Written By: William Goldman interviews David Koepp
The WGA’s monthly journal “Written By” provides consistently good reading about the craft and business of screenwriting. They have online articles, but if you don’t subscribe to receive the hard copy of the magazine, you miss out on some nuggets. For instance, in the May 2008 issues, William Goldman interviews fellow screenwriter David Koepp. With the cheeky title “Somebody Knows Something,” a twist on Goldman’s famous line about Hollywood — “Nobody knows anything” — it turns out that Goldman and Koepp are pals. Several insights in the interview including this exchange:
WG: An Indy movie is a constant set of reversals, like a giant slalom course.
DK: Those moments make storytelling exciting. There’s a kids’ book called That’s Good! That’s Bad! that I always thought perfectly encapsulates storytelling. It’s about a kid who falls off a mountain, and somebody says, “That’s bad,” but somebody else says, “No, that’s good, because then he caught the legs of a migrating stork.” “Oh,” they say, “that’s good.” “No, that’s bad, because the stork flew into a storm,” and it goes on. Everything that seems to be good turns out to be bad, but upon further examination that bad thing turns out to be good. That’s Indy. Constant reversals in the chases and the fights. I don’t think there’s a formula for that; that’s just trying to be interesting and always have it develop, to always bring peril to your guy however you can. And try to follow the rule that you can use coincidence but only if it’s bad for your character. You can never bail him out with coincidence, but you screw him up even worse with it.
Re reversals: That is so true and it goes beyond just the fun of plot twists, it also speaks to the fact that psychologically, readers need to feel like the Protagonist has been put through the ringer in order to achieve their goal. That’s part of the ‘bigness’ of movies, there’s typically a lot at stake and the distance to travel, both geographically and emotionally, to get from the beginning of Act One to the end of Act Three is expansive. Reversals force the Protagonist to overcome greater and greater odds, making the resolution of the journey that much more satisfying.
Re coincidences: The main thing about coincidences I always preach is something told to me by someone somewhere along the line — “A script can only have one coincidence.” As to what Koepp says, I think that is still true in the sense of only one good coincidence, i.e., something that benefits the Protagonist; it’s okay to have more than one bad coincidence, events that happen to muck up the Protagonist’s efforts.