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Screenwriting structure Part 4 What I learned from Aristotle

reverse-engineerI’m sure there were others BEFORE that successfully reversed engineered stories but I would venture a guess that he is probably the best known for it. I think all the screenwriting gurus and screenwriting authors out there agree that he pretty much is the guy we need to thank for coming up with the fact that a story has a beginning, middle, and end.

And hey… I’m right there with him. Stories certaintly do contain those three basic forms of structure and without these basic forms, reverse engineering your favorite movie would be an exercise in futility (thanks QT).

But that isn’t where I started my own analysis of structure in the movies… Nope. As I read more and more about Aristotle and his theories on stories and plays, I found out just how great a man he was but since this post has to do with screenwriting structure, let’s funnel it on down to that.

Causality. Or to be more precise, .

Again, that’s not to say there weren’t others before Aristotle who studied causality but he is perhaps, credited with a much higher and complete understanding of the :

  1. : that out of which a thing comes to be.

  2. : the definition of its essence.

  3. : the primary source of the change or rest.

  4. : that for the sake of which a thing is done.

Cause or causality link possible events or occurrences and can predict the consequences of an action. In other words, one event is the cause or result of another event. In this relationship, chance and spontaneity become the causes of effects.

Spontaneity and chance is the result of an unintended outcome… Let’s say I want to go to the coffee shop to write for a few hours. Going to the coffee shop is my INTENDED OUTCOME or my plan but on the way there, I get hit by a car (chance or unintended outcome).

So why talk about this? Well for me, the very best way to study the structure of your favorite movies is to simply reverse engineer them and on the face of it, you’d think that statement alone would be explanation enough… Unfortunately, I keep finding a lot of “would be” screenwriters who have no idea what I’m actually saying or MEAN when I tell them to go “reverse-engineer that movie.”

On top of that, when I read screenplays from the field, I almost always ask the writer what movie or movies their screenplay is most like AFTER I read it… Some will say there is no movie that it’s most like EVEN when what I just read is obviously derivative. Some go right ahead and tell me what the movies are and when they do, I always ask if they sat down and reversed-engineered that movie and in almost all cases, they say, “NO.”

And again, that’s perfectly fine… You obviously do not have to reverse-engineer any movie to write a screenplay but what I’m saying here is that if you DO sit down and reverse-engineer a similar movie’s structure, you’re going to be light years ahead of your competition. Most pros know this already and whether you like it or not, this IS one of the ways to move your screenplays past all those others in the same pile.

Assuming of course your examination of a movie’s structure is on the money.

The problem of course comes when would-be screenwriters have no idea HOW to reverse engineer a movie. The usual process seems to go something like this…

Okay, here’s the climax or the ending. Now work backwards. For a few minutes, that would-be screenwriter considers SOME of the factors that got the protagonist to the end of the film and then…

And then…

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

They figure they’ve got that movie all figured out.

Nope. Not by a long shot.

Now I can’t or won’t sit here and try to give you detailed step by step way to reverse engineer a movie. There’s not enough room here to do that and besides, what works for me, may not work for you but consider sitting down and pulling out that film that possibly inspired you to write your screenplay(s) and start making some notes.

I usually do it with my trusty digital recorder. I sit there and watch the end of the movie first and proceed to examine the climax in detail and dictate notes to myself as well as writing them down.

For me, I’ve found it much easier to do this in sequences i.e., watch the last sequence FIRST. Then watch the sequence before that. Continue to make detailed notes of those events that spawned new events. CAUSE and EFFECT — plain and simple.

Yes, it can be boring if you’ve never REALLY sat down and done this before. If you’re just used to watching movies as the rest of the world does, then this probably WON’T be a piece of cake.

But you wanna be a screenwriter, right?

No… Aristotle probably didn’t have the opportunity to watch things in reverse and make notes but don’t even try to sit there and tell me he wouldn’t have taken advantage of the modern DVD player and done the exact same thing assuming there were films on DVDs back then. Again, this is simply how you can gain an edge when it comes to screeenwriting structure.

