"Tree of Life" proves that all you really need is a clearly drawn dramatic idea to sustain a powerful motion picture.

All you need to write an effective screenplay is a clearly laid-out dramatic idea. The success of movies like Hurt Locker and Tree of Life confirm this. Neither of these movies conform to much of what you’ll find in the traditional screenwriting paradigms: there is no big “end of Act I” reversal, there is no standard antagonist, there is no climactic final battle. These movies have certain loose elements of structure, but they’re ultimately sustained by the clarity and simplicity of their respective central ideas. In the case of The Hurt Locker, the central idea would read something like, “A soldier’s addiction to death-defying battle both saves and destroys the life around him.” Here “life” means everything from the welfare of his fellow soldiers to the family members who need him back at home. In Tree of Life, the central idea would read something like, “Our natural desire to control the world around us keeps us from the grace that can actually free us.” We see this play out through the characters who struggle in vain to navigate their life wounds with self-protection and willful control rather than simply surrender to the force of God that forgives and unites us all. So, what constitutes an effective idea? In both movies, the central idea outlines a clear conflict that is then dramatized through fully embodied characters. There isn’t a single moment in The Hurt Locker that doesn’t trace back to the core battle between Sergeant William James’ addiction to battle and the ripple effect of destruction left in its wake; likewise, there isn’t a single moment in Tree of Life that doesn’t relate back to the struggle between resistance to surrender and the legacy of pain created by that resistance. In both cases, we have leading characters who activate this struggle through committed dramatic action: James (Jeremy Renner) goes for the adrenaline rush no matter the cost, Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) and his son Jack (Hunter McCracken/Sean Penn) drive their happiness into the ground attempting to rebound from the world that so wounded them. We, the viewers, become engaged in the deepening war between the two sides of the central battle – it’s the spine that sustains a movie’s power. Here, “power” means something much deeper and much profounder than the outward mechanics of predetermined “structure” – a concise, well-developed internal idea will always trump the movie that plays by the rules for the simple sake of playing by the rules. The lesson here for any writer is to know your story’s underlying idea in terms of the most fundamental conflict that will play out from beginning to end. What is the central struggle here? How does your hero embody it? How does this struggle deepen from start to finish?

Crazy Heart gets its quiet drama going with quiet danger.

I finally got around to seeing Crazy Heart – it is a perfect example of how even a slower-paced, more meditative character study uses life-or-death danger to generate dramatic traction. Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) isn’t just your garden-variety alcoholic, he’s an alcoholic on the verge of literally killing himself – if he doesn’t clean up his act in the near future, he will surely die. This is a man who has thrown his entire life away to the bottle: over the years, he has sacrificed a lucrative music career, a meaningful relationship with his son, and his basic physical/spiritual wellbeing. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that intimate, lower-key stories get a free pass from having to sufficiently raise the dramatic stakes – movies like Crazy Heart, Sideways, Brokeback Mountain, Ordinary People and so many others might appear quiet on the outside but they nonetheless throw everything on the line for their heroes. In point of fact, that is precisely how these stories get away with their slower paces – we remain invested in the flow of information because there is a quietly strong pull towards some kind of day-of-reckoning that means everything to the main character. These movies may not be loud, showy, blazing-guns adventures but the world is nonetheless coming to a possible end – maybe not the literal end of the world (like, say, in The Lord of the Rings) but a figurative end of the world.

A History of Violence never takes full responsibility for Viggo's deep psychological split.

