On Film-making

An introduction to the craft of the director

ALEXAN DE R MACKE N DR ICK

Edited by Paul Cronin

FOREWORD BY MARTIN SCORSESE

The Pre-Verbal Language of Cinema

Speech involves the rationalising of our feelings and impulses, 1. Mackendrick

something film directors of the silent era discovered they could frequently cited D. W.
Griffith to students as
catch at first hand. one of the most impor-
Through the use of different screen sizes and the framing of tant pioneering directors
shots, the juxtaposition of camera angles and point of view, in this respect. ‘Today
the “close-up” is essen-
expressive music and lighting, and the principles of editing, they
tial to every Motion
found that the camera can, uniquely, photograph thought.1 Since Picture,’ wrote Griffith
that time, those directors who have made the best use of the film in 1917, ‘for the near
medium have used the camera to communicate to audiences at a view of the actors’
lineaments conveys
level far more immediate and primitive than the spoken word. intimate thought and
By primitive I don’t mean more simplistic and less subtle. Far emotion that can never
from it. Cinema deals with feelings, sensations, intuitions and be conveyed by the
crowded scene’. (Focus
movement, things that communicate to audiences at a level not on D. W. Griffith,
necessarily subject to conscious, rational and critical compre- edited by Harry M.
hension. Because of this, the so-called ‘language’ the film direc- Geduld, Prentice-Hall,
1971, p. 52).
tor uses may, in fact, make for a much richer and denser
experience. Actions and images speak faster, and to more of the
senses, than speech does.
A recurring theme of these notes is that cinema is not so much
non-verbal as pre-verbal. Though it is able to reproduce reams
of dialogue, film can also tell stories purely in movement, in
action and reaction. Cinematographic images, particularly when
synchronised with recorded sound, deliver such quantities of
visual and audible data that the verbal component (even, in the
days of silent cinema, title cards) is overwhelmed and becomes
secondary. Consequently, the essential and underlying meaning
of film dialogue is often much more effectively transmitted by a
complex and intricate organisation of cinematic elements that
are not only not verbal, but also can never be fully analysed by
verbal means. Look at this example, taken from André Cayatte’s

the pre-verbal language of cinema 3

2. Truffaut’s interview 1949 film Les amants de Vérone, as written by Jacques
book Hitchcock Prévert.
(Touchstone, 1985),
p. 61. Some visitors are being taken round a glassworks in which the
young hero is one of the skilled craftsmen who makes fantasti-
cally ornamental goblets, vases and mirrors. One of them is an
attractive young actress who is being escorted by an elderly and
wealthy man who obviously wants to impress her. She, mean-
while, has taken rather a fancy to the hero. While her escort is
buying her a present in the showroom, the hero watches through
a glass partition. The girl turns to smile at him through the glass,
whereupon he makes a couple of scratches on one of the panes
with his diamond glass-cutter and knocks out of it onto her side
a small piece of glass in the shape of a heart. She is amused but
has to conceal it quickly as her wealthy gentleman friend returns
bearing a huge and ornate mirror. He presents it to her proudly.
She looks at it and after a moment smiles. But the camera shows
us something he cannot see: she is really smiling into the mirror
at the reflection of the young man behind.
This entire incident is quick and casual. It probably takes less
time in front of the camera than it does to explain in words, and
is much more effective on screen than I have told it here. This is
the point: it is not the sort of incident a novelist would invent
because it is far clumsier to describe than to play out on film.
Nor would it make a good piece of action for the stage actor
because the effect depends on quick glimpses of detail, the flicker
of reactions on faces and a switch of viewpoint by the camera.
Prévert is writing for the cinema, and nothing else. The director
Alfred Hitchcock has said that during the silent era, the great
directors ‘had reached something near perfection. The introduc-
tion of sound, in a way, jeopardised that perfection.’2 Hitchcock
is suggesting that a good film should be ninety per cent under-
standable even if dubbed into a language no one sitting in the
auditorium understands. Why? Because a well-written, acted
and directed film should be able to convey its emotional mean-
ing through the inventive use of film grammar, not words. And
it is, of course, the emotional and dramatic content of any scene
that really counts.
There is likely to be immediate protest from those students
who insist that dialogue is an entirely legitimate component of

