Waldo Salt believed in capturing “the truth” of the characters in a story. I had the good fortune of having several conversations with Waldo, and he was not only an extraordinary writer, but an extraordinary person. We talked about the craft of screenwriting a lot, and Waldo told me that he believed the character’s need (the dramatic need—what the character wants to win, gain, or achieve) determines the dramatic structure. His words resonated with me immediately, and I shared with him that I had recently come to the same understanding while I was analyzing Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: The character’s need determines the creative choices he/she makes during the screenplay, and gaining clarity about that need allows you to be more complex, more dimensional, in your character portrayal.

It was a powerful moment for both of us as we sat in an unspoken glow of communication that was more powerful than words, and it led to a long and passionate discussion about capturing “the truth of the human condition” in a screenplay. The key to a successful screenplay, Waldo emphasized, was preparing the material. Dialogue, he said, is “perishable,” because the actor can always improvise lines to make something work. But, he added forcefully, the character’s dramatic need is sacrosanct. That cannot be changed, because it holds the entire story in place. Putting words down on paper, he said, is the easiest part of the screenwriting process; it is the visual conception of the story that takes so long. And he quoted Picasso: “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”

Reading it from this perspective, I saw four things, four essential qualities that seemed to go into the making of good characters: (1), the characters have a strong and defined dramatic need; (2), they have an individual point of view; (3), they personify an attitude; and (4), they go through some kind of change, or transformation.

Those four elements, those four qualities, make up good character. Using that as a starting point, I saw that every main, or major, character has a strong dramatic need. Dramatic need is defined as what your main characters want to win, gain, get, or achieve during the course of your screenplay. The dramatic need is what drives your characters through the story line. It is their purpose, their mission, their motivation, driving them through the narrative action of the story line.

Having a character change during the course of the screenplay is not a requirement if it doesn’t fit your character. But transformation, change, seems to be an essential aspect of our humanity, especially at this time in our culture. I think we’re all a little like Melvin (Jack Nicholson) in As Good as It Gets (Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks). Melvin may be complex and fastidious as a person, but his dramatic need is expressed toward the end of the film when he says, “When I’m with you I want to be a better person.” I think we all want that. Change, transformation, is a constant of life, and if you can impel some kind of emotional change within your character, it creates an arc of behavior and adds another dimension to who he/she is. If you’re unclear about the character’s change, take the time to write an essay in a page or so, charting his or her emotional arc.

One of Henry James’s theories is termed the Theory of Illumination. James said that if your character occupies the center of a circle and all the other characters he interacts with surround him, then each time a character interacts with the main character, the other characters can reveal, or illuminate, different aspects of the main character. The analogy he used was walking into a darkened room and turning on the floor lamps located in each corner. Each lamp illuminates a different part of the room. In the same way, different aspects of your main character can be illuminated by what other people say about him or her. This is how we know that Bob Harris, the Bill Murray character in Lost in Translation, is a movie star: He’s sitting at the bar, alone, when two guys start telling him how much they loved his movies, and wonder whether he did all his own stunts. In that one exchange, we learn he is an action star, one whose career seems to be on the decline.

A short time later, I had the opportunity to interview Robert Towne, and during the course of our conversation I asked how he went about creating his characters, especially how he conceived Jake Gittes, the Jack Nicholson character. He replied that the first question he often asks himself when approaching his character is “What is this character afraid of?” In other words, what is his/her deepest fear? Gittes, a private detective who specializes in “discreet investigation,” has a certain reputation to uphold, so he always wants to “look good.” He does everything to make a good impression. He dresses immaculately, has his shoes shined every day, and has his own code of ethics. Gittes’s unspoken, deep-seated fear is not being taken seriously, looking foolish.

When you’re preparing to write a scene, first establish the purpose, then find the components, the elements contained within the scene. Then determine the content. Suppose you wanted to set a scene in a restaurant. What components could you effectively use? Possibly the waiter has a cold, or is starting to come down with one; or maybe he or she is overworked, has too many stations to cover; maybe he had a disagreement with his significant other just before he came to work; or maybe a couple at a nearby table is having an argument that begins in a subdued fashion, but soon escalates and intrudes on the characters in your scene. Let something happen that could possibly impact the characters. Look for any ingredients you might use that could generate some form of conflict, either inside the characters or within the restaurant itself.