My problem with A History of Violence is that it never really deals with the psychological/emotional split that is at the heart of its premise. According to the world of the story, Tom Stall (Viggo Mortenson) was not just a gangster, but a reckless, deranged and especially lethal gangster – then, somewhere along the way, he made a decision to leave that all behind him and start anew. And it leaves the viewer to wonder: Why? The script totally sidesteps its own underlying central question: What causes a seemingly unrepentant assassin to want to make a break with his life of crime and rebirth himself into a small-town family man? Which leads to an even more important follow-up question: Can it be done? And at what emotional cost to himself and those around him? Are we supposed to just accept that someone who was by all definitions a sociopath could just reinvent himself with no lingering trace of his old identity? Are we to believe that a marriage built on such profound lies can exist unblemished? Or that a man with such a deep psychological split can really be a stand-up husband and father? A History of Violence seems to suggest that Tom has been able to create and maintain a perfect family with no real regard for the powerful secret he has been keeping from them. This is ultimately where the movie fails on a certain level – the revelation of Tom’s dual-identity never illuminates a deeper issue regarding his relationship with his most cherished loved ones. In other words, there is a much deeper, much more powerful conflict at the heart of this movie than a man who simply needs to kill his old mob ties – it’s the conflict of a man who has done horrible things and makes a decision to just “leave it all behind,” the conflict of a man who creates “the perfect family” under very false pretenses, the conflict of a man who has been lying to the love of his life since the moment he met her. If the movie dealt with the part of Tom that made this decision so many years ago, if it dealt with the repercussions of him simply disowning his past, it would have the opportunity to create a deep internal journey that affects those around him: Tom’s secrecy would function as a silent killer in his household, and its integration would be the thing that ultimately heals the household. This is how director David Cronenberg could have married Tom’s external crisis with a deeper, more sustaining internal crisis. Instead, this otherwise smart, capable and accomplished movie settles for the most basic, literal conflict possible – a dad who has to kill his gangster brother so his family can be safe – and, in doing so, fails to take responsibility for the flawed, compelling choice made by its hero so many years ago.

With dramatic clarity comes dramatic ease.

Clarity creates ease.

You see this all the time in life.

Take money, for example. If you’re vague about your financial affairs (how much you have, how much you earn, how much you owe), then you create a baseline level of stress (you’re late paying your bills, you overdraw your account, you’re working too hard for your paycheck), and you impede your overall life energy.

If, on the other hand, you get clear on the numbers you have, the numbers you need, and the numbers you actually get paid, you can orchestrate your life in a way that makes total, organic sense. You will get paid, your bills will get paid, and money will accumulate. Financial clarity empowers you to step into financial flow.

Likewise, clear boundaries create an equally strong container for personal relationships. Vague, unspoken or disowned emotions lead to strained relationships built on silent resentments and unmet needs.

When you’re willing to get clear on what it is you want, what you need, and what you expect out of relationships, then you’re well on your way to creating the kind of interpersonal connections that will best serve you. Emotional clarity empowers you to step into emotional flow.

And so it is with screenwriting: clarity creates ease.

Most writers start scripts from a place of vagueness. Ask them to state the point of their movie in a single sentence, or to articulate their movie’s central question, or to succinctly explain how their hero embodies their intended theme, and you’ll often get a confused, flustered or puzzled response. It should be easy to articulate these things. If it’s not easy, you’re not dramatically clear and it will be evident in your screenplay.

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They may not know why they do what they do, but Bart and Annie do it with total dramatic conviction.

There is such a deep existential power to Gun Crazy, chiefly because there really is no rhyme or reason to what our heroes do. When asked by her partner-in-crime why Annie feels the need to kill innocent bystanders during their crime heists, she launches into a litany of reasons, “Because I had to. Because I was afraid. Because they would have killed you. Because you’re the only thing I’ve got in the whole world. Because I love you,” and yet none of them seem to carry much conviction. The fact remains that when it comes to the scene of the actual crime, there’s a lust in Annie’s eyes as she brandishes a gun and unleashes hellfire with it, there’s a thirst for violence simply for the sake of violence. In other words, Annie kills simply because she wants to to kill. And she’ll keep killing, even when she knows it’s gotten them into an inescapable corner, even when she knows their time has come to an end, even when she knows the moral price it costs her. She just has to do it. And it’s a similar road for our conflicted antihero Bart. A genuine guy, an upstanding citizen, a man who respects life and the right to live, he nonetheless has to own a gun and he has to shoot that gun. If it means breaking a storefront window to steal the gun, he’ll do it. If it means going to reform school for it, he’ll do it. He’ll feel guilty about it, he’ll beat himself up for it – but he’ll do it. And when Bart meets a soulmate in gun-loving Annie, he goes along with her thirst for excitement simply because he has no other choice. In some scenes, they’re motivated by love, in other scenes they’re motivated by the fancy “things” money can buy, in other scenes they’re motivated by the sheer thrill of violence, and in other scenes they’re motivated by a shared reverence for the gun: the target of their lust always changes, what remains constant is the frenzied rush to follow that destructive impulse. Gun Crazy may just be the most successful cinematic translation of compulsive behavior ever – it’s a hyperkinetic, energized, fast-paced road to nowhere, propelled forward by characters with no real understanding of what drives them to destructive ends, just the simple innate knowing that they must have it, whatever “it” is. The movie works because Bart and Annie are committed to their compulsions with everything they’ve got, and they ride that wave all the way to the end of the line where they have nowhere else to go; the movie works because it so clearly lays out its core battle: the thrill of compulsive excitement versus the destructive price you pay for that compulsion. There is a linear clarity here that pulls us deeper into the pounding hearts of these confused, tormented individuals. One of my absolute favorites.