After you’ve reversed-engineered the hell out of a film, wait a day or so and watch it normally but again, with your notes and your remote so you can pause and reflect.

Repeat this same process with ALL the movies that YOUR screenplay or idea for a screenplay remind you of no matter what the genre. I do this before I sit down and actually write any real screenplay pages but I have normally completed a ton of research on the idea/story.

In addition to the notes you make on the movies you’re reverse-engineering, you’ll very likey get some amazing ideas for your own screenplay/idea so be sure to record those for later use. For example, one of the films you watch and reverse-engineer has a scene that just stabs you through the heart or gives you a huge revelation or causes some great emotional response from you… GREAT! Be sure to make special note of those because you will want scenes in your screenplay that elicit similar emotional responses from your eventual readers and hopefully, audience members. Reverse-engineer those scenes and moments to SEE how the screenwriters arrived there and elicited that emotional response from you.

The more you do this with movies that are either within your genre or are somehow similar, the more solid and proven your own structure is going to be as long as you’re NOT copying the structure beat for beat.

Take a look at the movie, with Nicolas Cage. There is absolutely no way you’ll ever convince me that Andrew Kevin Walker didn’t reverse engineer (in his own way) the movie, with George C. Scott. There’s just enough new information and characters in 8MM to make that movie stand on its own. It’s edgier but that’s because audiences are a little more anticipatory of that edginess now as opposed to back in ‘79 but make no mistake, HARDCORE was just as edgy in its time.

I like to bring up the discussion of HARDCORE to illustrate reverse-engineering because reverse-engineered and studied the hell out of in order to write and direct HARDCORE and what’s so fucking cool about THAT is that if you sit down and watch HARDCORE, you’re never once reminded of THE SEARCHERS.

You can’t really say the same of 8MM if you’ve seen HARDCORE.

defined at Wikipedia:

Reverse engineering (RE) is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device or object or system through an abductive analysis of its structure, function and operation. It often involves taking something (e.g. a mechanical device, an electronic component, a software program) apart and analyzing its workings in detail, usually to try to make a new device or program that does the same thing without copying anything from the original.

Give reverse-engineering a try and you’ll understand so much more about screenwriting structure — it’ll make your head spin.

Unk




Thursday: 4 October 2007|1820|Under Structure

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16 Responses to “Screenwriting structure Part 4 What I learned from Aristotle”

  1. Moviequill on Thursday: 4 October 2007|1920

    Who’da thunk this Aristotle dude would be so highly revered after slipping the moussaka to Jackie O a few times, huh?

  2. spatula on Thursday: 4 October 2007|2146

    I’d toga party with that chap any day. Interesting stuff about reverse engineering. I’m almost afraid to analyze some movies that much, for fear of losing the “movie magic” on my favorites. But do what ya gotta do; do what you do, they say. Whatever it is you do. Who are they? They do. They’re the ones that do the saying of the things like ‘do what you do’.

  3. Clive on Friday: 5 October 2007|0325

    I’ve done some teaching over the years and the first thing I tell students is “Now, I’m going to ruin watching movies for you forever, because you’ll never be able to watch a film again without breaking it down into its production elements.”

    Nice post Unk, as usual you are several steps ahead of me. I’ve been breaking films down and taking notes on structure for a few years now, but damn it, it never occurred to run then from the end and literally reverse engineer them!

    Good tip — presumably you can do the same reading a screenplay.

  4. Tom on Friday: 5 October 2007|0857

    “I like to bring up the discussion of HARDCORE to illustrate reverse-engineering because Paul Schrader reverse-engineered and studied the hell out of THE SEARCHERS in order to write and direct HARDCORE”

    I thought the Searchers was the inspiration for Taxi Driver…

    I’ve had a hard time trying to find similar films to the script I’m working on. I think the closest would be Liar Liar. But I think I have a pretty unique character arc. My script consultant even said he hadn’t read a script quite like it before. But, that being said, he could have meant he hasn’t read a script this BAD before, and I’m sure the arc’s been done before, I just need to look harder.

    I’ll add Liar Liar to Netflix and give this a go. Sounds like it could help out a lot.

