As I work on my current screenplay I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of the ordinary world in film story structure. The old maxim that I’ve read in countless books and articles, and been told on various courses, is to use the first ten pages to present the protagonist’s ordinary world.
This could be Kansas, Tatooine or The Shire presented in stark contrast to where the main characters have to go on their hero’s journey. That does feel important in mythical stories that revolve around a quest, as per Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey and its inspiration Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a thousand faces. It can also be used as a way to show the calm before the storm, be that Amity Island or Kingston Falls prior to the status quo changing due to a killer shark or some post-transformation mogwai.
The story I’m working on relies on a character’s arrival with no precursor, which made me wonder if that’s something I can pull off. Two movies I watched recently made me think differently about the need for the ordinary world section of a script. I rewatched In Bruges for the umpteenth time, it’s a masterwork and one of my all-time favourite movies. Writer/Director Martin McDonagh never shows us the ordinary world of our two hitmen. We start…well In Bruges. And the film is all the more powerful as a result.
I also saw Hell or High Water for the first time recently and Taylor Sheridan’s Neo Western script doesn’t give us a glimpse of life prior to when the two brothers start to rob banks together. We sare thrown headlong into their first robbery at the start of the movie. In a way both these films treat their protagonists like forces of nature, they themselves are the catalyst for chaotic change. Perhaps this is where the distinction lies.
This week’s episode of the screenwriting podcast Scriptnotes talked about another well-trodden piece of advice - enter late, exit early. They mentioned how important this advice is to a screenwriter approaching scenes when they are starting out, but that with more experience you know when to ignore this for dramatic effect. I think the same case can be made regarding the need for an explicit ordinary world being shown on screen too.
It’s interesting to consider that in a story where the hero returns home at the end or where the outside force is removed from a place we never left, you need that reassuring opening to bookend the ending. The opening image and closing image of Blake Synder’s flawed, but interesting Save the Cat® approach.
In Bruges, Hell or High Water and the script I’m currently working on the lead character is more of an anti-hero and their ordinary world needs to be more oblique. Their journey isn’t aligned to the mythical approach to storytelling in the same way, so doesn’t need to rely on the same tropes. Perhaps with that in mind ignoring the instinct to show the ordinary world is the right thing to do after all. Time will tell.