4 dramatic construction
modern cinema. Needless to say, the spoken word can be an 3. Hitchcock, p. 17.
important element of storytelling on film, but because cinema is
so well equipped to explore action and movement, together with
the emotions behind the words (those physical impulses and
reactions that both anticipate speech and are a response to dia-
logue), it is not so dependent on what is actually being said. As
Truffaut writes in his interview book with Alfred Hitchcock,
‘Whatever is said instead of being shown is lost on the viewer.’3
Truffaut’s cardinal ‘rule’ does not mean that a film’s cinematog-
raphy is the only medium of communication in cinema. He is not
suggesting that speech has no value or that dialogue does not
contribute. But he is pointing out that in cinema, mute action
supplies the most basic information, while verbal information
adds another, secondary dimension.
Though a gift for lively and playable dialogue is perhaps the
skill most likely to assure you of a professional career as a
scriptwriter, the dialogue-driven screenplay is actually a wholly
misguided blueprint for a film. Simply, dialogue is almost always
less effective than visible activity in cinema, and not until the
screenwriter understands that good characterisation can be
made visible through physical behaviour and the riches film
grammar has to offer is he truly writing for the medium. This is
one of the first things the screenwriter needs to understand
before studying the craft of dramatic construction, for it is the
job of the writer, not the director, to decide whether his film
story will be built with images or merely decorated with them.
The film camera and cutting bench, able to manipulate both
space and time so efficiently (just as the novelist can vary point
of view, to say nothing of his ability to describe and explain
internal feelings and thoughts), can do much to express those
things unsaid by the characters. Between internal thought (the
uncensored and unselfconscious impulse) and deliberately deliv-
ered words there may be some contradiction. What we say inside
our heads is private, and by putting it into words and addressing
it to others we often rationalise and even distort our original
impulses and intentions. The best lines of film dialogue are
sometimes those in which the real meanings lie between the
words, where the spoken lines mask the true and unadulterated
feelings of the speaker.

the pre-verbal language of cinema 5

 Such emotions are often visible to the camera, just as they are
to an observant human being, because the spoken words frame
those revealing and fleeting moments that take place just before
the character speaks or as an impulsive non-verbal reaction to
what has just been said, seen by the film editor, for example, in
shots containing perhaps a barely visible shift of focus in the eyes,
an unconscious flexing of jaw muscles, or a gesticulation during
a speech. Study, frame by frame, the performance of an expres-
sive actor in close-up and you may be able to find the precise
images where the spark of thought or feeling ignites, those impul-
sive moments that then find expression in the delivery of a line. In
the hands of competent film-makers, even the most seemingly
inconsiderable dialogue can provide a significance that would be
lost if there were more talking. If a scene is genuinely interesting
because it is cinematic (in the sense that without speech we can
comprehend most, if not all, of what is happening), then the
added component of the spoken word will probably contribute
something. If the scene is uninteresting in cinematic terms, then
layer upon layer of dialogue will only make it more so.
One of the tasks of the director as he transfers a screenplay to
the medium of the moving-image-with-sound is almost to forget
what his characters are saying and reimagine their behaviour as
being mute, so that all thoughts, feelings and impulses are con-
veyed to the audience through sound and vision – without
speech. There is a curious paradox here, for when a scene has
been reconstituted in this fashion the director is often able to
reincorporate elements of the original dialogue in ways that
make it vastly more effective. Moreover, when a script has been
conceived in genuinely cinematic terms, its sparse dialogue is
likely to be free of the task of exposition and will consequently
be much more expressive. A sound principle is to employ
expository dialogue as the reaction to events that take place
before the lens (remember: movies show and then tell). Invent
action or incidents as the provocation for dialogue, because
exposition in film is much more interesting after the dramatic
event as a comment (or perhaps an explanation) on it. In this
sense the dialogue of a well-constructed film will enrich the
visuals – it is never merely an extension of what is already obvi-
ous to observant audiences (think of title cards in early silent

6 dramatic construction

www.dramaticconstruction.com
films used as punctuation of what is being looked at, not as a
substitute for it).
The senior writers at the film studio in London where I
worked for many years used to delight in collecting examples of
bad dialogue in screenplays. One of their favourites was ‘Look,
Highland cattle!’ This was a quote from a particularly amateur-
ish travelogue in which a character pointed off-screen, said this
line, and the film cut to guess what? Those three words became
shorthand for a piece of wholly unnecessary and redundant
exposition used when the story was being told perfectly well
solely through visual means. A good director will go out of his
way, often in the editing process when he has both words and
images in front of him, to gradually eliminate all lines that are
not absolutely necessary. In the final film, many pieces of dia-
logue are apt to become redundant because the on-screen action
is telling the story with more clarity without them. A scene that
on paper might seem to be more effective when full of witty and
clever dialogue can often play far more meaningfully and effec-
tively through subtle moments of silent interaction between
characters (moments that are, inevitably, not so easy to appreci-
ate when in script form only).
In fact, cinema can be at its most interesting and forceful when
images play against the literal sense of the dialogue. When what
is spoken by the screen actor acts as counterpoint to what is
being seen by the audience, dialogue is able to express much
more than the literal meaning of the words and so has extra
force. In such cases, the uniqueness of the cinematic medium is
most apparent. Through this sometimes extremely subtle juxta-
position of words and images, the writer and director are able to
focus attention on the rhythm of a scene’s subtext. By doing so,
and by making use of the fact that the camera is able to relate
things to audiences subliminally rather than literally, it is possi-
ble to tell more than one story at once.
Consider this simple example from Truffaut, who writes of
the ‘mundane occasions [such] as dinner and cocktail parties, or
of any meeting between casual acquaintances’:
If we observe any such gathering, it is clear that the words exchanged
between the guests are superficial formalities and quite meaningless,

