Tuesdays With Tom Benedek: “Life’s Demons: The Inherent Emotional Conflict in Characters”
A guest column from screenwriter Tom Benedek (Cocoon):
I was going to call this post Stopped because I have been thinking about Tony Scott’s tragic death last week. I happened to have watched 3 of his films in the last six months. A writer I was working with used Man On Fire as a touchstone for a script project. I have been playing with time travel so I was curious about Deja Vu. And Unstoppable was sent to me as a screener.
In each of these films, Denzel Washington presents a protagonist living in a somewhat or greatly tortured present though the stories and the structures of these films are very different. The visual styles are similar — Tony Scott films all have a particular look and feel — something screenwriters don’t generally place on the page. As a writer, the thing that resonates today from all those films is the way that Tony Scott brought the feel of his own personal issues, his demons to his protagonists. We all do that when we write.
The external conflicts and internal conflicts are almost always about things we can relate to because they are parts of us. I think we have to accept that and let it thrive through our pages. It may be part of the reason we write — to air out our souls.
Tony Scott didn’t make movies that were considered highly literate, from screenplays which were always great, in formal terms. Yet one of the many things he did fantastically was to bring the agony, beauty, the juicy conflict of living real life which we all experience more or less in our daily lives to the screen through his protagonists.
As we write our pages, mindful of story, plot, subplot, the intricacies of character development, the raw facts of the mindsets of our protagonist may be the most essential thing. The heart and soul from ourselves which we carry into that may be the thing which makes our written work memorable and resonant. For me, the spectacular and wrong way Tony Scott took his life last week sticks as a visual the way so much in his films did. There is also this blur between his protagonists, their internal conflicts and the filmmaker now and probably forever. We all need to do a better job of conquering our demons than Tony Scott did, obviously. Displaying them as well as he did in his creative work endures as a great role model amidst this tragedy.
You can carry on this conversation with Tom in comments. You can also work with him in the upcoming session of Prep: From Concept to Outline, a 6-week screenwriting workshop that begins September 4.
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