Dispatch from The Quest: Brandon Cohen
Last week as we did here on GITS, the Quest writers focused on the first week of Prep. Today’s dispatch: Brandon Cohen reflects on the importance of character depth:
I was at a point recently where I decided I could no longer write my characters as “types.” I was fed up with how unrealistic and predictable most characters were in the movies I saw. I get that it’s easier to write types rather than fully fleshed out characters, but the frustrating thing is that it seems like a lot of audience members like watching them too. I think they like knowing what to expect from a character. It’s the visual equivalent of McDonalds.
Viewer: “Oh man, I wonder how Party Guy is gonna weigh in on this political discussion!”
Party Guy (on screen): Forget about four more years, how about…four more…beers!!!
And the crowd goes wild; you’ve done it again Party Guy. When I first started, I was dead set against writing types because it didn’t feel real to me. Judd Apatow’s movies, which are gospel to me, present relatable, and more importantly, believable characters that feel like real people and not just movie characters. I wanted to emulate his style, but I realized pretty quickly that there was more depth there than I even realized. Ya see, he writes types too, he’s just really good at it.
My first attempt at screenwriting, I tried to write real people, and what I ended up with was a bunch of people who sounded exactly the same and didn’t really have distinct personalities. My reasoning was — “in MY group of friends, we all have a pretty similar way of speaking that you develop after being close with someone over the years, and we also aren’t so drastically different from one another that people question how we ended up as friends.” That was my other problem with types. They would throw a group of three people together that were so extremely different that I would question why these people even became friends or started dating in the first place.
In theory, I think this makes sense, but when I actually considered it more closely, I realized I was way off. My group of friends definitely has types, and I’d imagine most of yours do too. Among my group there is the athletic one, the womanizer, the nerd, the clown, the shy guy, on and on. And to go even further, we definitely have inside jokes and things we say that nobody else would get, but we all have very distinct ways of talking that would set us apart if you transcribed us onto a page. There’s no reason that characters in movies shouldn’t be the same way.
Girls recently cemented this notion for me. Say what you will about the show, but I thought it was fantastic, and I thought it had some of the most compelling characters I’d seen on TV. Even though they were very specific types within the show, they always felt real, and I never questioned why they did the things they did or said the things they said.
I think the reason most movies fail at presenting characters with depth is because they don’t want to do the work to dig into these characters. I learned this week how much work it is to really flesh out a character and make them feel like a living breathing person that exists somewhere. It’s very easy to just slap a label on someone and decide “this will be the bitchy girl” and then hope every line of her dialogue elicits a “what a bitchy girl!” from the audience. I think it’s much harder to find out why she’s the bitchy girl. What happened to her in her childhood that made her that way? What’s she really hiding? What does she want more than anything? All of the things you come up with about the character don’t have to necessarily make it to the page, but if you know all these things about them, the result (hopefully) will be characters that the audience really connects to on an emotional level.
Author Sinclair Lewis was known for the extensive research and character development he did for his books. Once he was asked how he knew he was ready to write a character. His response: “When I know what their favorite color socks are.”
Every story is different and you may not need to know that degree of specificity for a character to write them effectively. But as Brandon suggests, you have to write more than a type. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created–nothing.”
And how to create individuals? Do the hard work of getting to know them in prep.
Tomorrow: Another Dispatch from The Quest.
About Brandon: NYC native, fan of all things comedy. I cry every time I watch Big Fish, Forrest Gump and Marley & Me. Don’t judge me. Twitter: @brandandco.
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