the pre-verbal language of cinema 7

 www.alexandermackendrick.com

4. Hitchcock, p. 17. whereas the essential is elsewhere; it is by studying their eyes that
we can find out what is truly on their minds. Let us assume that as an
5. One figure cited
repeatedly in
observer at a reception I am looking at Mr Y as he tells three people
Mackendrick’s Film all about his recent holiday in Scotland with his wife. By carefully
Grammar handouts watching his face, I notice he never takes his eyes off Mrs X’s legs.
whose work gives us a
Now, I move over to Mrs X, who is talking about her children’s prob-
deeper understanding
of these ideas is lems at school, but I notice that she keeps staring at Miss Z, her cold
German psychologist look taking in every detail of the younger woman’s elegant appear-
and theorist Rudolf ance. Obviously, the substance of that scene is not in the dialogue,
Arnheim, author of the
1933 book Film as Art which is strictly conventional, but in what these people are thinking
(Faber and Faber, about. Merely by watching them I have found out that Mr Y is physi-
1983). In a handout cally attracted to Mrs X and that Mrs X is jealous of Miss Z.4
that elucidates
Arnheim’s ideas, Puzzled by the difficulties encountered by many students as
Mackendrick notes that
it was during the first
they tackle the problems of writing for the cinema, I wonder if
thirty years of silent this is because we are educated to think verbally. This condi-
cinema when the tioning to express oneself in literate word systems can be a stum-
underlying and
bling block to young writers and directors, a handicap to those
immutable grammar of
cinema – the visual and trying to master the pre-verbal structures of narrative cinema.
kinetic ‘language’ For most students, ideas that spring to mind are so swiftly trans-
which distinguishes it formed into words that we automatically equate thought with
from theatre and litera-
ture – was established speech and writing, rather than visuals. It has even been argued
by the more imagina- by psychologists that thinking is not possible without the capac-
tive directors. ‘It’s been ity to verbalise.
claimed that before the
coming of synchronised
It does certainly appear that during our psychological develop-
sound most of the ment through the stages of babyhood, infancy and pre-adolescence,
important techniques of the point at which we are said to be capable of thought and
cinema had already
abstract reason seems to date from the period when we are also
been established,’
explains Mackendrick. learning to speak. But I am not entirely convinced by this argu-
In this respect, he adds, ment. Just as a cartoonist can tell a story in sequential images of
‘talking pictures’ were action without captions, so a film-maker can imagine a scene told
deemed by some to be a
‘retrogressive step’. in the pure language of the cinema, a language invented before
the birth of Talkies (sync sound). Nevertheless, to translate cer-
tain concepts into cinematic forms comprehensible without
words, the student may actually have to unlearn habits of verbal
thought and return to patterns that are in some ways more prim-
itive. This can be a ruthless learning experience, requiring elimi-
nation of our habits of talking in generalities, of failing to be
specific and concrete, and of intellectual concepts.5

8 dramatic construction
What is a Story?

Can we define the nature of what we call a story? What are the 1. S. H. Butcher trans-
distinguishing characteristics of a story? Is it content or form? lation (Dover, 1997),
p. 51. Richard Janko’s
Must a story be a work of fiction? Surely not, since there have translation makes this
been documentaries, biographical and historical, that carefully point most clearly:
represent only factual material but nevertheless have as gripping ‘Impossible [incidents]
that are believable
a narrative structure as any work of complete invention. Are
should be preferred to
there characteristic elements? Does, for instance, a story, possible ones that are
whether it presents factual reality or imitations of real life, have unbelievable.’
to be structured in a particular way? And if so, what are the nec-
essary elements of this structure?
One way to tackle these questions is to explore the origins of the
impulses of storytelling as they are seen in the earliest human civil-
isations and then echoed in the psychology of infants emerging
into childhood. It has been pointed out that when a child begins to
ask a question like ‘Where do babies come from?’ and the mother
explains about the stork that flies over rooftops, carrying a swad-
dled bundle that it brings as a present to Mummy and Daddy, this
is a much more acceptable reply than information about the
semen from Daddy that fertilise the ovum inside Mummy. The tale
about the stork (told to a child who has never even seen such a
bird) is believable. He or she can handle it, while the stuff about
fertility is unacceptable because it raises a lot more unanswered
questions. Incomprehensible, it becomes implausible and unbe-
lievable. Note that this point was made a few hundred years
before Christ by the man who first tried to set down some laws
about drama, Aristotle. He wrote that ‘a poet should prefer prob-
able impossibilities to improbable possibilities.’1
The child, with its limited experience and simplistic compre-
hension of life, is trying to make coherent sense out of profound
mysteries, and needs any explanations to be satisfying at the

