Raindance: Bill Martell - Secrets of Action Screenwriting (applied to other genres)

Martell - Secrets of Action Screenwriting

Time: 1:00 pm
The class of the book! How to write an effective plot twist, create unbearable suspense, design an exciting action sequence, create a high concept villain's plan, use diversion & anticipation to make your script unpredictable, and create great heroes and villains. Why an action scene is a character scene and a story scene - or it's rubbish. How to write a page-turner action script. Dozens of techniques that can be used in any genre.

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Learn from other peoples mistakes

The antagonist is the most important character because their the ones that kick off the story. (no matter what the genre)

The antagonist is the person that causes the problem (doesn’t need to be a mean/nasty character)

Conflict creates story

If your writing an action story, the antagonist is the most important character

Who is your antagonist, who is your villain

There is no story without a problem, that problem comes from the antagonist

In a romantic comedy the antagonist could be the nicest person

Antagonist kicks off the story

One of the things you want to have is an active villains plan – something the protagonist has to stop (active hero), oppose to a passive villains plan

The bigger the villains plan the bigger the movie – if the villains plan is to rob a bank, it will be a small movie. If the villain puts together a huge plan to take over san fran and rob 40 banks that will be a huge movie.

The villains plan could come up with something huge – but we don’t need to show all the special effects because the hero could stop it before hand

You can basically enlarge the scope of the story by giving the villain a huge plan but don’t need to have a large budget with high stakes and big plans.

The villain needs to be doing things for reasons that makes sense to him or to the audience. He needs a motivation, not just because ‘he is a villain’

The more the audience can understand the motivation, the more the villain becomes real, the more the villain becomes a real threat. If someone has a real motivation for doing something then the audience understands he is a real person, and we question what if he really does these things?

Make sure the villains plan is unpredictable – usually problems with scripts is that its obvious from the start.

A good villains plan has layers to it – its not what it is on the plan, but whats underneath that.

The villain has to be more intelligent than the hero… usually

You want the plan to be one thing but then have a twist so seems something else

What if the villains plan, or the heros plan goes wrong?

See all possibilities that could happen. Make sure villians plans make sense.

Punishment fits the crime

If your villain does something, the protagonist reacts on an equal level, if the protagonist does something, the villain reacts on an equal level

Make sure the villain reacts logically on the same level and vise versa

A movie that works the audience forgets all the problems

A movie that doesn’t work the audience picks out all the problems becasue they are bored

Silly villians-  villians that do things that are stupid, things tht make the audience say you are going to get caught

Make sure the protagonist is smart and not stupid because we instantly lose respect for him.

You want your character to be sympathetic, and to be smart

To outsmart with the villain the hero needs to be smart

Typically in an action movie, the villain is smarter than the hero

The hero needs to be the underdog in the story

The antagonist has a henchman, whose bigger than the hero

The thunderball theory

In the old days of movies you could have a villain say I have 2 nuc weapons and im going to use it, we have a demonstration of whats going to happen if the villain doesn’t get the money, and then the threat of if I don’t get the money I will do it again somewhere else

The more villains you have, the more stories you have. (you want just one story) but that doesn’t mean the villain cant have henchmen. Multiple villains need to be ‘running up the same ladder’

Hero -  job to stop the villain

Reason why you don’t see too many murder mystery story movies, because the villain isn’t active most the time. Would be boring to show in a movie that’s why murder mysteries are usually on tv

Any character we’ve seen too many times it becomes a cliché – find another protagonist

Superman vs everyman

Two types

-       superman – powerful, strong, able to deal with themselves

-       everyman – somebody like us that gets thrust into the danger

bad ass character; we want to be this character!!

James bond, steven segal

The thing about superman character is fantasy

The thing about everyday man character is reality, we want to do it. Everything is a learning curve

A problem sometimes in films is that there are not enough action

You want to have the hero and villain banging heads all the time. If the villain is a secret then have his henchman bang  heads with the hero.

What we want to look at is the pacing is a regular heartbeat in the script. With every 10 pages in an action movie you want an action scene. with every 10 pages of a romantic movie you want a romantic scene. with every 10 pages of a thriller movie you want a suspense scene.

You want organic in your movie rather than built on. Its better to think from the beginning im going to need action scenes in my action script and grow them in the movie. Look at when your planning your story look at the places where the action scenes come together.