Notice how the one line of action, showing the house, from living room to kitchen to bedroom to the outside, is a continuous line of action, but illustrated with four different couples, giving the impression that Carolyn has been showing the house the whole day. This single line of action, showing the house, is the subject of the sequence, the context; and the content changes from room to room, couple to couple. In effect, this could be labeled a “montage,” a series of shots strung together to bridge time, place, and action.

The sequence concludes with Carolyn, at the end of the day, shutting the vertical blinds. Then, “standing very still, with the blinds casting shadows across her face, she starts to cry: brief, staccato SOBS that seemingly escape against her will. Suddenly she SLAPS herself, hard. ‘Stop it,’ she demands to herself. But the tears continue. She SLAPS herself again. ‘Weak. Baby. Shut up. Shut up!’ She SLAPS herself repeatedly until the crying stops. She stands there, taking deep, even breaths until she has everything under control. Then she finishes pulling the blinds shut, once again all business. She walks out calmly, leaving us alone in the dark, empty room.”

Look what we know about her character from this particular sequence. She fails in her intention, “I will sell this house today”; we’ve seen her working her butt off doing the best job she can, but it’s still not good enough. She thinks she has failed, and failure, to her, is a sign of weakness. Then she pulls it all together, wipes the tears away, and strides out as if nothing had happened.

But look at what we, the reader and audience, get to see: a woman with a low sense of self-esteem and little self-love, who takes failure personally and blames herself for what she is not able to accomplish.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is a perfect example. One of the most gifted novelists of the twentieth century, Fitzgerald came to Hollywood to write screenplays. He failed miserably—he tried to “learn” camera angles and the intricate technology of film, and he let that get in the way of his screenwriting. Not one script he worked on was made without extensive rewriting. His only screenwriting achievement is unfinished, a script called Infidelity written for Joan Crawford in the 1930s. It’s a beautiful script, patterned like a visual fugue, but the third act is incomplete and it lies gathering dust in the studio vaults.

Most people who want to write screenplays have a little of F. Scott Fitzgerald in them. The screenwriter is not responsible for writing in the camera angles and detailed shot terminology. It’s not the writer’s job. The writer’s job is to tell the director what to shoot, not how to shoot it. If you specify how each scene should be shot, the director will probably throw it away. And justifiably so.

A scene is written in a master shot, or specific shots. A master shot covers a general area: a room, a street, a lobby. A specific shot focuses on a specific part of the room—a door, say, or in front of a specific store on a specific street. The scenes from American Beauty are mostly presented in master shot. The script Cold Mountain utilizes both specific shots and master shots. If you want to write a dialogue scene in master shot, all you need to write is INT. RESTAURANT— NIGHT, and simply let your characters speak without any reference to the camera or shot.

You can be as general or specific as you want. A scene can be one shot (a car racing down the street) or a series of shots (a couple arguing on a street corner in front of a few bystanders).

A shot is what the camera sees.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman offers a good example of taking dialogue from a play and using it as an opportunity to see an incident as it happens. There is a scene in which Willy Loman approaches his boss, the son of the man he has worked for for nearly thirty-five years. His “American dream” now shattered and in pieces, Willy has come to ask the man if he can give up the road, literally his way of life, and work in the main office. But Willy Loman is a salesman, and he doesn’t know anything else.

Willy asks Howard, the son, for a job on the floor. First he asks for $65 a week, then he drops his request to $50 a week, and then, in a final humiliation, he is literally forced to beg for $40 a week. But this “is a business, kid, and everybody’s gotta pull his own weight,” Willy is told, and Willy Loman’s sales figures have not been the best lately. Willy responds by retreating into his memory, telling Howard what drew him to become a salesman. “When I was a boy... eighteen, nineteen,” he says, “I was already on the road. And there was a question in my mind as to whether selling had a future for me....”