what is a story? 9
2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, level of his or her understanding. While the stork story is usable,
The Savage Mind the biological data must wait till the child can cope with it. One
(Oxford, 1972), p. 22.
can argue, therefore, that such a tale – like the myths of prehis-
toric times – functions as a ‘poetic’ explanation of concepts that
are beyond the limited intellectual capacities of the listeners to
deal with. This may be how drama began. In his book The
Savage Mind, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss says that ‘art
lies halfway between scientific knowledge and magical or mysti-
cal thought.’2
The Greek mind of Homeric days personified all its beliefs.
Science was conceived in parable form, with abstract concepts
symbolised in the semi-human forms of the gods. This is surely
how the imagination of every one of us functions when we are
small children. Indeed, it is the way we dream, for dreams are the
unconscious mind at work and they have their own language.
Psychotherapists will warn you that a figure in a dream should not
always be thought of as a person in the same way that the waking
mind conceives individuals. Dream-figures are more often person-
ifications of some aspect of the dreamer’s psyche. This could be a
clue to the psychological purpose of all stories. A story that has
fictional characters may be using these figments of the imagina-
tion or unconscious in order to act out an abstract thought, an
idea, a theme (the underlying dramatic point of the story).
It can be argued that form, in all of the arts, has a mnemonic
purpose. A mnemonic is, in popular terms, a device like a piece
of doggerel verse that helps you remember some information
you might otherwise forget if you could not rattle off the rhyme
without thinking. The scansion and rhymes of poetry, whether
vulgar limericks or Shakespearean blank verse, have this much
in common: they come easily to the lips because the sounds of
the words, their formal qualities, make them easy to recall. In a
way, a story does this too. The pattern of its dramatic unities, an
articulation of connected incidents that function as the plot,
makes it easier to memorise. The contrasts of the characters and
their patterns of antagonism or of affection are the design of a
closed system, the unifying theme of which is, thinking of
Aristotle, ‘unity of action’.
Anthropologists argue that this was one of the original func-
tions of rites and myths. Primitive magical rituals use rhythmic

10 dramatic construction
movement, repetitive gesture and musical noise to give sensory
unity and comprehension to some otherwise disturbing and fear-
some mystery. A myth, it is said, is the verbal equivalent of a rite
that serves the same archaic need: to help the primitive mind
take hold of a mystery. Stories, even in the contemporary con-
text of mass entertainment, would seem to be successful when
they, too, fulfil such a need, something audiences need not even
be aware of.

One of the essential components of drama is tension. This ten-

sion may or may not be the result of conflict between people on
the screen – it doesn’t necessarily have to be at the level of plot
(though plot suspense is no bad thing). It is rather a tension in
the imagination of the audience that leads to feelings of curios-
ity, suspense and apprehension (for example the audience being
torn between contradictory elements of a character). Drama, so
said drama critic William Archer, is almost always the effect of
‘anticipation mingled with uncertainty’. A good director, there-
fore, is always asking himself certain fundamental questions.
What is the audience thinking? In relation to what has just hap-
pened and what might or might not happen next, is it approving,
disapproving, fearing or hoping?
In trying to invent film stories that have some narrative/
dramatic tension, it can be useful to recognise the factors that
work against tension (though this is not to say that these factors
are necessarily bad or wrong). Over a period of some years, I
have noted elements of storytelling that a would-be screenwriter
should avoid, those things that involve evasions of the more
demanding task of real cinematic writing. All of these things are
no more than variations on the basic point: don’t put into a
script things that the camera cannot photograph in action.
Passivity in a character is a real danger to dramatic values.
‘Protagonist’ (the name given to the leading character in your
story) literally means the person who initiates the agon (strug-
gle). But a figure who does not (or cannot) actually do things or
who hasn’t got the gumption to struggle in a way that produces
new situations and developments is apt – in dramatic terms – to
be a dead weight on the narrative. In effect, a bore. A scene of
something ‘not happening’ will usually be undramatic unless it is

