“Every villain is a hero”

Sage advice from screenwriter John August:

A helpful thing to remember when plotting out stories with a clear antagonist: he probably doesn’t know he’s the bad guy.

• Alan Rickman’s character from Die Hard likely sees himself as George Clooney’s character from Ocean’s 11.
• In Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton is struggling to protect herself and her company. She sees it as a survival story, with herself cast as the heroic victim.
• Even monsters, like the shark in Jaws or the velociraptors of Jurassic Park, can be heroes of their own story. In Aliens, the Queen is defending her brood. Once we understand that, the conflict is even stronger.

Or as the old saying goes, “Even bad guys have mothers.” The best movie villains are characters who have their own world view, one that — at least in their mind — justifies the ‘evil’ they do. As John puts it, they see themselves as a hero.

One of the major benefits from using character archetypes is that you can switch protagonists — where you take a character in your story who is not the Protagonist and look at the story through their eyes as the protagonist. This is an especially valuable exercise when you do that with your story’s Nemesis. See how the other characters’ narrative functions shift in relation to the Nemesis as the story’s ‘protagonist.’ See how your attitude shifts toward the Nemesis when you fully embrace their goal as the story’s goal. 

The end result should be to give you a much deeper understanding of your story’s Nemesis and that should translate into a more complex, interesting, and compelling villain on the printed page.

You can go here for an analysis of The Silence of the Lambs, switching protagonists first to Hannibal Lecter, then to Buffalo Bill.

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