First Time Director. Gil Bettman

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СКАЧАТЬ hero performs such a selfless act. This will initiate the process by which the audience identifies with the main character. The more selfless this initial act of heroism, the better. If the audience themselves wants everything that the hero is giving up, then they will know in their heart of hearts that they would never be so selfless, so strong, and so heroic to sacrifice what he is sacrificing. This intensifies their admiration for the main character. The more intense their admiration, the more complete their identification. This is the process by which the audience is transported out of themselves and into the action of the film.

      One of best the examples of such a defining moment early on in a film can be found in The Godfather. It comes after the Tattaglia family has tried, unsuccessfully, to assassinate Vito Corleone. Vito lies mortally wounded in the hospital. Sonny, played by James Caan, and the capos of the Corleone family are plotting how best to strike back at the Tattaglias. They want to stage a hit on two key players: Captain McCluskey and Sollozzo, known as the Turk. McCluskey is the crooked NYPD captain protecting the Tattaglias. Sollozzo, a heroin importer, is pushing the Tattaglias into a turf war with the Corleones. He obviously put out the hit on Vito Corleone. Sonny and his capos are trying to figure out who in their family is so trusted by the Tattaglias that he could get close enough to Sollozzo and McCluskey to put a bullet in their heads.

      Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, volunteers to do the hit. Nobody can believe it. Sonny even starts baiting Michael, asking him, “Whaddya gonna do, nice college boy, huh?….You think this is the army where you shoot them from a mile away? You gotta get ‘em up close. BUDDABING! You blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit..”

      No one in the family would ever think of Michael as a candidate to do this hit. Why? Because Michael is the only Corleone who is clean. He has never sullied himself in the family business. He has an Ivy League education. He is a war hero. He has lovely Diane Keaton waiting to marry him, move to New Hampshire, raise a family, and lead the clean version of the American dream. But he turns his back on it all. He volunteers to give it all up and commit a murder. Why? Out of loyalty and love. He is a member of the Corleone family first, and an individual second. The extent of this selfless act makes him a gigantic hero. This is his peak. It is one of the defining moments of the Godfather trilogy. When ordered in a linear chronology, unlike the films themselves, everything from this moment on until the end of The Godfather: Part III is about the fall of this hero.

      I would advise every first time director to compare the main character of his breakthrough film to Michael Corleone. Ask yourself if your protagonist does something early on in the script that proves that he has the strength to make such a sacrifice. If not, your script needs a rewrite. Your main character does not have what it takes to get the audience rooting for him to the extent that they can enter the action of the film.

      You must bear in mind that there are heroes, like Michael Corleone, who act out their heroism, and there are anti-heroes, like Rick in Casablanca, who are as strong and self-sacrificing as a Michael Corleone, but either deny it, like Rick, or are unaware of it, like Marty McFly. Rick claims that he “sticks his neck out for no one.” But the script makes it clear that this is a pose. The audience can tell from early on in the film that underneath Rick's cynical, alcoholic, Euro-trash façade beats the heart of a lion. In the opening scenes we learn that Rick ran guns to the Ethiopians defending their country from the Axis invasion. Then Rick hides Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre, from the Gestapo. It would seem he has an ulterior motive for doing so: This is how he gets his hands on precious letters of transit out of Casablanca, which become the MacGuffin of the film. But when he tells the bandleader to play La Marseillaise so as to drown out the Nazi's beer hall anthem, we know that he has the heroic capacity for self-sacrifice of a Michael Corleone…he just has to get back in touch with it.

      At the beginning of Back to the Future, Marty is on the verge of being screwed up by his screwed-up parents. Like all teenagers, he knows that his parents are geeks. His purpose in life is to somehow become the antithesis of everything they are. Everything in Marty's existence seems to be conspiring against him and working to turn him into as big a loser as his Dad. Everything except Doc Brown. So Marty sneaks out in the middle of the night to the Twin Pines Mall to bear witness to the unveiling of Doc Brown's time machine. Then, by a series of freak accidents, Marty ends up getting sent back into the past in the time machine.

      There is little self-sacrifice in hanging out with Doc Brown. At this stage, Marty is not very heroic. But the target under-30 audience, and for that matter, anyone who can remember being a teenager, can clearly see the outlines of a true hero in the making underneath Marty's slightly callow, wise-cracking, self-deprecating exterior. For Marty to have both the good sense to recognize his parents' deficiencies and the intense need (it could even be called courage) to defy them, makes him extremely sympathetic — if not heroic — in the eyes of the target audience.

      When putting his main character to the acid test of heroism, the first time director must keep in mind the size and the scope of the target audience for his breakthrough film. Some audiences will never be able to care intensely about the fate of a specific main character because that character is from a world that is completely alien to them. The hero of Trainspotting, Retten, is a heroin addict. The hero of Boys Don't Cry, Brandon Teena, is a lesbian who crossdresses as a man. These movies are not for everyone. They were made for a younger, urban audience that is acquainted with, if not accepting of, heroin addiction and/or gender bending.

      The studios prefer to make movies aimed at a wide audience because there is a greater risk involved in making an edgy movie with a morally ambiguous hero. For that reason, such movies are usually made by independent companies who are looking for their audience outside of the boundaries proscribed by studio films. This audience, along with the critics, will embrace a film that takes these chances. So if, as a first time director, you are hired to make an edgy film about a character like Retten or Teena, then allow your main character to be as much of an outsider, as weird, as flawed as possible. Do not pull your punches. Go for the limit. The films of Pedro Almodóvar have proved that, in the new millennium, educated urban audiences will gladly identify with characters whose lifestyles are totally divorced from all societal norms. And, it could be argued, that the more bizarre, the more sexually deviant and morally ambiguous they are, the better. It would seem that, for an educated urban audience, there is a certain radical chic in embracing films like Almodóvar's that feature societal outcasts in the main roles. It takes guts to live as they do, in defiance of societal norms. In almost all Almodóvar films, these outcasts/heroes invariably undertake a daunting quest early on — a quest which is made that much more difficult, because, in trying to reach their goals, Almodóvar's heroes must overcome the additional obstacles thrown in their way by those who are prejudiced against them and intent on denying their fundamental humanity. Rebels always make good heroes and Almodóvar's rebels are usually rebels burning with a cause.

The Heroic Quest

      Yet a main character of truly heroic proportions alone does not a great script make. If the audience is going to enter the action of the film, they have to have an intense admiration for the main character and an equally intense desire for him to achieve his objective. What the main character wants has to be something they see as worth wanting very much.

      A good rule of thumb to make sure that the audience will very much want the main character to achieve his objective is to simply require that the objective is either one of two things: (1) love, because we never get enough love or the right kind of love and so we see love as supremely desirable, or (2) a matter of life and death — something the hero is willing to give up his life to get. It can be a matter of life and death even if it isn't an action movie. The hero's life doesn't have to actually be on the line. If it is clear that he will die either physically or spiritually if he doesn't achieve his objective at the climax of the film, like Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) in American Beauty, then the audience, given that they admire the hero, will find reason enough to root for him with enough passion to transport themselves into the action of the film.

      Though СКАЧАТЬ