what is a story? 11
www.alexandermackendrick.com

presented in active terms. This imperative need for positive

action to produce tension towards crisis is not (or not quite) as
necessary in the literary media. It is generally easier for a literary
work than a film to describe non-happenings. A novelist can
write several pages about the motives of a character who, in the
end, decides to take no action. He can explore the characteristics
of his hero and heroine, analyse their feelings past and present,
explain their psychology to readers, and act as historian and
critic as he interprets the influences that contribute to certain
states of mind. A novel or short story can have, in a sense, no
story or dramatic progression, no conflict or crisis. Maybe some
forms of experimental and personal cinema have little need for
dramatic tension, but a narrative fiction film is (more often than
not) something else.
Dramatic tension generally requires an element of conflict.
The nineteenth-century theorists suggested that conflict requires
the presentation of an onstage clash of wills between the hero
and his antagonists. Later critics pointed out that in many cases,
when a story is really rewarding, the tension may be a matter not
of what happens, but how it happens. This is the effect of ten-
sion arising out of aspects of character rather than plot (which
we can define, rather untidily, as the sequential progression of
incidents with the cause-and-effect connections that have a for-
ward momentum). For example, the suspense in de Sica’s Bicycle
Thieves is really much less the problem of Ricci’s stolen bicycle
than about his relationship with his son.
With Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex – a play that can be studied as
the first of all whodunnits – we are pretty sure at a very early
stage of the solution to the mystery of Laius’s murder, and are
not surprised to find out that the guilty man is Oedipus himself.
The plot consists in the piecemeal unravelling of a mystery upon
which tension is built. Pieces of information and narrative expo-
sition are fed to us in very carefully contrived sequences. Piece by
piece, the jigsaw builds the picture of Oedipus’s crime. The thing
to note is that Sophocles was writing of events that Athenian
audiences knew by heart. They knew how it was all going to
turn out. But to think that surprise is not a factor when audi-
ences are watching or listening to stories they know the ending
of is to misunderstand the very nature of drama. In the case of

12 dramatic construction
 www.alexandermackendrick.com

Oedipus, the real surprise (to the extent that there is one) is in
the reaction of Oedipus himself, something the audience looks
forward to no matter how many times it has seen the story told
in previous productions. Any parent who tells bedtime stories to
infants will recognise something similar in the way their child
insists on hearing the exact same story over and over again, as if
each new turn of events were quite unexpected. Indeed, there is
apt to be emotional protest if the narrator takes undue liberty
with the yarn. When finally Oedipus’s reaction is presented to
us, tension is resolved and the story ended.
When characters are presented in a static relationship, dra-
matic tension is apt to be weak (remember: ‘drama’ means the
‘thing done’). The beginner is apt to think of character in terms
of outward physical appearance, the age, sex, social class or pro-
fession of the person in the story. But this matters very little in
the sense of the drama. A dramatic character is definable only in
relation to other characters or situations that involve tension. A
dramatic scene is usually one in which something happens: an
incident or an event takes place, the situation between the char-
acters is different at the end of the scene from what it was at the
beginning. The equilibrium has been altered and there is some
narrative momentum that drives the characters (and us the audi-
ence) to a new situation in the next scene.
Many successful screenwriters have a gift for duologues, two-
handed scenes that have the vigour of a singles match between
two strong players. There may be one character who is more
important to the story, but the other (even if he or she is acting
as a foil in order to provoke exposition) is kept in play to sustain
the other end of the dramatic tension. An all-too-common weak-
ness of the inept dramatist is to write a scene between two char-
acters who are so much in agreement that there is no real conflict
or cause-and-effect dramatic progression. When this happens
the result is apt to be that their positions are quite interchange-
able, an almost certain indication that the scene will have little
tension. As a great deal of television drama seems to prove,
two-handed scenes can become so much the ping-pong game
of service and return that monotony sets in. Note, however, that
for characters to create dramatic tension, they need not always
clash. Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene, for example is a

