Robert McKee interview: Part 5

Interesting 7-part interview between a young entrepreneur Sramrana Mitra and screenwriting guru Robert McKee. The questions have a business slant to them and yet McKee always pulls through them the commerce side of things and back to his central focus: Story.

Here is an excerpt from Part 5:

SM: Can you synthesize your philosophy of storytelling in brief for the reader?

RM: I will do my best. I get asked that question all the time. Reducing story down to its simplest underlying element, it is the underlying form of all stories everywhere. A story begins when an event, which is caused either by human decision or random coincidence, radically upsets the balance of forces in a character’s life. This event causes the character to need to restore the balance of life, and to do that the protagonist character will conceive the object of desire.

An object of desire can be anything imaginable. It is what the protagonist feels they need to put life back into balance. It can be something physical. In a crime story it might be a dead villain. It could be something like a happy marriage. It could be something metaphysical like the meaning for life. The protagonist then goes off into their world into their own heart and soul as human beings and into the various dimensions of their existence seeking their object of desire, trying to restore the equilibrium of life.

As they do this, they will struggle against forces of antagonism that will arise from their own inner natures, from their personal relationships with other human beings or from the physical environment. Forces of antagonism will rise up and try to block them from achieving their object of desire. They will struggle towards that and may or may not achieve it. The story may or may not end up with a satisfying balance of life for the protagonist.

To go even further, we could reduce it down to five fundamental elements of any event. The protagonists desire to restore life’s equilibrium, the object of desire the protagonist either consciously or subconsciously believes is the key to life’s balance, the protagonist’s constant struggle to achieve that object of desire, and the forces of antagonism from all of their aspects of life to prevent them from doing that. It is really very simple universal form.

Apart from the fact that I only count four “fundamental elements” in the last paragraph, I don’t know how one can argue with McKee. And what I like about this articulation is it incorporates vividly the inner life of story. So much of screenwriting theory and books focuses on structure — and by all means, structure is important. However script readers and movie viewers do not respond emotionally to structure; they respond to characters and most often and most specifically to the Protagonist and their psychological journey.

The language system I used divides the screenplay universe into two parts:

* The External World (Plotline): Where we experience characters through their actions and dialogue.

* The Internal World (Themeline): Where we experience characters through their intentions and subtext.

And where the Plotline is comprised of what we have come to call (courtesy of Syd Field) a series of plot points or (courtesy of Frank Daniel) a series of sequences, the Themeline is comprised of movements. Most mainstream Hwood movies have four that follow this arc:

Disunity — Deconstruction — Reconstruction — Unity

That is, as McKee says, in the beginning of the story, the Protagonist begins in a state of imbalance or Disunity. They set off to find balance or Unity, but along the way through confronting obstacles, roadblocks, and reversals, and most particularly some sort of antagonist or Nemesis force, they go through a Deconstruction process, knocking around the behaviors and beliefs they had back in their ordinary world (where they started the story). And then into a Reconstruction process, where they tap into their core essence or authentic self, which enables them to overcome the odds and a Final Struggle to achieve Unity.

Or what we may call transformation.

Those four movements can be shifted and rearranged if the story is a tragedy — the Protagonist does not succeed in ‘winning’ in the end — or if the story is one of a Protagonist’s fall from Unity or any number of variations. But most movies — per Hollywood’s “lie” (according to McKee) — follow this ‘positive’ arc. Or as Joseph Campbell puts it:

Departure.
Transformation.
Return.

For more of Part 5 of the McKee interview, go here.

For Part 4, go here.

For Part 3, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

For Part 1, go here.

Tomorrow in Part 6, McKee compares writing stories to the making of a shoe.