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chapter four

CONFLICT IS KING

All screen story structure exists to drive some worthy hero onward through ever more daunting conflict toward an important goal. There’s just no tale to tell without this battle.

So take a tip from the World Wrestling Federation: the bigger, meaner, nastier the brawl, the better.

The opposing force character required to create conflict I’ll call the adversary. This term covers characters ranging from a decent person who needs to stop the hero for perfectly understandable reasons (Dr. Bruner in Rain Man), to a psychotic killer who just enjoys murder (crazed hitman Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men).

Movie conflict is two people pursuing mutually exclusive goals who smash into each other, physically and emotionally.

A hero and adversary collide either while chasing after a single goal that both want but only one can have, as in National Treasure, or while pursuing separate but opposing goals, as in Heat.

Vague resolutions won’t fly. Someone must win and someone must lose.

CONFLICT ON TWO LEVELS

In well-written screenplays, conflict plays out on two dramatic levels at the same time.

The first level of conflict is duked out in the external world, the world of sight and sound and physical action. In Iron Man, genius engineer Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) must stop his adversary Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) from selling Stark’s advanced weapons to terrorists. Physical conflict.

The second level of conflict is emotional, internal, and personal.

It is turmoil within the hero as he struggles to overcome some psychological roadblock that must be surmounted before he will be able to triumph in pursuit of his physical goal.

This second level of emotional conflict plays out simultaneously with the physical conflict so that the two clashes are parallel and weave together to form one strong screenplay.

In Groundhog Day, arrogant weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) finds himself condemned to relive the same horrible day over and over as he attempts to bed the girl he lusts after, Rita (Andie MacDowell). And day after day she rejects him. That is, until Phil learns to grow beyond narcissism and give of himself unselfishly to others. Allowing genuine love to finally enter his heart frees Phil, and he gets the girl and escapes from Groundhog Day at last.

VISIBLE PHYSICAL CONFLICT: Seduce his adversary love interest Rita who refuses all of his advances.

INNER EMOTIONAL CONFLICT: Fight to conquer narcissism and learn to love unselfishly.

In The Matrix, computer hacker Neo (Keanu Reeves) joins a band of rebels to fight Agent Smith and the machines who now rule the world. But there’s no hope of beating the evil Agent Smith until Neo overcomes self-doubt and grows to accept his true destiny as The One who will lead all surviving humans to victory.

VISIBLE PHYSICAL CONFLICT: Defeat Agent Smith and his army before they kill the rebels and enslave what is left of mankind.

INNER EMOTIONAL CONFLICT: Neo must overcome self-doubt and accept that he is The One able to accomplish impossible deeds.

The first level of physical, external conflict remains mandatory for all screen stories. Gotta have it.

The second level of inner emotional struggle is optional — but highly recommended. We’ll explore the inner Character Growth Arc more fully in a later chapter.

In both kinds of conflict not just one but a series of collisions is required. The nature of those repeated smashups must expand as the story advances and conflict grows in ferocity.

Here are the seven basic elements required to make conflict effective for the screen.

1. The conflict must be strong.

The strength of conflict in any movie will always be a major factor in defining commercial success or the lack of it. Strong conflict develops from three sources within a story:

a. The power of the adversary — he should appear unbeatable;

b. How greatly the hero desires to achieve her goal — she should want victory more than anything in the world;

c. How high the stakes are — stakes need to be nothing less than physical or metaphorical life or death.

In the movie Breach, rookie FBI agent Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe) gets assigned as office assistant to veteran agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper). The FBI knows Hanssen has been spying for the Soviets for years, and young hero O’Neill must collect further evidence against his new boss. He copies computer records, tapes conversations with Hanssen, and keeps his adversary boss out of the office so other agents can search Hanssen’s files.

The boss spy plans on retiring very soon. So he risks one last “drop” of secret government information for the Russians. Hanssen gets caught red-handed by other FBI agents and the movie ends.

Chris Cooper’s stunning performance as the Soviet mole Hanssen may yet save Breach from total oblivion.

But there’s something fundamentally off about this story.Conflict between the hero and adversary never grows strong enough to create an effective movie.

By the time O’Neill gets assigned as assistant to adversary Hanssen — the point at which this movie begins — Hanssen is no longer a threat to anyone. Scores of FBI agents hover over his every move. This spy has already been removed from the position he held, where Hanssen actually could do damage to the United States, and soon he’ll retire anyway. The Bureau only wants O’Neill to scrounge up a few final nails for Hanssen’s already closed coffin.