what is a story? 13
 www.alexandermackendrick.com

3. Mackendrick was concordance of wills and yet is certainly dramatic. There is ten-
impressed by adept use sion not because of any struggle between the characters, but
of the foil in all forms
of storytelling. He because the audience understands that the relationship between
would hand out to stu- boy and girl is going to lead to some later crisis. The powerful
dents a selection of suspense in Shakespeare’s story may be absent from the emoting
cartoons from the
pages of The New
of the boy and girl, but it is very well established in our minds as
Yorker as examples of we watch the scene.
how to tell stories Students often exclaim they are uninterested in on-screen con-
purely in images, and in
flict, that the most interesting kind of tension is internal, within
particular commended
Charles Addams’s use the mind of the hero. Why, they ask, is it necessary to have an
of ‘the foil, the figure antagonist at all? The answer is that a state of mind is something
which has been added static. In terms of the camera it is passive, dramatically inopera-
to the scene as the
straight man to the tive and not easy to dramatise in active cinematic terms. When
comic absurdity’. on-screen characters are frustrated, bored or alienated, the situ-
ation is not yet dramatic. A bored character becomes dramati-
cally interesting only in the context of the possibility of some
escape from his frustration, when his state of mind becomes a
catalyst for positive story action. For example, when contrasted
with active characters or placed in certain situations, an inactive
character is liable to create certain tensions. Simply, if your pro-
tagonist is passive it may be necessary to create strongly aggres-
sive antagonists or antagonistic circumstances.
The most effective way of doing this is to think of the antago-
nist as a foil character, a figure who – like the audience – is igno-
rant of essential information and therefore asks the questions to
which the audience needs to know the answer.3 These characters
are confidants or interlocutors created especially for the purpose
of contrasting with other on-screen personalities in order to
reveal certain things to the audience (for example Horatio in
Hamlet and the Fool in King Lear). In many examples they
externalise the conflicts of the hero, bringing them out into the
open, thus creating active on-screen situations. A good example
is in Oedipus Rex where Creon is antagonist to Oedipus. If you
consider that Oedipus’s real battle is not with his brother-in-law
but with the Gods who punish him (somewhat unfairly) for
crimes committed in ignorance, then Creon is simply a dramatic
foil. In the Western High Noon, the sheriff’s crisis of confidence
is externalised not through an antagonist but through his newly
married Quaker wife.

14 dramatic construction
 www.alexandermackendrick.com

It is sometimes necessary to create dramatic situations that 4. Constantin

counteract a character’s inaction. How, for example, do you Stanislavsky
(1863–1938), Russian
show a man torn between the natural instinct to run away from theatre director and
his responsibility and his reluctant sense of duty? In High Noon theorist, founder of the
the sheriff bolts from town and then discovers he simply has to Moscow Art Theatre.
return. His negative thought has been characterised by contrast-
ing it with positive action – his inaction has been shown as the
direct cessation of an action. In many cases when something is
about to happen but for some reason is prevented from taking
place, the non-happening can become dramatic. A similar prob-
lem is the need to show a character’s disinterest with something,
often a negative and passive quality of dramatic importance. On
the cinema screen the scriptwriter has to contrast this attitude
with active interest. Stanislavsky4 once asked the question: ‘How
do you play a man who is bored?’ If the actor does nothing then
the point is not properly made. But as soon as you define the
idea of boredom as being ‘interested, but not enough’, then it
become playable. A bored man is an individual who finds every-
thing interesting to a limited extent. As such, the actor should
contrive to be interested in so many things that he isn’t really
interested in anything very much.
Other things students of screenwriting should avoid are gen-
eralisations and indeterminate action. Film treatments (basic
plot details in prose form, perhaps with the odd line of dialogue)
and scripts are almost always written in one tense: the present.
Complex as time dimensions in film may be, they are less free
than in the novel where the reader will find several tenses (past,
present, future, subjunctive). But there is no equivalent in cin-
ema for indeterminate time. While a novelist can write the
adverb ‘frequently’, an event in a film happens only as often as
you show it happening. The author of a screen treatment who
writes, ‘From time to time, she made a habit of . . .’ is simply
postponing to the screenplay stage the task of presenting this
indefinite and continuing action in an economical and dramati-
cally viable way.
Take the phrase ‘the cat sat on the mat.’ You can say this in
words and the meaning is clear, but it is left to the listener or reader
to imagine what kind of cat and what kind of mat. Are we to see
in our mind’s eye an elegant Siamese with blue eyes, white fur and

what is a story? 15
www.alexandermackendrick.com

brown markings as it poses on a Navaho rug of intricate design?

