World Building

Soon, very soon, something is going to happen.

The protagonist just doesn’t know it yet. The opening scene carries us through the first three minutes of the movie—that’s three pages in typical script format. Sometimes it’s shorter, sometimes it’s longer, but the job of the opening scene is to ensure the audience has a sense of what the movie’s going to be about, and what’s at stake. In the pages and scenes that follow, the writer must introduce the protagonist and the ordinary world to set the stage for the story.

• In STAR WARS IV: A NEW HOPE, Darth Vader’s invasion of the rebel starship and the capture of Princess Leia show us immediately that we’re in space, and at war. We grasp that the rebels are fighting against a tyrannical Empire. Turn off the volume, and we still understand what’s at stake. The struggle between makeshift rebellion and all-powerful Empire is expressed right down to the design of the beat-up rebel spaceship and the massive, technologically advanced Imperial starship.
  

• By the end of the first scene of FINDING NEMO (2003), Marlin loses his wife and 399 children. He cups the sole remaining egg in his fin and promises always to take care of... Nemo. That, of course, is what the whole movie is about. When Nemo is abducted, Marlin does whatever it takes to find him. We also understand—because we understand Marlin’s past—just how great a loss he feels. Losing Nemo is Marlin’s worst nightmare. He relives the most traumatic loss he ever experienced. Nemo is all Marlin has left. (Pause here to shed a tear. This story gets our emotions going!)

The important thing to remember about the ordinary world or “world as we know it” is that we are encountering the protagonist as he or she goes about business as usual. Very soon something is going to happen—but the protagonist doesn’t know it yet. Even when a character bends the rule and anticipates change, like Tony in WEST SIDE STORY (1961), he only has a vague sense, or perhaps a premonition, that something unusual is coming.

At the beginning of Act One, we meet the protagonist’s friends, find out what defines ordinary life for the character and discover rivalries or other sources of conflict. Little by little, the protagonist’s character is revealed by the decisions she makes and the ways she interacts with others—but not because a character verbalizes what the well-intentioned novice thinks the audience should know at the beginning of the story (the no-no known as "exposition”). We discover the protagonist’s nature by watching her live her life.

Let’s talk some more about exposition. In a memorable scene near the beginning of PULP FICTION (1994), we meet the two hit men played by Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. They are nonchalantly driving along, chatting aimlessly. Screenwriting expert Richard Walter will tell you that you should avoid car scenes as much as restaurants. He’s right, because these kinds of scenarios breed exposition. Tarantino, however, is a master craftsman. Watch, and admire.

In PULP FICTION, the characters philosophize about seemingly trite topics: whether it’s okay or not to give the boss’s wife a foot rub, what a quarter pounder with cheese is called in France. They park the car, grab guns from the trunk, and execute the soulless massacre of drug dealers who have been encroaching on their boss’s territory. Whoa.

The novice writer might have weighed down the story with useless and meaningless expository dialogue. “Hey, man, can you believe this is our fiftieth hit together?” “How long have we been doing this, anyhow?” “Remember that one time...at band camp?” (Just kidding.) Instead, what Tarantino achieves is masterful. When the hit men chat about all kinds of things irrelevant to the task at hand—food in Paris, giving foot rubs—he reveals to us how cold-blooded they are. This is their ordinary world. Parking a car, pulling out guns and mowing down some amateurs who have overstepped their boundaries is as second nature to these guys as taking my dog for a walk is to me. It’s jarring. Without telling us a single thing about the moral worldview of the characters, Tarantino shows us everything we need to know. That’s filmmaking at its best.

Here’s another example of how a story can set up the ordinary world and reveal character through action. In THE PROPOSAL (2009), Margaret Tate is a go-getter career girl and workaholic. We know this because when the movie begins, she is up before dawn in her fancy Manhattan apartment, cycling on her stationary bike, reading a manuscript, half-heartedly watching an intense woodsy simulator on her TV. Margaret’s job is her world. We wonder if she has ever bothered to notice the breathtaking—real—view of Central Park we see right outside her window.
   

That is how a great set up sequence—the ordinary world—functions. By experiencing a tiny slice of Margaret’s life, we surmise all kinds of things about her. Within minutes, we feel like we know Margaret, even though she hasn’t said a word.

Andrew Paxton, meanwhile, is quite the opposite—or is he? Andrew lives in a small, simple apartment. He oversleeps and doesn’t have time to date. (According to an earlier version of the script, he doesn’t even have time to remember the name of the girl beside him when he wakes up.) He, too, is enslaved by his job, driven to succeed at all cost. Andrew knows that in order to succeed, he must please his boss, Margaret, even though he loathes her. No one likes Margaret. We know this because as she approaches the office, Andrew fires off a warning email to everyone on staff: “The wicked witch is on the broom.”

As the scene unfolds, we learn that Andrew will do anything for a promotion. Margaret will do anything to keep her job. When disaster strikes, it’s hardly surprising that the reckless determination inherent to both of these characters is completely believable, since the audience feels like they already know and fully understand their laser-focused, workaholic existences. We know what drives them: success at any cost.

Of course, Andrew fails to realize that part of him is just like Margaret. Each views the other only as a means to an end...but you’ll have to watch the movie to find out what happens. (If you want to get the most out of this experience, make the time to watch the movies discussed in each step.)

© SJ Murray, 2018