Generations of men doomed to repeat familiar mistakes.

There is something so incredibly profound about The Godfather, something that goes deeper than the surface of its Mafioso plot, something that speaks to a much more universal experience of what it means to be born into a family legacy. Don Corleone is acutely aware of the precariousness of his so-called power position but ultimately rationalizes it with the resolution that favorite son Michael will get to escape the family business. Unfortunately, Michael has been born into an unspoken code of honor where duty to the family comes before duty to self, into a world where his even-handed temperament and shrewd diplomacy are the very things needed to keep the family going strong amidst great upheaval. And so we watch generations of men doomed to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.  What a poignant metaphor for the way any destructive legacies gets handed down from parents to children, even despite our best interests. This is a perfect example of a movie that uses an external plot – in this case, a mafia family’s struggle to maintain power – as a vehicle for a deeper universal conflict – the sins of the father becoming the sins of the son. This clear marriage is what allows this crime saga to resonate with such deep emotional meaning.

What I find so interesting about all this hubbub around Charlie Sheen’s infamous ABC interview is the unacknowledged, collective conversation we’re having underneath the surface: “Be normal, Charlie, be healthy, be like us,” as if we’re all sane. I mean, really, look at how helpless that correspondent seems in the face of Sheen’s conviction. She cannot handle him at all, she can’t meet him in his place of anti-establishment thought. All she can do is fall back on armchair diagnoses of bipolar disorder, proffer pharmaceutical medication and revert to 12-step rhetoric that even she doesn’t seem to believe. Isn’t this the exact kind of processed drone that movies like Fight Club and American Beauty parody? It’s interesting that we get such a charge out of taking down this kind of emblem of Mainstream Society in cinema, and yet then we turn around and support it as the “voice of reason” when it comes to real life. Watching this footage, I cannot help but feel that this reporter is just as crazy as Sheen, in her own way, but the difference between them is that Sheen wears his insanity on his sleeve. If I had to choose between being crazy like Sheen or crazy like that repressed, button-down interviewer with her quickness to diagnose who’s bipolar and who’s not, with her “successful” living peddling negative pleasure via tabloid journalism to the masses, I am honestly not sure which I wold choose.

Leo navigates the danger generated by the rip between his deepest want (look to the future without reconciling the past) and his deepest unmet need (letting go of the past)

Inception provides a sound model for character transformation that both powers the story forward and also brings it to it a meaningful conclusion. The transformation begins with the pronounced gap between Leonardo DiCaprio’s deepest want (rescue the future of his family without first letting go of the past) and his deepest unmet need (release his toxic idea of his wife’s memory and forgive himself). Leonardo’s psychological rip generates dramatic danger that ultimately poses very real conflict for our heroes – the guilt-produced projection of his wife infiltrates his latest do-or-die assignment and threatens to undermine his only chance to make things right. It’s the escalation of this danger that forces Leonardo into a corner where he has no choice but to do the very thing he has avoided all along: void the memory of his wife of her power over him, claim ownership of his part in her death, forgive himself for his transgression and finally release her from his subconscious. This is how a movie like Inception demonstrates true internal cohesion – the unmet need simultaneously motivates the hero’s on-screen and also generates the danger that ultimately forces him to heed his deeper emotional calling. The unmet need is like a dragon that demands to be heard – his voice initially sends our hero running, but his presence ultimately grows so loud that it can’t be ignored.

• What is your hero’s initial psychological rip –
• What is your hero’s urgent want?
• What is your hero’s deepest unmet need?
• What immediate, pressing danger does this rip generate?
• How does this danger escalate to a point where your hero has no choice but to finally face his unmet need?