Oh, people shout at each other and get upset in the story, but real stakes don’t exist.

The story of Breach comes from true events, and like many other such films, the plot suffers for being reality-based. It couldn’t be manipulated enough to create the much-needed hero-focused conflict.

Handcuffed by facts, young O’Neill isn’t really responsible for causing the climax of his own movie. The hero isn’t even present at Hanssen’s showdown with FBI agents when the adversary gets arrested. And most of the evidence provided by the hero is redundant.

So core story conflict ends up feeling like the hero isn’t very important or at the center of things.

Also, the stakes for young rookie O’Neill are quite low. He works about eight weeks for the FBI, and then when informed that his first case has been closed (since he’s not personally present for the climax, he must be told), O’Neill realizes he doesn’t much like being an FBI agent after all, so he quits.

What a wuss. The problems in this film are:

a. A weak adversary;

b. A hero who isn’t very committed;

c. Stakes that are relatively low.

Conflict here just isn’t strong enough to create a captivating movie. Breach did not do well at the box office.

If your idea for a new screenplay doesn’t contain a powerful collision of two dynamic characters from the earliest “what if” in your head, then keep pounding on the idea until it does.

2. Conflict must be seen.

That strong, physical outer battle keeps the plot active and cinematically engaging while at the same time it permits the hero’s interior emotional struggle to be brought out into the open through behavior and actions that we can see.

In Romancing the Stone, hero romance writer Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) lives in loneliness because she longs for a perfect man — “Jessie,” who exists only in her books. Then, trying to help her kidnapped sister, Joan is thrown into the Columbian jungle, running for her life alongside sleazy exotic bird smuggler Jack Colton (Michael Douglas) who is everything that’s the opposite of Joan’s perfect guy. In order to survive — and find happiness — Joan must let go of her fantasy and learn to love a flawed but real man. She grows confident in her survival skills, matures emotionally, and lets go of her romantic notions to find happiness at last with Jack.

The physical plot action-line of this film allows the hero’s inner emotional conflict to become visible. If Joan just moped around her New York apartment dreaming about her perfect Jessie for the whole movie, it would be deadly dull. Taking action in the jungles of Columbia to save her sister’s life creates a film worth watching.

BOTH outer and inner conflict must be made active and visible.

3. Conflict must get nasty.

Screenwriters should abandon all instincts for being nice. At least on paper.

Screenwriting classes are filled with genuinely good souls; honest, warm people who value their families above all else, who live the Golden Rule each day, and meet the world with kindness and compassion. Unfortunately, the stories they create sometimes prove just how nice these students really are. None of their characters treat anybody badly. Nobody tries to stop anyone else from getting what they want.

For a script to succeed, you’ve got to get mean.

It’s your job to figure out the very worst things that can possibly befall your hero, then find the most shocking ways to make those very bad things happen. Not just once or twice but in a dramatically rising manner throughout your whole script.

When asked who the adversary of their story is, many new screenwriting students aren’t sure. Or they mention some secondary character who’s in no position to stir up any serious trouble for the hero. I’ve had writers tell me they thought their story didn’t need an adversary at all.

Good bloody luck.

When told conflict must be increased and toughened, sometimes a writer will try to fix things by having his powerless adversary burst into a scene and start shouting. Not necessarily about anything in the plot, mind you, just shouting. Then the adversary retreats to the story sidelines until a few scenes later when he strides forward to rant once more. Then withdraws again.

Conflict is not effective if it only starts and stops.

When your plot moves in jerks and fits and feels episodic, assess the strength and commitment of your adversary. Reconceive the story to include a central, powerful adversary who can provide conflict that gets ever nastier throughout.

4. Conflict should develop and grow to become more and more challenging for the hero.

The principle of change is never more vital than at the core of story conflict.

The battle must build throughout all the pages of a script. If conflict requires only one scene of real collision between the hero and adversary, and that scene gets put off so it can serve as a climax to the story, you end up with a hero stuck in the middle of the movie for a long stretch with nothing to do.

Did anyone say “passive hero”?

It’s quite a common problem and it can be solved forever by using the Hero Goal Sequences_® approach to story construction.

No small number of scripts have crossed my desk that offer the following scenario. Loving daughter Phyllis receives a proposal of marriage from grease monkey Ralph, the man of her dreams. But Phyllis knows if her adversary dad hears about an engagement, he’ll say no. Dad hates Ralph.