  5. Joshua James on Friday: 5 October 2007|1209

    the Searchers inspired many a movie, including STAR WARS . . .

    Of course, as a playwright, I got Aristotle comin’ out my ass, LOL!

  6. Joshua James on Friday: 5 October 2007|2145

    Shoot, Unk, you’re giving away the really good gold here, LOL!

    I just recently reverse engineered The Terminator, a particularly spectactular spec, I think . . . that one and T2 . . . good stuff.

    We did this in grad school with really old fucking plays, tore ‘em apart and examined all those things . . .

    It’d good stuff, tho’ deconstruction (which is what they call it) is different than construction and it’s good to keep that in mind when one is wrting something new, I think . . . anyone can take a screw out of a machine and it will fall apart . . . the important thing is figuring out how that screw contributes to the overall function . . .

  7. Clive on Saturday: 6 October 2007|0406

    Deconstruction is different from reverse engineering. Deconstruction is a critical theory based roughly on the writing’s of French Philosopher Jacque Derrida — a bad description of this complex theory would go a bit like this — Words don’t have meanings, only usages and these usages change through time and cultural setting. Because of this, any critical stance taken about a piece of literature is imposed on it by the person creating the crit rather than extracted from it. Therefore it’s possible to say contradictory things about any document and use the same evidence in order to make those contradictory points.
    Or, in other words, all of literary criticism and most of history is essentially useless, because all it does is reflect current linguistic trends and cultural ideologies.
    Sorry for the pedantry, but it was my honours degree speciality and I don’t get to use it much! LOL

  8. Thomas on Saturday: 6 October 2007|2019

    I can’t work without reverse engineering. It is such a powerful tool to my writing that I use it constantly. But instead of reverse engineer an entire movie similar to what I write, I mostly have 15 to 20 movies with scenes I want use. So I basically reverse engineer the scenes that I need and make them new in my script.

    Powerful stuff!

  9. Joshua James on Saturday: 6 October 2007|2138

    Not to argue with you, Clive, but it’s a terminology thing, ain’t it? We called it deconstruction, though it may have its roots in one philosophy, it’s certainly evolved from there, wouldn’t you say?

    There are differing forms of deconstruction, from what I remember . . . and I’ve forced myself to forget most of grad school, heh-heh . . .

  10. Tom on Saturday: 6 October 2007|2310

    “There are differing forms of deconstruction, from what I remember . . . and I’ve forced myself to forget most of grad school, heh-heh . . .”

    Don’t you mean “gradual school…” OK, I freely admit that I have had maybe one too many because the Cubs hit into more double plays than the entire 2007 National Leauge in one game, BUT, deconstrution is deconstruction, engineering is reverse engineering or vice versa… I’ve never been one for organization, so I’m firmly in the camp that you can write a story without some sort of technique.

    Maybe i’m a wide-eyed neophypte, but a story is a story. right? maybe I’m just burned out on all the screenwriting books and lectures, but I just have to believe that someone can go out there and just tell a story, right?

  11. Clive on Sunday: 7 October 2007|0323

    The irony is the very change in usage of the word deconstruction from a specific term meaning a obscure French linguistic philosophy to a whole other raft of usages is almost perfect proof of Derrida’s theory.

    So, er… yeah, it can mean lots of things… LOL

    By the way, I wasn’t arguing so much as showing off! Like I said, I don’t get to drop it into conversation much. LMAO

  12. Tom on Sunday: 7 October 2007|0818

    Sorry about that last post, drunk blogging isn’t as bad as drunk dialing, but it’s not good. I fully understand the benefit of all this deconstruction, and reverse engineering and basically everything UNK talks about on this site.

    I guess sometimes it just seems screenwriting leans more toward a science than an art. but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be so hard.

  13. Christian Howell on Sunday: 7 October 2007|1429

    Yet more brilliance from the UNK one. I don’t actually compare similar screenplays to mine, per se, though I do think of movies that have similar characters and\or arcs.
    Half the fun of doing that is challenging yourself to be unique in your view.

