GITS Script Reading and Analysis Series: “Good Will Hunting” — Characters

We continue our analysis of the script Good Will Hunting today by considering the characters in the story. Here is a list of most of the characters from the script in order of appearance:

Will (flawed genius)

Chuckie (best friend)

Morgan (buddy)

Billy (buddy)

Lambeau (Math professor)

Sean (therapist)

Skylar (Harvard student)

Screenplays are unique narrative forms for many reasons, one of which, I contend, is that each character in a script should have a function. Depending upon the genre or circumstances in a story, you may be able to drop in a secondary or tertiary character who pretty much exists for pure entertainment value, but that is not the case with primary characters. A screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and the interplay of character functions is a critical aspect of that blueprint.

There are five primary character archetypes we see in movies all the time. They are:

Protagonist: The lead character, the character through whose perspective the story is told, the character who typically goes through the most significant metamorphosis.

Nemesis: Provides opposition to the Protagonist, often represents the Protagonist’s shadow, their dark impulses, tied somehow to the Protagonist’s goal.

Attractor: Characters who are most intimately tied to the Protagonist’s emotional development, often a love interest, Heart.

Mentor: Characters who are most intimately tied to the Protagonist’s intellectual development, wisdom, Head.

Trickster: Characters who test the Protagonist, switching allegiance from ally to enemy, enemy to ally, intentionally or not helping to prepare the Protagonist for their Final Struggle.

So an interesting way to approach analyzing the characters in Good Will Hunting is: (1) Cull through the above list, picking out the most important characters. These represent the story’s primary characters. Why do you think they qualify as a primary character? What about who they are and what they do elevate their status to such importance? (2) Look through the lenses of Protagonist, Nemesis, Attractor, Mentor, and Trickster to consider what the respective narrative functions are for each primary character.

If you are uncertain as to a character’s potential archetype, ask yourself this: When all is said and done, what is the most fundamental narrative function this character provides to the story? Strip the character all the way down to that core essence. It is almost always a determining factor in understanding their archetypal role in a story.

And another excerpts from the Tom Shone interview with Matt Damon about GWH:

“The original script that we sold had this high concept thing where the government was trying to get Will. Rob Riener sat with us for script meeting and said ‘why don’t you guys take all that stuff out?’ Wait a minute. We can do that? ‘Yeah its enough just to make the movie about these guys. That’s a really good movie. That’s what we really love about it. And we said ‘we thought there was this whole high concept thing.’ ‘No you don’t need any of that’. At one point after Gus [Van Sant] became involved I was shooting The Rainmaker in Memphis and everyone came down for a script meeting. Gus came down and said ‘I want to do a draft where Chucky, Ben’s character, dies on the construction site.’ And Ben and I were just mortified. ‘What are you talking about’ ‘I want him to get crushed like a bug.’ We said ‘Gus what are you talking about? You cant just fucking smush Ben. That’s a terrible idea.’ Gus said ‘no I really want to see what would happen.’ So we did a whole new draft on weekends of The Rainmaker, when I wasn’t working, we would write, Ben and I did a whole draft, with a wake and everything. It took a left turn and went into this other place. The scenes in a vacuum I thought were good, but we still didn’t like the idea, then Gus read it said ‘okay its a terrible idea let’s go back to what we had’.”

For more of the interview, go here.

So armed with all that, I’ll see you in comments to discuss the primary characters in Good Will Hunting.

For Day 1 of our analysis of Good Will Hunting, go here.

For Day 2 of our analysis, focusing on structure, go here.

[Remember next week (9/26–9/30), we will be reading The Silence of the Lambs. You may access the 1/15/1990 draft here.]

NOTE: THIS SERIES AND THE USE OF SCRIPTS IS STRICTLY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES!

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