was Louise.
And it’s an excellent example of not using backstory to tell the audience every little thing about a character; it’s much more interesting and thought-provoking to wonder why Louise won’t go through Texas.
Great site.
DOH!
Editing to change that…. :)
C.
After thinking about this post, ping-ponging around — I was inspired to watch Tony Gayton’s Salton Sea yet again. I do ever so like backstories that weave themselves into the theme itself, not showing the full deck of cards until seconds before end credits. Backstories (for me) work best when they thrust you future-forward. It’s pie-talk was minimal, as it was pretty much final, but what a great story nevertheless, glued for the whole two hours. Give them what they need, WHEN it’s needed, not when they think they need it or even want it…unloading all clips too soon, makes for no story. :)
But there’s not much to wonder about Lousie’s refusal (stupid and contrived as it is) to travel through Texas—her rape. I’ve always thought that the film’s reasoning for their round-about and fatal route seemed made-up after the fact.
Craig, I love the site. First time commentor. I’ve been writing scripts now for about 4 years. I noticed in one of your posts that you used to be a Marketing Exec. I was wondering if that was a good way to go about networking (I’m currently working on a finance degree), and if so, how would you go about getting a job like that?
I think of it as an actual translation issue: what speech could either of them have given, for our benefit, that could have hinted at the casual intimacy they shared? Also, if you think of your own lifetime, there have been hopefully many intimate moments where an observer might laugh or roll their eyes at something said in the fog of love. Sofia might have cheated, but just because cheating helps you win.