Phyllis worries. Phyllis asks friends what she should do. With another thirty pages of Act Two yet to go, Phyllis writes in her diary and cries, then asks Aunt Sarah what her thoughts are. Finally, near the end of Act Two, the daughter musters her courage and confronts dad, tells him she wants to marry Ralph. Dad shouts “over my dead body” several times. The heated climax scene plays out until dad breaks down in tears, expresses his boundless love for his daughter and agrees to the wedding. Dad hugs Phyllis. For Act Three, we watch the daughter’s happy wedding.

One confrontation scene alone cannot create a movie.

And a story concept built around one scene of genuine conflict leaves nothing for Act Three. A happy wedding isn’t an act. It doesn’t allow for the powerful dramatic conflict required there, too.

A marriage opposed by parents can be shaped into a fine story. Try Romeo and Juliet. But no plot can survive if conceived so that conflict does not develop in growing stages throughout the entire movie.

5. Conflict should surprise the audience.

Every story must offer the audience an intriguing conflict with unexpected turns.

This is perhaps the single greatest challenge for screenwriters today because everyone in the audience has already seen thousands of movies. But scripts that claw their way out of the slush pile and into the land of produced films invariably contain some element of the unexpected in their storytelling.

Juno presents a story so simple, so obvious, that at first we may expect very little originality from the film. But every character in it proves to be complex and compelling. Sixteen-year-old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) quickly begins reacting to her pregnancy in unexpected ways. And who’d have thought the adoptive dad Mark Loring (Jason Bateman) would turn out to be a bigger child than Juno herself ? It’s a simple story but with unexpected twists.

TIP: Here’s an important suggestion that by itself is worth the price of this book. When outlining your screenplay, write down on 3x5 cards, scene by scene, the next most logical thing that could happen in your story. Create a plotline where, after each scene, the next clearly logical thing unfolds. Now line up those cards and tape them to the wall above your computer. A scene spine for your whole movie.

Then — whatever you do — DON’T do that.

A writer should never, ever accept the easy or obvious plot way out.

Surprise your audience.

6. Conflict must be believable.

The Number 23 is about an Animal Control officer named Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) whose wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) gives him a mysterious journal that she finds in a secondhand bookshop. Walter discovers the book echoes his own life far too closely. He feels a creepy, growing bond with the detective hero in the story named Fingerling (also played by Carrey). The book sparks in Walter an overwhelming obsession with the number 23, which rapidly draws him down a cruel, dark path toward madness.

Eventually this loving family man comes to fear that he’s fated to murder his wife just the way it happens in the mysterious red journal. As Walter sinks into desperation, he must also solve a real-life murder mystery that forces him to face terrifying revelations about his own past.

I was captivated by The Number 23 for a while. Then at some point the plot became so stretched, characters so inconsistent, that I just didn’t care anymore. The whole thing became hokum.

Complex plotting often results in conflict believability problems.

This script lost touch with “reality” in the fictional world it created. We are asked to accept that the hero discovers he’s a former homicidal maniac who was locked in an insane asylum for years, but got released and forgot all that so now he hunts dogs for a living and nevertheless he’s a good husband with a loyal wife and loving son who don’t seem to mind he’s going nuts while seeking revenge on a stray neighborhood fido after his wife just happens to find an unpublished manuscript in a second hand book store written by the hero himself relating his past life fantasized as a detective who kills his girlfriend so the hero’s now worried he’ll kill his sweet wife especially after he finds the bones of the first girl he murdered but his wife will stand by her man, all the while the number 23 is supposed to relate to everything but doesn’t really.

Come on now.

When characters begin behaving in ways that hold no human truth, when they start doing things that serve no purpose except to advance a tortured plot, the audience feels betrayed. They step outside the movie and become critics.

The night I saw The Number 23 in a theater — a film that wanted very much to be taken seriously — by the end the audience was roaring with laughter.

Keep conflict believable.

7. Conflict must be resolved in a meaningful way.

The race must reach a finish line. Stories can only have real meaning if the hero pursues a final showdown that decides once and for all the main issue of the plot. A hero either triumphs or fails.

Even in serial movies (The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Matrix) where the central story question isn’t settled until the last installment, each separate episode still requires the resolution of its own main issue.

So conceive your conflict with a finish line built in.

By the end of Ray, singer Ray Charles will either overcome his addiction to heroin or he won’t.

By the end of Working Girl, Tess McGill will either triumph over her evil boss and close her big business deal or she won’t.

By the end of Fargo, Police Chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) will either nail the kidnappers or she won’t.