When your coming up with action scenes, you want action scenes to be different from eachother. Mix it up and give a variety of action scenes. Eg a chase, kick people in head, shootout scene.

Two main ways of plotting a script

-       A game of tennis

-       Or an onion

Thing about onions is your story is peeling off layers

The story keeps peeling back layer after layer after layer. We keep peeling back layers to find out more information. From the outside we have a surface and we keep digging to find out more information.

 If your doing a character based story its always going to be an onion

A game of tennis:

The antagonist serves, the protagonist returns, antagonist hits back, the protagonist returns again etc back and forth back and forth logically.

If you have an action scene with no emotion In it, the movie is dead

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

You don’t want something that comes from nowhere in your story

Action scenes themselves

Your going to have to come up with approx. 10 action scenes for your script.

We want to come up with scenes we haven’t seen before

What that means is that we are either going personal, or we are going to have to imagine something. High action concept scene. you want to find that thing that’s on the line of acceptable but not over the line silly

Any action scene is a character scene and a story scene. you don’t want an action scene with no meaning. By creating a decision for the character in an action scene shows you what the protagonist is.

Obstacles in an action scene are part of the story. You want to have emotions in it.

Car chases don’t pay for the cinema, people pay for the cinema. So make it about the people.

Car surfing

Wrote a script called manhunt

Two guys were on a foot chase. There are loads of cabs in traffic. The two guys are hopping over the roof of the taxis, then then the traffic lights turn green. So now they are car surfing, do the characters jump from car to car whilst their moving? What if the cars go in different direction? – a unique scene!!!! (think outside the box)

Find the element of a car chase we haven’t seen before!!

What if a man is tied up to a chair to cuffs and cant undo it, he gets up instead and runs into a car with the chair on the back of him.

Think about the protagonist failing

What if the protagonist cant get into the car so he fails?

DNA of a script

If you watch an action scene, you want to think I have an idea of the character from this character scene. it needs to give a piece of the larger story. Not just some generic story (where an action scene has been just thrown into the movie) you want it to be organic.

-       every genre is exactly the same

talking about theme

in the matrix – neo doesn’t believe in his own ability in all his scenes.

If you know what your theme is, tie it in

How does the protagonist react with tough decisions, give him a scene where he has to make a choice between 1 and the other. Potentially why hes being attacked. Make things emotionally difficult.

Spider man: has to save his love but at the same time has to save a load of kids and green lantern (or whoever the villain is) is attacking him but he removes his mask and its his best friends dad. Who he finally kills but his best friend now wants to kill spider man.

Each reversal in the story can go different ways. Every action scene needs to be filled with tons of reversals.

An action scene should be good news bad news. The bad news is the character should be thrown out a plane, the good news he has a parashoot, the bad news is it doesn’t work, the good news is that he has a spare parashoot, the bad news is that it doesn’t work either… and so on so forth until he reaches the ground.

You have to create little twist in an action scene to make it exciting

If your writing an action scene on the page it gets boring – you need to write a twist and describe what happens, not punch punch punch.

Reversals – interesting, exciting, makes it a real page turner (not just they fight eachother)

You want to have something interesting and stunt coordinated rather than generic

Jackie chann – everything with his is a weapon

Locations

Everytime you walk into some place, identify the weapons

Walk into costa coffee what are the weapons:

-       hot milk

-       stalls

-       mugs

-       cutlery

in casino royal big action scene in an airport, all elements of the airport are used as weapons etc. the mobile stairs, the luggage truck.

Die hard 2 in an airport, a gun falls onto a moving side walk toward john mclean but will he survive long enough

Script

Paragraph no longer than 4 lines (usually)

Keeps to space it out for your action scene

Read walter hill scripts, and shane black. Read writers scripts !!!

Example

He reaches for the gun

His fingertips touch the gun

The gun gets kicked away

Adds a lot of intensity and action

You want them to read as if it is action rather than boring

Make sure there twists and unexpected things, and reversals

1 page per minute, including action and dialogue

write the action parts and make them exciting

make sure that you keep the writing visceral rather then read out the story!!!

Words like bang, wallop, (the sound effects part) add a stylize feeling of what your seeing on screen. If the whole script is full of sound effects it will lose its effect.

Develop your own style and your not faking somebody elses writer. Be authentic!