Or is it a black tabby squatting on a rubber doormat? Words,
whether spoken or printed, can communicate relatively abstract
and intellectual generalisations. Not so cinema, for though a pic-
ture is (so it’s said) worth a thousand words, photography cannot
help but communicate to the mind’s eye a great quantity of very
specific data about precisely how things look and move.
What we might call interpretations and editorial comment
should also be viewed with suspicion by the screenwriter.
Drama, historians tell us, probably originated from ceremonies
that centred on choral recitations of narratives about the Gods.
As the first Greek playwrights devised the earliest patterns of
dramatic presentations, the choral commentary became a stan-
dard device. Within a few centuries the function of the chorus
was progressively diminished in favour of exposition through
interaction and explanations by characters within the story, until
nowadays dramatic exposition has come to mean essentially all
explanation made through dialogue.
A novelist might not use the first-person pronoun ‘I’ but will
still allow himself total liberty to describe to his readers all man-
ner of things that belong only to his imagination and not neces-
sarily the characters in his story. By describing the internal
feelings and thoughts of a character, the novelist becomes omnis-
cient, with an all-seeing godlike mind that can look into the
souls of men and interpret them for the benefit of the reader. But
the film and theatre writer – regardless of how often his creative-
writing teacher encouraged him to express his ideas, thoughts
and feelings directly, as ‘the voice of the author’ – does not have
this privilege. His task is to give expression to all his narrative
ideas through action and reaction, things done and said. In
effect, when translating into dramatic form a story that has been
written only for reading, the first character to be removed is
often the author himself. The screenwriter will work through the
original text and ruthlessly eliminate all editorial comment,
every phrase, adjective or adverb added by the author as a clue
to how he himself wishes the action to be interpreted by the
reader. He will retain only those adjectives, adverbs, similes and
metaphors that are of immediate practical value to the actor,
cameraman, editor or any of the other craftsmen whose media of

16 dramatic construction
 www.alexandermackendrick.com

expression are images, gestures and sounds – those things that

can be represented on screen.
A narrative is driven by character progression, something that
can take more than one form. It can, for instance, be the kind of
progression where changes do not take place within a character
but rather in the audience’s increased understanding of him or her.
Or it might be the kind of development in which the protagonist’s
personality is changed through his or her experiences. The
change-of-heart formula is an old one (example: Scrooge in A
Christmas Carol), though it is often too simplistic and not really
believable. It has been pointed out that when character changes
are convincing they are likely to be the eventual resolving of two
conflicting elements that exist within a single personality. An obvi-
ous suggestion, therefore, when you are devising characters: look
not only for interesting qualities in their personalities but also for
those social masks that hide other dramatically exploitable tem-
peraments. Think of characters who may at first appear in a sym-
pathetic light but are then revealed, thanks to certain active
developments in the story, to have uglier traits – or vice versa.
Student film-makers are often uncomfortable with the task of
inventing characters not as individual entities but as interactive
personages. One suspects this is because in the early stages of
experimenting with storytelling, the beginner chooses a protago-
nist that in psychological terms is something of a projection of
his own point of view, someone who clearly represents his own
attitudes, feelings and thoughts, a thinly disguised or idealised
version of themselves. There are two potential problems that
need to be considered here.
First, there is a tendency to surround this protagonist with
characters who are not nearly as fully realised. Every protago-
nist needs an agon, a struggle with surrounding antagonists, and
the nature of this struggle is rather misunderstood among many
student writers. So misunderstood, indeed, that the student will
insist it is not necessary to have such conflict (or even a plot).
Second, changes of personality are not envisaged, which
means such characters may have nowhere to go in the story. Or,
to put it another way, the writer might not be able to envisage
the direction his protagonist should move because he cannot
conceive of such changes of attitude and emotion taking place

what is a story? 17
 www.alexandermackendrick.com

5. The Third Man within himself. But classic patterns work in a very different way.
(Faber and Faber, 1988; Oedipus comes onstage as proud, noble and more than a little
first published Lorrimer,
1968), pp. 7–9. arrogant to open a story that will lead to his disgrace and humil-
iation. So when planning a character reversal it is important to
6. See ‘Exercises for the begin at a different place from the one you want to end up at. If
Student of Dramatic
Writing’ below.
you have in mind as your protagonist a figure with whom you
identify, it makes good sense when you start writing to look for
(and even accentuate) those aspects in him or her that you would
like to see completely abandoned by the story’s end.
In a well-told story, every fictional character functions within a
network or nexus, a cat’s cradle of character interactions. Certain
characteristics of the protagonist and antagonist are revealed
often only through relationships with each other or with circum-
stances (either external or internal) and events played out in action
and reaction. Under the pressure of situations, conflicts, clashes of
will or story tension, the ideas that lie behind a story’s themes
cease to be merely abstract and become people actually doing
things to each other or reacting to the action. As has been already
explained, film dialogue is best when it has an immediate purpose
and produces visible reactions in others. This is the essence of
drama. Because character is not a static quality that belongs to a
specific figure, rather than thinking of individual characters in the
world it is far more useful for the writer to consider the notion of
character-in-action-and-reaction. A story’s energy comes from the
degree to which its characters are warring elements, complemen-
tary aspects that illuminate each other by contrast and conflict.
The only practical reason for a particular character’s existence, in
fact, is to interact with other characters.
The published screenplay of Graham Greene’s film script The
Third Man contains descriptions (presumably written by Greene
after the film was completed) of the story’s four principal char-
acters, followed by notes on subsidiary characters, those neces-
sary as foils or for the development of the incidental action.5
These are worth your study because they serve as a good model
for the kind of thing I have asked you to attach to your efforts at
writing Step Outlines.6 When outlining character relationships it
is important to be able to distinguish between those characters
indispensable to the central theme and those needed only for the
smooth mechanical running of the plot and its exposition.

