TRANSCRIPT

The world of the story is part of the story. It's as important as the plot points themselves. What do I mean by this? When we walk through our everyday lives, we think of the world around us is being accidental. It's just something that's there that we relate to. Maybe we arrange things in a certain way in our home, but when we're walking down the street, it's beyond our control. So that's not exactly the way the storybook world works in a film or in a novel. You know, I had a great teacher at UCLA. His name is Richard Walter. He used to talk about integration and I recommend that you go read his book Essentials of Screenwriting. The idea behind integration is that every single detail of the story matters. It has to count. It has to show me something, and that taught me to go a step further in thinking about the world of the story and realize that the world is a manifestation of the values at play and intention in the story itself. So if there's a detail on the wall or if the story is playing in a small town or under the ocean or on a planet in space, that's because it's going to better showcase the tensions in the screenplay. The world of the story is not accidental. It’s carefully chosen and built by the writer.

So today I really invite you, in addition to the other exercises in the course, to sit down and think, “Have I picked the best world for my story?” Some of the greatest tales ever told have been born in this process of transposing your world to somewhere else. For example, Andrew Stanton, I believe, found the drive for Finding Nemo when he thought he had lost his son on the playground, but he didn't choose to tell the story of a father losing his son on a playground in the human world. He thought, “Wow! What if I put this under the ocean, and what if I made the main players fish?” and that made it super interesting and it allowed us to build this whole world that is novel and exciting to us. So do you have the best world for your story? You might be thinking yes right now, and sometimes I think of the best world right off the bat, but I've learned that if I challenge myself to transpose my story into other worlds, I find out if I had the best solution at the start. One thing I'd like you to do today is think about what your story would look like if you approached its world in three different ways. Challenge yourself to think of three different ways you can tell the story and what the world would look like, and then come back to your original idea and see what you've learned from the journey.

At the end of the day, your gut intuition is something to follow. I just want you to challenge yourself to not be constrained by it. Look at your gut as an invitation to explore the very best pathway to unlocking your story. It's kind of like that. It's really like a puzzle that needs to be unlocked, and the more you work on it, the more that story is going to come into focus, the more the puzzle is going to appear. The further you get in the process of story design, the easier it's going to be to slot in the other pieces. So follow your gut, trust your intuition, but at the same time don't settle for anything less than what feels right for your story. I want you to challenge your audience. I also want you to challenge yourself.

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