Written Interview: Seth Lochhead

Yam magazine nterview with Hanna screenwriter Seth Lochhead. Some excerpts:

How important is the “villain” in a movie like Hanna?

I think the honest answer would be that the villain is not important in a film like Hanna. I believe the hero/villain relationship resides in Hanna. Erik and Marissa are characterization, visualizations of Hanna’s two warring halves. What makes it complex and what the actors bring to it, is that they too have their own struggles, with their own hero/villains warring inside. Maybe Erik’s hero is a bit more prevalent. And perhaps Marissa’s villain is more prevalent (especially when she’s hanging out with Isaacs). But, ultimately, my conception of them is that they are human (neither the hero or the villain).

I read that the script was blacklisted… who stepped in and saved it from production limbo?

Franklin Leonard’s Blacklist is a great thing. It’s a list of most liked screenplays by people who have to read 10, 15, 20 scripts a week. When a script makes it on the blacklist, you know there’s something about that script that has stuck in the head of the reader. Reader/audience mentality fascinates me. There Will Be Blood was on the same list! Ha. I’m proud Hanna was on the blacklist. It helped my career and did not hinder the script’s progress… if anything it helped.

“I believe the hero/villain relationship resides in Hanna. Erik and Marissa are characterization, visualizations of Hanna’s two warring halves. What makes it complex and what the actors bring to it, is that they too have their own struggles, with their own hero/villains warring inside.”

Intentional or not, this is straight out of Carl Jung, conveyed in the idea of the shadow:

In Jungian psychology, the shadow or “shadow aspect” is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. It is one of the three most recognizable archetypes, the others being the anima and animus and the persona. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” It may be (in part) one’s link to more primitive animal instincts, which are superseded during early childhood by the conscious mind.

According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to projection: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections are unrecognized “The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object — if it has one — or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power.” These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world.

In writing, we can think of projections as characters that surround the Protagonist, the shadow most typically reflected in Nemeses. Per Hanna’s character, as Lochhead suggests, she has to come to terms with her own “warring halves,” and that struggle is represented in the External World by Erik and Marissa.

Looking at story this way and in particular the constellation of the characters who emerge in our writing is, I find, a fascinating and helpful approach. It crystallizes characters and their respective narrative functions, steers us into each character to find their core essence upon which we can construct multilayered flesh-and-blood individuals each of whom is a protagonist in their own story. And it seems like Seth Lochhead has either studied Jung or intuitively struck upon some key dynamics of metamorphosis that innately exist in the psychological realm of human experience.
 
For the rest of the interview Lochhead, go here.

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