18 dramatic construction
 www.alexandermackendrick.com

One reason why Greene’s descriptions are interesting is that 7. Mackendrick was
he defines his characters not as individual figures or separate aware that director
Peter Brook had
elements but strictly in terms of their connections with the written something
other principals. The main roles are envisaged as a web of ten- similar when discussing
sions. Indeed, the pattern is very often a push-pull tug of war, King Lear in his book
The Empty Space:
one that takes triangular patterns where character A is torn ‘Experimentally, we can
between opposing connections represented by character B and approach Lear not as a
character C. The pattern is built by successive steps that estab- linear narrative, but as
a cluster of relation-
lish the dramatic interactions and tensions as they grow in
ships.’ (Penguin, 1990,
force, making for ironies and surprise reversals that lead, by first published 1968)
stages, to a final denouement of the main lines of tension. When p. 102.
called on to write similar descriptions of characters for your
Below: Character
own story, you should do so as though you were looking from relationship map: The
the point of view of the final resolution of their conflicts and Third Man.
relationships.7

what is a story? 19
 In any project that you have already worked on or that you
have scripted and might be planning to make, can you answer
these questions? It helps if you can be as specific as possible. (It
is also useful to ask these questions of your favourite films.)
1 How many characters are there in your story? Select three
that can be considered as principals. I tend to feel uneasy
when a student explains that there is really only one character.
As we have seen, drama normally involves a conflict between
people, therefore you need at least two characters. Often it is
more effective to have at least three because this gives the pos-
sibility of a triangular relationship, a bind involving a central
figure who is pulled in opposite directions by two others.
Note that there are examples of characters in films who have
dramatic scenes in which no other character is present, but
these tend to be of the kind where the environment itself plays
the role of antagonist, placing the protagonist in some cir-
cumstances that require a reaction from him or her.
2 Who is your point-of-view character? Sometimes it can be dif-
ficult to decide between who is the protagonist and who is the
antagonist. Though occasionally there are stories in which the
audience is not invited to feel identification with any one of
the characters, it is far more common to have a figure who
represents the viewpoint of the story and who has a final
‘objective’ of some kind. Ask yourself: by the end of the story
what does this character want to achieve? What is required is
a character intention that will produce a dramatic action, a
visible result on screen. As has been explained, for a character
merely to express his or her feelings is seldom enough in cin-
ema. There can be, of course, a negative objective: to prevent
something from happening, but this too should be conceived
as a result of action (a incident that can be photographed).
3 Can you define what obstacles there might be to this objec-
tive? Can you also identify some other character who is a per-
sonification of these obstacles? Such a character is the
antagonist whose dramatic function is to create conflict with
the central figure (though importantly this does not necessar-
ily imply we have less sympathy with the antagonist than with

20 dramatic construction
 www.alexandermackendrick.com

the protagonist). Note that the existence of an antagonist in

the story does not mean there is not also conflict within the
central figure (where, for example, he is being pulled in con-
flicting directions by certain emotions or beliefs). There is, in
fact, conflict within all well-defined protagonists, and many
characters who seem tame when it comes to extroverted
action will have clearly defined introverted tensions brought
into the open at times by the antagonist for the audience to
observe. Note too that in the buddy movie there is always
some thread of conflict between the twin protagonists, one
that typically climaxes somewhere in the third act. But what-
ever tension develops between these two characters, it will
usually take second place to the dramatic conflict in which the
twin heroes confront some third antagonistic faction. Their
conflict is a subplot (often vaguely comical), a secondary case
of character-in-action that runs parallel to the main narrative
tension.
4 How does the conflict lead to crisis? What is at stake for the
main characters? Is there a confrontation scene? In a well-
constructed story the audience is held in expectation of what
is called an obligatory scene brought about by a reversal (or,
indeed, a series of reversals). Note that the obligatory scene,
usually the denouement of a story, classically expresses the
theme. It is an expression of the story’s central moral, the
point expressed as a generalisation as seen in character-in-
action. (A good way of defining this moment, in fact many
moments in a dramatic narrative, is to ask: ‘Who does what
with which to whom and why?’)

what is a story? 21