“There’s no movie that can’t be told through its emotions. And there’s no movie that succeeds that is told any other way. In my opinion.”
—Billy Ray
I want to sneak in one more post before stepping back into a run of posts on Hamilton (and the emotional “I want” song My Shot.) This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post What is the simple emotional journey?—Screenwriter Billy Ray’s Mantra.
Normally Ray is given exclusive assignments where he has a week (or a weekend) to decide if he wants to take on a film project. But Captain Phillips was what he calls a “beauty pageant” where many screenwriters went in to pitch their angle on the story. This is how Ray arrived at his pitch and landed the assignment (and for which he received an Oscar nomination):
“I thought, what’s the movie about? Narratively, Captain Phillips is a white guy gets kidnapped by four black guys and three of them get their heads blown off. And not only was that not a movie I wanted to write, that was not even a movie I wanted to see. So I had to think, okay, where is the story in there that has an emotion that I want to write? And so I thought, well, you can just twist the reality of that. The narrative reality of that just a little bit. Look at it from a slightly different perspective and it becomes a story that would be moving. The pitch was, this is a movie about leadership. This is the story about two captain wake up on opposite sides of the globe and they get up in the morning and get dressed and go to work. And their work is going to put them on a collision course. And once they meet we’re going to realize that one of these captains is would sacrifice himself to save his men, and the other captain would sacrifice his men to save himself. And their collision is the story. That I could write. And that’s the movie. That’s what Captain Phillips is, but told in a visceral, emotional way.”
—Screenwriter Billy Ray
UCLA’s Story Break podcast interview with Simon Herbert and Chris Kyle
Tucked inside Ray’s pitch (and the trailer below) is conflict, character, stakes, emotions—core storytelling traits that helped attract Tom Hanks to the role. And also helped the other captained, played by Barkhad Abdi, to get an Oscar nomination and win a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor. (When AFI does a great movie quote list for this century, I expect Abdi’s line “Look at me, I’m the captain now” to be on that list. )
P.S. The very first line of Ray’s pitch for The Comey Rule (The TV mini series on James Comey) was the emotional idea, “This is a love story between a man in love with an institution, and everything he does is in defense of that institution.”
Related post:
Screenwriting Battlefield (How Billy Ray beat out more experienced writers when starting out. And what he learned from Robert McKee’s seminar.)
‘Hamilton’ as an Emotional Journey