A Note on Character

Creating believable characters is essential to the success of any screenplay, regardless of its genre. Often my partner and I are called on to come into a project in development and do 'character work,' an ungraceful term which usually means making two-dimensional cardboard cutouts into three dimensional human beings. How one does this is an elusive business at best; it is more like sleight-of-hand than engineering. One cannot, of course, make a character on the page a human being, but one can create the illusion of humanity - the sensation in the mind of the reader or viewer that he has grasped the truth of the character. Doing so is one of the most important and challenging tasks a writer faces, and I suppose that every good writer has his or her own ways of accomplishing it.

In my own work, I have found it useful, when considering the portrayal of a character, to ask a few salient questions. (I will use the masculine pronoun for convenience.) Among these are: What does this person want? Why is this person behaving the way he is - that is, why does he think, talk and act the way he does? Why is he associating with the people with whom he does? What does he cherish most, and what does he fear most?

Now, I have said that writing is not mechanical, and so it is not enough simply to ascribe answers to these questions in order to make characters human and three-dimensional. Arriving at the answers is only a start in the process. You must get to know your character so deeply, so instinctively, that he begins to be a part of your life - that he begins to talk to you. I have always found this to be the case. I so saturate myself with a character that I find him or her talking to me at odd moments - when I am driving, or relaxing or even when I am sleeping. I cannot tell you how many times a character has awakened me in the middle of the night, telling me what he or she wants, challenging me to face the truth about him or her whether I want to or not. When we were working on a script about Marilyn Monroe, for example, I found her regularly invading my sleep, and at one crucial point in the writing process, she said to me: 'You're refusing to face the truth just as I did.' She then proceeded to tell me about something that happened to her when she was nine years old that made the whole script make sense.

Now, of course, I was not having a ghostly visitation. I had come across clues to her perplex in my research, but I did not put them together until Marilyn herself told me how to do it. It was a subconscious process of coming to grips with the character which was the direct result of total immersion over a period of months of research, reading and thinking. And this brings me to a simple point about creating characters: It is damned hard work. You have to live with a character, learn everything you can about him - or in the case of fiction, imagine everything you can about him - think about him, eat and sleep with him, and try to see the world through his eyes. This was certainly true when we wrote 'Nixon,' and it was neither an easy nor a pleasant task. But I will tell you that I came to an appreciation of Richard Nixon that I would never have achieved otherwise. I really did begin to see the world as he saw it, and to empathize with him. That experience, in turn, has colored my entire understanding of the politics of the sixties and seventies, because I now understand that Nixon did have a valid point of view even in extremis, and that his demise may have been the result of a combination of forces, both personal and political, that holds the key to much truth about that period.

For this reason, writing is, first of all (perhaps above all), a learning experience. Creating a character ought to change you; it ought to make you larger, wiser, more compassionate and more sophisticated and nuanced in your world view. For we writers have a responsibility and an opportunity that is denied to any other artist (with the exception of actors): We can become someone else, in a deep and revealing way - revealing not only of the character but of ourselves. All well-drawn characters have something important to teach us as writers. If they do not, how can they teach an audience? To put it another way: If you do not learn from your characters, if they do not teach you things that you did not anticipate and could not have learned any other way, then they are not authentic characters, but mere extensions of your own personality, or silhouettes that you manipulate around a plot as the plot requires.

If you emerge from a work having done nothing but reinforced your own point of view and affirmed your preconceptions, then you can be sure that your characters are flat and sterile, and that you, as a writer, are a fraud. If you write only to reassure yourself that you are right, then you are no better than the socialist realist hacks of the old Soviet Union. You are, in fact, not a writer at all. Writing is and ought to be dangerous: dangerous to society and dangerous to the writer. The experience of seeing the world through another human being's eyes ought to be a revolutionary one for you as a writer. It ought to take you places you did not expect to go, but where you must go because the characters require it. As I said: Creating believable characters changes you.

That this is so is simply a function of the fact that writing is about Truth. Not truths with a small 't' and a plural termination, but about singular Truth with a capital 't'. Unless you feel that you are in possession of some small particle of truth that an audience needs to hear and that you can bring to them in your unique voice, then you should not be writing. And the chief way you do this - to bring this truth to the audience - is through the creation of character. But character has to be real, subtle, organic and vivid, and how are you going to achieve this if you do not get at that particle of Truth contained in your character? So please bear this in mind: When you are creating characters, you are dramatizing not your truth, but theirs. And as a writer, you must believe that the truth of your characters is superior to your own sense of truth. This is a difficult mental, moral and spiritual adjustment to make, but it is what makes writers of drama unique, and what makes it possible for drama to change minds in a way that no other form of writing can do.

So you must be willing to let the character take you wherever HE wants to go - not where you want him to go. You must reach the point in your understanding of the character where he dictates the story to you: he tells you the story he wants told, which may not be the one you set out to tell. Tolstoy experienced this in his writings. Often he simply could not force his characters to do what he wanted them to do, and we can read in his notebooks the arguments and urgings and frustrations he directed at certain of his characters. I have also found this to be true in my work. There are moments in a screenplay when a character simply will not do what I want; he insists on doing something else, something that feels right for him, something that reflects the truth about him.

