Decades ago, when I was still a member of the screenwriting faculty at UCLA’s film school, one of my colleagues, now deceased, preached in his lectures that writers should make their villains as ‘villainy’ as they can.
I’m sure he meant not ‘villainy,’ the noun, but ‘villainous,’ the adjective.
Hey, it was a writing class!
I expect that he meant bad guys in movies should be as evil as possible, perhaps because it provides the protagonist, presumably the good guy, with sharp contrast.
I don’t agree, first of all, that protagonists are necessarily good guys. Tony Soprano? Walter White? Macbeth? Richard III? Willie Loman? Archie Bunker? Among this list are murderers and bigots, and some of dramatic literature’s most timeless, enduring protagonists.
I say that, above all else, every character in a screenplay should be portrayed as somehow sympathetic.
The cruel Japanese commandant in the Best Picture Oscar-winning The Bridge Over the River Kwai, for example, is given a lonely moment late in the narrative where he is seen to weep. Suddenly he is shown to be not some cartoon cut-out baddy but only another human being caught up in dreadful circumstances that are beyond his control. I’m not arguing that he’s right or wrong, but merely that he’s human, and when an evil character’s humanity is revealed, it makes for better drama.
In Swimming with the Sharks, the bad guy is a movie executive played by Kevin Spacy, modeled after some notoriously brutal, intimidating producer like, say, Scott Rudin. Late in the movie, however, writer George Huang has Spacy’s character get a bit teary, a trifle mournful, and suddenly the audience learns how he got to be the way he is, and actually experiences a twinge of sympathy on his behalf. That, again, makes for stronger drama.
My late sister Jessica was a notorious movie bad guy. In Clint Eastwood’s first directorial outing, Play Misty for Me, she portrays a psychotic murderer. In the legendary TV series Arrested Development, she plays a cold, cutting, uncaring, perhaps even abusive, certainly an intimidating alcoholic mother, Lucille Bluth.
But Jess had this trick, a technique that she frequently employed where, at the last minute, her character would become just a tad misty-eyed, a trifle sad. She would hesitate a bit, and even stutter, perhaps struggling for breath. Suddenly, in this manner, her role’s vulnerability was rendered visible to the audience. Inevitably, it made for more powerful drama.
The villain in Christian scripture has to be Judas, who rats out his Lord for thirty pieces of silver, resulting in the crucifixion on the cross. But don’t Christians believe that God sent his son to Earth for that very purpose? If Jesus doesn’t die on the cross and, in doing so, take upon himself the sins of all Christians, they are not saved. If not for Judas;s acton, instead of sitting at God’s right hand for eternity in the Kingdom of Paradise, weren’t they otherwise doomed forever to burn in Hell?
Didn’t God chuck Judas something of a sympathetic break there?
If God could write so splendid a Bible observing this principle, wouldn’t She have made a heck of a screenwriter?
It might seem dramatic for writers to create portraits of antagonistic villains who are as evil, as hateful as, say, mythical monsters from Jupiter. This is, however, a mistake. To do so is not to expand but actually to mitigate the villain’s evil. Truly worthy movie villains are far more evil than any mere monster from Jupiter. They are, after all is said and done, much worse than that.
They are human.
Do you have any questions about screenwriting? Comment below and I’ll do my best to answer them in future articles. :-)
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Richard, great podcast. First, as someone who missed the mentor era, there is nothing i want more than to have my screenplay ripped to shreds by Richard Walter. How do you approach re-drafting or editing? It’s my achilles heel. Of the thirty or so scripts i’ve written, few of them get past a second draft. How would you recommend addressing this? Thank you!!