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Finally,  here is the second part of my interview with Michael Hauge in which he talks about favourite movies that break with his own structural principles, how emotion relates to anticipation and about the choice to follow “Hollywood structure” or not.

I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Karel: Do you have any favourites that don’t follow the principles you teach?

Michael: Oh yeah, yeah. There are a number of movies that I think are wonderful, that I generally don’t talk about when I lecture. The reason is: I want people to understand the core of what I consider the essential principles of story and structure and character arc and love story and eliciting emotion. So, the examples I use, are ones that follow the formula - if you want to call it that - so it strengthens a writer’s understanding of it.

No movie breaks all the rules but great movies often times push the envelop or they take liberties, or they fit into a niche that is less common.

So, if you take ANNIE HALL, which would have to be regarded as a romantic comedy. But the basic formula for that in Hollywood is: a story about deception, or a character with a goal, then meets someone they fall in love with but they are lying about something, pretending to be somebody they’re not, as in WORKING GIRL or in TOOTSIE. Or just lying as they are in a WEDDING CRASHERS or SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE. There is almost always deception, two goals, always a happy ending.

ANNIE HALL doesn’t have any of those. It is more like a straight love story, but so funny that it is regarded as a romantic comedy. It is a great movie and it doesn’t have a happy ending. Woody Allen is pretty much allergic to happy endings because he sees love affairs and relationships as finite. It breaks the rules but it doesn’t make it not a great movie.

Another example, and this would be one of my all-time favourite movies and one of the great screenplays coming out of Hollywood in the last years, is SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. There is all kinds of rules that it follows: rules about empathy, visible goals, character arc, theme. But it doesn’t follow a normal structure.

It follows a three-stage structure. We see the character in one period of time, then we jump ahead quite a few years, see them again, jump ahead, and see them a third time. That structure is used by WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, by STEEL MAGNOLIAS, by DRIVING MISS DAISY, by numerous other movies but those numerous movies are a very small percentage of the movies Hollywood makes.

So that’s not a typical film and that’s also a great screenplay. Here’s the way I usually say it: you can break the rules after you know the rules so well that you know exactly what you are doing and you have made a conscious decision that “I will elicit more emotion and create a better emotional experience by pushing the envelope than I will by following the formula”.

When writers get in to trouble is when they say “I don’t believe in formula, I’m just going to ignore it and I’m going to tell whatever story I want to tell”. Those movies rarely work.

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Karel: Michael, your books and seminars start from the primary goal of the screenwriter: to elicit emotion, from the reader of the script and from the audience. How does that relate to the other goal of eliciting anticipation. Are they the same?

Michael: Yes, absolutely. Anticipation creates an emotional experience. A very good example of that is a certain form of anticipation, and that’s suspense. All suspense thrillers are built on the concept of anticipation. It is the primary emotional experience they are providing. Because suspense is simply the anticipation of violence.

All anticipation in any movie pretty much is the anticipation of some kind of conflict. So if you take romantic comedy the anticipation is ‘oh-oh, what’s going to happen when the woman he is in love with finds out he that he lied about who he was just to crash the wedding.

Now, that creates emotion in an audience because now we are hoping on the one hand that our hero doesn’t get caught because we empathise with him and we’re rooting for him, and the other hand we sort of want him to get caught because it is the conflict in the movie that we go to see. It is the obstacles, it is the humour that goes on in the conflict, it is the fight sequences, it’s the chases, it is the scary moments, it is whatever.

So that anticipation is one method of eliciting that emotion that needs to be elicited. Just like surprise. That is an other form of eliciting emotion. Because every once in a while you’re gonna have something jump out and go ‘boo’. So when the shark jumps out of the water for the first time in Jaws, you know, people were scared shitless. And that’s why they’d recommend the movie and went back to see it again. Because they wanted that emotional experience.

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Karel: Two problems I often find in screenplays by inexperienced writers are 1) the choice of protagonist and 2) the key qualities of the protagonist. Would you mind giving us an insight?

Michael: In almost every case where the problem seems to be choosing the wrong protagonist, the writer isn’t clear about what the story concept is, about what the hero’s visible goal is.

