TRANSCRIPT

The opening image of your film or your story, your book, your game, is everything. You know, we say in life that there’s only one chance to make a first impression. I think this is really true of the story, but there's so much more at stake in a story than just a gut reaction to it.

I mean, this is where I ask myself, “Why should I care? What's at stake? Why does this story matter?” Now, the interesting thing from the perspective of being a writer is it’s very hard for me to find where to begin until I realize where the story is going to end. By that I don't mean all the specific details. What I'm getting at here is the idea that your storybook world that you’re building has certain values. There's the values that your protagonist embraces that's often the underdog values and then there's the values of your antagonist, the dominant values of the world, and your protagonist has to wrestle against them. I need to get some sort of sense of that battle of what's at stake in the world when the screen opens on your story, and in order to understand it, I need to know what's going to be at stake at the end, like why is the protagonist fighting? Why does it matter? Even if the protagonist doesn't understand yet how crucial their role is in bringing the story to a term, we as writers have to understand that. That’s a lesson I’ll return to in the course as well.

As a writer we have to learn to divorce ourselves from what we know is going to happen when we're thinking from the point of view of a protagonist. What does that mean? It means that while I as a writer know exactly where the story is going (I know who's going to win out in the end even if I don't know all the details as to how it happens) my protagonist has no clue. My protagonist is waking up every morning just like you and I wake up, thinking, “I wonder what today is going to bring.” My protagonist can't make a decision to go somewhere simply because as a convenience I, as a writer, need them to. So that's why openings are beginnings. I need to get a sense that the protagonist is waking up to life as normal. I need to figure out how to show what that life as normal looks like, and yet at the same time in the undercurrent of the story, the audience has to get a sense that this is not a day like any other. This is the last day to enter the story. This is the last moment to enter the story before everything changes. Beginnings are not just an opportunity in a film to make a first impression. They’re an opportunity to get buy-in and for me to care about why the story matters.

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