A lack of resolution in screen stories leaves audiences emotionally unfulfilled. For true-life biographical films especially, this can present a problem unless the real person died dramatically or reached some other moment of resolution in their life.

Chaplin recounts the life and loves of one of the world’s most famous comic filmmakers, Charlie Chaplin (Robert Downey, Jr.). But commercially this picture did not do well, and I believe it’s because the story is episodic without reaching any larger resolution.

Chaplin follows Charlie’s quick rise to fame, riches, and creative control over all his films. The movie also dramatizes his many affairs with much younger women. An eventful, incredibly successful life is portrayed. But where’s the story and theme resolution?

The concept holding Chaplin together involves an interview with Charlie’s biographer (Anthony Hopkins) that’s conducted at Chaplin’s palatial estate in Switzerland during the twilight of the comic’s years. As questions are asked by the biographer, the movie flows back and forth in time to various episodes in Chaplin’s life.

At the end, the question finally comes up about what the comic star thinks his life has all meant.

Chaplin shrugs and says — I just cheered people up.

Any deeper point of the picture remains unknown. So the theme of Chaplin can only be: it’s nice when you’re born gloriously talented and then get filthy rich.

Compare this to biographical movies that do mean something like Braveheart or Gandhi, both of which did very well at the box office. The heroes of these films sacrifice their lives at the end for a greater human good. Historically accurate, they also present important themes through powerful story resolutions. And audiences flocked to see them.

Episodes in a life do not by themselves constitute a convincing conflict without some meaningful resolution.

SUMMING UP

• Conflict is the heart and soul of all screenwriting.

• Conflict develops from three story sources:

1. The power of the adversary — he should appear unbeatable;

2. How greatly the hero desires to achieve her goal — she should want victory more than anything;

3. How high the stakes are — stakes need to be physical or metaphorical life or death.

• In most good movies there are two levels of conflict that play out simultaneously:

1. A clash in the physical world as a hero struggles against the adversary in ways that can be seen;

2. Conflict inside the hero where she is forced to overcome some limiting emotional problem that’s stopping her from resolving the physical conflict.

• To solve the external physical conflict a hero must first resolve the emotional struggle within.

• The basic elements required to make dramatic conflict effective on the screen are:

1. The conflict must be strong;

2. The conflict must be seen;

3. The conflict must get nasty;

4. The conflict must develop, grow, and become ever more challenging to the hero;

5. The conflict must surprise the audience;

6. The conflict must be believable;

7. The conflict must be resolved in a meaningful way.

EXERCISE:

Make up three heroes, and give each a life pursuit. Examples:

1. Mack Henry — Big-rig trucker.

2. Gina Ferguson — Reality TV producer.

3. Ron Bishop — Corporate research & development scientist.

Give each hero a goal that is very important to them. Let’s say:

1. Mack wants to haul his last load before retiring.

2. Gina wants to make a film about an unjustly imprisoned man in Brazil.

3. Ron wants to present his research on a new food product.

Next, for each hero invent an adversary to oppose them. Something like:

1. For Mack: Jessie, a ride-along pal, wants to convince Mack not to retire.

2. For Gina: Torvold, her egomaniac director who opposes Gina’s every wish.

3. For Ron: Jill, a lab tech, who demands undeserved cocredit for Ron’s research.

Now, closely analyze the POWER that each adversary holds over the hero.

1. What power does Jessie hold over Mack? (None — Jessie’s just a loudmouth)

2. What power does Torvold hold over Gina? (None — Gina can fire Torvold)

3. What power does Jill hold over Ron? (None — Ron can fire Jill)

If needed, keep inventing new adversaries for each hero until they fulfill all requirements of an effective opposing force character. Keep testing the situational POWER that each new possible adversary holds over the hero — until you end up with something along these lines:

1. For Mac: Albert, who kidnaps Mack’s wife and forces Mack to haul cocaine.

2. For Gina: Prison Warden Degron, who schemes to keep the innocent man jailed in order to exploit this prisoner’s computer skills.

3. For Ron: Alice, the company CEO, who orders Ron “disappeared” when Ron discovers dangerous toxins in the new food product.

Don’t stop trying out new adversaries until the power ratio with the hero looks like this:

1. What power does Hector hold over Mack? (Total power)

2. What power does Warden Degron hold over Gina? (Total power)

3. What power does Alice hold over Ron? (Total power)

Keep testing and honing each adversary until they become believably unbeatable. With each new adversary you try out, the nature of the stories will change. Stay open to that change — and you will ultimately create several strong movie story possibilities.