In other words: if the writer is operating under the belief that they just need to portray characters and show them going through a situation in their life and let’s see what happens, then that’s the quicksand they have stepped into. Because movies are about heroes who are pursuing specific visible goals.

It is about stopping the serial killer, about escaping from the panic room or from N.Y. or from Alcatraz, about winning the love of another person or winning an athletic competition. Or it’s about getting the buried treasure. But the goal must be specific, must be visible, must have a clearly defined end point.

Now it’s pretty hard to imagine that if a writer has come up with a specific goal that the hero has to achieve by the end of the movie, that’s going drive the story, that’s going to create the throughline and define the story concept, that they’re then going to pick the wrong protagonist.

Because the protagonist is the character who wants to do that.

I’ve never encountered the problem where somebody had a very clear visible goal and then they had the wrong protagonist.With this exception: sometimes a writer will have a goal and they’ll team two people up: a love story, or

LETHAL WEAPON.

What they do is, they pick one of those characters to be the hero and often times it is the less interesting of the two, the less original, the less dynamic, the less fun. And often the solution to this is not to switch to the other character but to make it a two-hero story.

But in my experience 90% of all problems go back to the hero’s outer motivation. That’s just my term for the visible goal, for the finish line the hero has to cross. It’s either vague, it is not visible, it’s not there at all, there are too many in stead of one single one. Or it is something that is outside the hero’s power.

So if there is a goal that meets all those criteria, I don’t think picking the right hero is really going to be the problem.

The other thing about the hero that you have to do, is to create empathy with that character for the reader. You have to create a psychological connection between the reader and the character and there are some key ways you can do that.

One is to make them a victim of something, because we empathise with characters we feel sorry for, if they have suffered from undeserved misfortunate. Think of Tom Hanks’ character in SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE. The movie opens with him at a funeral, burying his wife with his young son, standing by his side. We feel so sorry for the guy that we are going to immediately put ourselves in his place.

Or another way put the character in jeopardy. If you open the movie with your hero immediately in great danger, say a MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movie, or a JAMES BOND movie, or something like that, then we will empathise on that basis. Even if the danger is danger of loss of a job, we will empathise with characters who may lose something important to them.

Or you can make your hero funny.

Or you can make your hero very good-hearted and likeable as almost every Tom Hanks character is, if you look at his films as examples.

Or you can make your hero very powerful as with either a superhero or just the character is very good at what she does.

So any of those five things will strengthen or establish the empathy the reader needs to feel. But if you open your movie with a hero by showing their flaws or showing them do something that we’re going to find objectionable before you’ve created empathy, before we’ve put ourselves inside that character, you’re going to push us away.

And then we’re just observing the character rather than becoming the character, and then the movie isn’t going to work.

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Karel: Sometimes I have clients who resist the structural principles, saying “but I want to be different“. What do you say to that?

Michael: Often times I see movies from England, or Australia, or Canada or possibly even non-English speaking countries but mostly there and the conclusion I draw is, that there is sort of this underlying belief that we can’t out-Hollywood Hollywood.

So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to sort of bend over backwards to not follow the rules of Hollywood. We’re going to not give it clear happy endings, we’re going to make the ending obscure or inconclusive, or we’re going to have it sort of a bummer or nothing is really going to be different or we’re gonna take somebody on an odyssey that isn’t really structured in the same way.

I believe that’s a big mistake.

And here’s why: it doesn’t matter if a movie makes a lot of money or not per se, you can’t just be going after money. But there is something about big box office and that is: the more money it makes at the box office, the more people were touched emotionally by your work.

It’s hard for Australian, Canadian and English filmmakers, just like it is hard for independent American filmmakers to out-Hollywood Hollywood when it comes to special effects or big movie stars. But those aren’t the big things. I’m talking about principles of a clear visible goal, of a six stage structure, of clear turning points, of an uplifting or a happy ending, a complete character arc, of transformation that leaves the audience feeling uplifted or empowered or positive and there’s no reason that those qualities can’t exist in movies from anywhere. Because there are examples of movies that cost $100,000 that do that, they don’t have to cost $100m to achieve those things.

I think it is kind of like settling for something if the underlying attitude is: “Let’s not even try and do those kinds of movies, we can only make the arthouse fare”.

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