    I do write scripts from the end. I don’t think about introing the character until I know how the movie ends. In one of my favorites, the rating, main characters, and some events changed dramatically but because I started at the end I had a firm goal to work towards and the theme and mood remained the same.

    I now swear by it.

  14. Phil on Thursday: 11 October 2007|1037

    Hah!

    Isn’t another word for this just plain old ‘copying’?

    But yeah, of course, I do it too. I sit there with a pad, a remote, and run the movie/tv show forwards scribbling down big beats as they happen. You end up with a beat sheet, which you can abstract away a couple of levels higher on your own.

    Then, when it comes to work out your own story, you fill that abstraction with the particular detail of your world and characters - and there you go: a lovely new story!

    To be honest, any working writer who doesn’t do this, even in a half baked way, is either a genius and doesn’t need to, or is missing a very good trick.

    And yeah, absolutely, Christian, start with the end first. Saves you all kinds of grief.

    Nice post, Unk.

  15. Unk on Friday: 12 October 2007|0350

    Moviequill,

    I’ve heard from reliable sources that he never actually did any slipping…

    Spat,

    Ah yes… The MOVIE MAGIC. For me, and I suspect this is much the same with others, you can lose the magic for a while if you obsess and stress about the magic but if you can LET IT GO, the magic comes back. At some point… If you do it ENOUGH, you can actually do both.

    Clive,

    This was how I wrote my first screenplay. I didn’t read any books. There weren’t any magazines. All I had were two scripts: BLADERUNNER and THE THING. I reverse engineered those two movies and scripts over a 3 month period the best way I knew how. I used brown auto-body masking paper and several black Marks-A-Lot(s). I broke both movies and screenplays down to 12 and 15 foot lengths, respectively. I used my own lingo — a lot of which I use today for myself. I wrote EVERYTHING down and made a ton of notes until I felt that I had a basic working knowledge of structure.

    And I was write… I mean RIGHT.

    Josh,

    It’s all good whatever anyone calls it. I’m easy.

    Tom,

    There’s a lot of people that tell stories. There’s a lot of people that write stories.

    They JUST DO IT.

    And they suck at it. At least 98% of them do.

    Ouch.

    And I DO look to screenwriting as an art. I used to be a full-time artist… Yup. I painted on canvas and everything… LOL. Which brings me BACK to structure… Before you can paint a picture, you need something to paint on. If not canvas, then a piece of wood… Paper. Linen. Whatever. You need paint. Maybe you make your own. Maybe you use oils. Acrylics. Whatever.

    That’s your structure. Then you paint. Structure to me is simply THE GATHERING OF TOOLS. I need structure just as much as I need some kind of software, pen and paper, or typewriter to start working.

    A necessary evil for most of us.

    And a little drink now and then never hurt anyone… LOL.

    Thomas,

    That’s why I hesitate to explain in detail how I do it myself. I’d hate to teach someone how I do things if it’s not right for THEM. I would rather point out a direction and let someone discover the landmarks along the way… For instance, you like to reverse-engineer relative scenes — I’m assuming from different movies (at least some of them) and then string the entire set of scenes together into your own story and then of course tweak to fit.

    OUTSTANDING!

    Christian,

    Again, OUTSTANDING!

    Phil,

    Copying? Nope. Structure AIN’T copying unless you copy EVERYTHING including the story.

    8MM isn’t a copy of HARDCORE. They are certainly similar movies and anyone familiar with HARDCORE couldn’t help but think of that movie while they watch 8MM but both certainly are different movies.

    Probably NOT DIFFERENT ENOUGH for my own personal taste but different.

    You cannot however say that HARDCORE isn’t different enough from THE SEARCHERS.

    Cause and effect is reverse-engineering as far as I’m concerned.

    Great comments all… Really.

    Much appreciated.

    Unk

  16. Ryan on Friday: 12 October 2007|1142

    Just stumbled across your site. As an actor and aspiring screenwriter, I love this post. As a technical person, I can fully understand the concept of RE. We do it everyday in software development.

    Thanks,
    Ryan

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