GITS Script Reading and Analysis Series: “The Silence of the Lambs” — Structure
Welcome to Week 4 of the GITS Script Reading & Analysis series. This week we will be analyzing the 1/15/1990 draft of The Silence of the Lambs. If you haven’t had a chance to read the script yet, you can go here.
I thought this week I would pull quotes from various Ted Tally interviews and articles about Silence to give us more insight into his creative process. Here’s an excerpt from the book “Screenwriters’ Masterclass”:
I was confronting this mountain of pages knowing I’d probably be ending up with only one-fifth or one-sixth of the text. So the first thing you’d better do in a case like that is to find an organizing principle; and in that one it seemed pretty clear to me that Clarice is the character that we care most about, our surrogate going into this world. So it would also be more moving for the audience if we were made to see the story through her eyes…
As we went on and we had more perspective on making the movie, we gradually began to realize that we were breaking all kinds of thriller rules, not only did we have a woman in the central role but we also had no action until the last half of the third act, we had no car chases. Not only that, but we didn’t even have our heroine in physical jeopardy until almost the very end of the movie. She’s in emotional jeopardy but she’s not in physical danger. It just broke rule after rule after rule in that way.
Today we discuss the script’s structure. Once again you may choose to consider the story in terms of three-act structure with one of these iterations:
Aristotle: Beginning / Middle / End
Campbell [Hero’s Journey]: Separation / Initiation / Return
Hegel: Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis
Jung: Invitation / Immersion / Integration
If anyone is into sequence theory, if you’d care to break down the script per its sequences, we would all laud and honor you.
See you in comments!
For Day 1 of our analysis of The Silence of the Lambs, go here.
[Remember next week (10/2–10/6), we will be reading Toy Story 3. You may access the script here.]
NOTE: THIS SERIES AND THE USE OF SCRIPTS IS STRICTLY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES!
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