Motivation is terribly important: Why is this character behaving the way he is? In order to answer this, it is imperative that you put yourself in the character's place, that you get inside his head. For it is not your head that matters, but his. Keep asking him why, what do you want, what are you trying to say through this piece, through me? And whatever the answer is, it ought to conform to your understanding of the meaning of the script as described earlier. If the character's motivation is at odds with the essential meaning of the script, then you are writing the wrong script.

Language is also crucial to character. To a great extent, characters are defined by what they say and how they say it. For a character to be authentic, he must possess a verbal idiom all his own. You must be very careful every time you put words into your character's mouth. The words must be his, identifiably a part of his personality. His level of diction, syntax, grammar and dialect must reflect and reveal who he is. But do not fall into the trap of so many writers by making a character's language too consistent and lacking in variation and color. Listen to how people speak: they often surprise you with their choice of words, or with some sudden unexpected turn of phrase. Your characters should do likewise; their language should be a part of their personalities, and it should be so particular to them that, if your removed all the dialog tags, you would still know who was speaking. I once wrote a book with this idea in mind, and I learned a great deal from the experience. A character's lexicon and style of speech is an integral part of who he is and how the audience will perceive him. For what comes out of our mouths influences how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves.

I have said earlier that ideally a screenplay should be a long-form poem. By this I mean that the language must be intensive as in poetry, and, as in poetry, it ought to have rhythm, balance and weight. Writing a character's dialog is the best opportunity you have to make your screenplay poetic, for everything the character says should have intensity of meaning and sonority of phrasing. This does not mean that you ought to write your dialog in verse (though I have done this, as in 'Copying Beethoven,' and I intend to do it again), but that your words must be chosen with as much care for meaning and beauty (or deliberate ugliness) as a poet chooses his words.

Characters are also defined by the company they keep. A script will normally be populated with subsidiary characters, all of whom stand in relation to the main character (or characters). The question here is who are they and why are they here. And this raises the matter of primacy. Is your main character in fact the most important character in the script? If so, why? It was Steven Spielberg who pointed out to me that if you can tell the story without the main character as the main character, then you are telling the wrong story. I agree. The main character is the main character because his point of view must be the one with which the audience will identify most intimately. I recently saw the film 'Bad Lieutenant' for the first time, and I was struck by the fact that the protagonist was perhaps the most unrelievedly negative character I had ever seen. I did not identify with him for very long; I found him repulsive and off-putting. In my view, he should not have been the main character at all, but, rather, a compelling subsidiary character to, say, the nun who was violated and who chose to forgive her attackers. She, at least, would have had contrasts and subtleties and contradictions in her character that might have taught us something. But at some point, apart from a dull curiosity, I did not care what happened to the lieutenant - in fact, I was in no doubt about what would happen, and I learned nothing when it did.

Your characters, main and otherwise, must possess humanity in order to project humanity. They must have reasons for making the choices they do with which an audience can identify. We just created an example of this recently in a script in which the main character and his family stop at a motel in the deep South. They are turned away by the manager's wife who, in our initial draft, was herself a racist. But we realized that we have seen that character too many times, that such a character is now a stereotype and of no interest. And so, on the re-write, we made it clear that she did not want to turn them away but was afraid of upsetting her husband who was sleeping in the next room. "If it was up to me," she pleads, "but it's not." Those lines made her a more authentic character; one who, instead of being a sneering racist, appears for the brief moment which she occupies in the film as the prisoner of a marriage to a racist, whose snoring we hear. Why is she behaving in the way she does? Because she knows that her husband will be furious if she behaves otherwise. And this in a character who appears for only one page. How much larger a role must motivation play in your main character?

At every turn, with every decision, we must learn something new about your character. His personality must begin to develop facets like a diamond in the process of cutting. But these facets ought to be revealed with the depth and complexity of humanity itself - not through rigorous logic nor arbitrarily, but with the grim and endearing truthfulness of human nature. In the script for 'Like Dandelion Dust,' the antagonist (played brilliantly by Barry Pepper) was originally depicted as an unrelieved villain. When I was asked to rewrite the script, I took it as my first priority to humanize this character; to give him a point of view with which the audience could identify. And so, instead of his just being a violent drunk, I gave him the ability to behave contritely, even sweetly, I made it clear that all his life he had been short-changed by fat cats and big shots, that he had dreams and ambitions but, as often happens in life, they had not been realized. And so, when he declares that he wants his son back, it is because his son represents everything that he has dreamed of and longed for, and that has been taken from him by people more powerful than he.

Make your character's motives clear, and you will have gone a long way toward making him human. You will have provided him with the ability to elicit empathy from the audience, for, even if we do not agree with him, even if we ultimately find him repulsive, we will have remained with him on his journey because we perceive something of ourselves in him: We will have seen a truth. For a writer's only duty is to truth. It is the business we are in, the pursuit we are about. And truth is brought to life above all through character. Character, it is not too much to say, is truth - the writer's truth.