Emotional Structure (Part 4)

“A dramatic story is any series of events having vivid, emotional, conflicting, striking interest or results.”
William Froug
Screenwriting Tricks of the Trade

“Witness is a great little film that works on all levels. The ending of one thing is always the beginning of something else.”
Syd Field

If basic emotions are Happy, Sad, Disgust, Surprise, Anticipation, Love, Trust, Excited, Tender, Angry, and Scared then perhaps one of the reasons for the success of the 1985 movie Witness is that all of those emotions are hit in the first act. Not as if the writers went down a check list while writing the story, but they are organic to the story.

The writers of Witness (William Kelly, Earl K. Wallace, and Pam Wallace) won an Academy Award for their script and story. (Six-time Oscar-nominated director/writer—and director of Witness—Peter Weir also had an uncredited hand in shaping the script.)

And the writers didn’t put down the emotions after the first act, they continued to build emotions and feelings of affection, pride, passion, nervousness, sadness, shame, shock, alienation, disappointment, panic, hope, courage, serene, affection, friendliness and I’m sure quite a bit more.

It’s great to study this movie and script not only because it’s a contemporary classic film, but because quite a bit about it has been documented in various screenwriting books. One of those books is Emotional Structure: Creating the Story Beneath the Plot by Peter Dunne. Dunne is a big fan of using index cards to work out the structure of the script. (That’s a pretty common practice and I wrote about it in the post Screenwriting Via Index Cards.) Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) uses index cards, so what else do I need to say?

The opening scene of Witness for Dunne looks like this on an index card:

Opening in AMISH COUNTRY

A FUNERAL. The COMMUNITY DRESSED IN TRADITIONAL gathering AT RACHEL’S FAMILY FARMHOUSE.

We SEE the CULTURE and the PEOPLE. It is A GENTLE WORLD, SINCERE AND SWEET even at an emotional time as this.

(I think Sorkin might simply write; An Amish Funeral.)

What many writers are doing with index cards is building their dramatic structure. The sweeping flow of the story. The twist Dunne gives is he suggests writing out the emotional payoff of the scene on the back of the card.

Dunne writes, “We are creating an emotional structure for our screenplay, and this card is worthless unless it contains the emotional content and the emotional intent of the scene. We are not creating a plot and then forcing an emotional story into it. We cannot develop an idea for a scene without knowing first and foremost what the emotional reason for its being is. Right? Right.”

The example that Dunne gives in his book is not from the opening, so here’s my version of what you might write on the back of your index card; Sorrow and hurt fill the farmhouse as tears are shed at an Amish funeral that appears to be another time in another country—but is in fact current day rural Pennsylvania. The audience is disoriented by the Amish language and has compassion for a wife and young son who have lost a husband and a father.

Or you could write with more Sorkin-like brevity on the front of your index card:

Rural Amish Funeral. Tears and sorrow. Introduce widow and her young son.

Either way you are now on your way to emotionally (on top of dramatically) structuring your film.

“Scene after scene you will build on those emotions until eventually even the smallest occurrences in the plot will have emotional impact. An emotional shorthand develops for you, and sensorial touchstones appear. By that I mean your audience will begin to react viscerally to things late in the script that were introduced in the beginning of the script through emotions attached to them.”
Peter Dunne

Even if you aren’t the type of writer who uses index cards—or other visual aids— to track your story, asking what the emotional impact of each scene is important in understanding the emotional structure of your film. As we’ll see later this week, directors, actors, cinematographers and editors are all looking for the emotional thrust of each scene.

When I’m done with this thread on emotions and screenwriting it will be over a month of posts—far more than anything I’ve ever written about in the four years of doing this blog. The reason is simple; I think it’s the greatest void in the scripts I read and the movies I see.

P.S. Watching Witness for the first time in years reminded me that the film opens almost like a silent movie. The first 15-minutes of the movie are communicated visually with very little dialogue.  Director Weir (who also directed Dead Poets Society) said in an interview on the DVD, “I think I would have liked to have worked in the silent era.” And perhaps some of the credit for the scripts success should also go to Harrison Ford who starred in Witness and said, ”I like very much to try and refine the dialogue to what’s both natural and essential to move the story along. When there are too many words I call that in my shorthand ‘talk-story’—We’re talking about the story rather than illustrating the story.”

P.P.S In that opening funeral scene in Witness you’ll see actor Viggo Mortensen in his first feature film appearance. One of the ways that the director Weir (from Australia himself) set the Amish apart in the film was to cast foreign actors. While Mortensen was born in New York, his father was from Demark and Viggo spent time in his youth living in Venezuela, Argentina and Denmark.

Scott W. Smith