Insight into Joss Whedon: Storyteller
A special promotional video for the upcoming surer-to-be smash hit The Avengers, featuring Joss Whedon discussing a fight sequence between Thor and Iron Man. His insights into this one scene reveal how a storyteller thinks:
Here’s an excerpt of Whedon’s commentary:
“It was one of the first things that Kevin Fiege at Marvel Studios said to me. ‘These guys have to fight. Because it is true, people want to see who’s the stronger, who’s going to get it done. For me the most important thing was that fight was earned, that both of them had an agenda that conflicted with the other’s, that it wasn’t a spell or a case of mistaken identity, where you’re just waiting for them to figure it out. They both really think they need to win and neither of them is totally wrong, and that makes it more than fighting, it makes it a conflict.”
Again a simple observation about a single set piece in the movie and yet much to learn from it:
* Earn it: The goal of the fight may be top-down in its origination [i.e., from the head of Marvel Studios], but it’s the writer’s job to go inside the characters within the context of the story universe and earn the right for the fight to occur.
* Agenda: Every character should have their own goals. Sometimes those goals align. Sometimes they don’t. If the writer can tap into the characters and determine how agendas can crash up against each other, then you have conflict that arises organically from the characters.
* Need: Beyond their conscious goal [agenda], characters have an internal world filled with a variety of memories, thoughts, emotions, passions, etc. I don’t even know the particulars of the fight between Iron Man and Thor, and setting aside their agendas, I can pretty figure that what’s going on at a need level between them is this: A symbolic dick-measuring contest.
* Neither of them is totally wrong: This is critical. If both parties in a fight are right or even partially right in terms of their agendas as they relate to the larger plot, then you provide for each character even that much more energy to bring to the contest because they are fighting for something in which they believe, which in turns makes for a more compelling scene.
Just as the article’s paragraph notes:
Joss Whedon has long insisted that in as much as the Avengers are a fearless group of superheroes, they’re also a dysfunctional family thrown together by circumstance, distrustful of one another and often arrogant in their own powers.
External World: The Avengers are a “fearless group of superheroes.” Great. What do you do with that? Explore the Internal World: “They’re also a dysfunctional family… distrustful of one another and often arrogant in their own powers.”
Now you have something you can work with as a storyteller. And evidently it’s what Whedon and the screenwriters did as evidenced by the glowing THR review of the movie:
Although they really should be saving their energy for the battle against Loki and his minions, the Avengers team can’t resist getting into it with each other from time to time. One could say that this is just gratuitous time-killing, but it could as persuasively be argued that watching The Hulk duke it out with Thor for bragging rights as to who’s tougher is what such a film is all about; at least there’s nothing perfunctory about it, as there is when superheroes routinely dispatch aliens and enemies who exist just to get blown away. The friction between Iron Man and Captain America, for example, is all about style and attitude; the former is far too irreverent and glib for the latter, for whom patriotism and coming to the rescue are not laughing matters.
Again the conflict grounded in the core essence of the characters, the events of the External World tied directly to the story’s Internal World.
Takeaway: We have to make the script reader care about our characters. We need to ground our characters’ action in how and why who they are. We have to earn that right. Otherwise all the action in the world on screen is meaningless, nothing more than noise.
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