Writing the first draft of a screenplay is like driving through a blizzard: you usually have no idea what’s coming up, the “right path” is whichever one you create that doesn’t immediately destroy your car, and once you’ve gotten to your destination, you have the hindsight to make a much more straightforward route on the next draft. To do all of that from the comfort of your perilously unaffordable apartment can be terrifying for some, exhilarating for others. If you’ve decided you’ve got an idea and want the script to eventually be in Alfred Molina’s hands, you’ve got to earn it.

The secret to creativity is making sure that you’re doing it wrong. Every song you’ve repeated ten times in a row on a treadmill, every movie you’ve rewatched as you fell asleep, every recipe you’ve burnt because you don’t know why potatoes get soft when boiled but eggs get hard—all of them recreated the rules by breaking the previous rules—doing it wrong. Because it’s impossible to do something wrong if you don’t know what right looks like, here are 10 screenwriting tips alongside 30 must-see movies that each did it wrong, were adored, and have thereby become right; learn where they skewed off the path so that you can skew off theirs.

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Movies That Execute Simple Premises

Let’s start with your film’s premise: say you want to make a movie about regular people in regular situations. As the most boring possible way to start, understand that regular people are delightful but regular situations are detested—we endure regular situations every day and go to the movies to pretend we don’t. You’re allowed to do anything in your script and if you’re still too enthused by Italian neorealism to write Star Wars set in PetSmart cages, your first option in plot creation is to take a seemingly regular situation and make it extraordinary.

30/30 — Wendy and Lucy

Wendy and Lucy
Oscilloscope Pictures

Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond’s Wendy and Lucy is about a woman searching for her missing dog—that is it. Reichardt and Raymond use Wendy's desperation to make you believe that this isn’t a regular situation, but more dire to human survival than the Ascenders defeating Dr. McBloop.

29/30 — Fish Tank

Has Star Wars 7 Cast Two More Female Roles?
BBC Films

Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank shows how bildungsroman navigation can be nail-bitingly tense just by how quick decisions make for long-term devastations, plus features an outstanding, young Michael Fassbender.

28/30 — Moonlight

Moonlight
A24

Watch Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight and see how a barely-surfaced romance can burn more ferociously than an opium-soaked Austrian opera. The trick isn’t keeping the premise regular, but making sure the simple feels sublime by how much the character you’ve written for Alfred Molina desperately needs these common and human things to not kill him.

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These Films Execute Extravagant Premises

Say you hate simple premises and want to make Tolkien meets zombies but with a thermonuclear solar flare apocalypse and Molina plays every character (we triple-checked and it hasn’t been done). Your first step here is to remember to never emulate the things of which you’re a terrific fan—skew off the path, don’t put guardrails around it. After that, make sure your extravagant premise still thematically ties to your delightfully human characters.

27/30 — The Truman Show

Jim Carrey's The Truman Show 2 Idea Is Dark and Depressing

Andrew Niccol’s The Truman Show was originally set in a fully reconstructed Manhattan where Truman was miserable, balding, his mother dying, etc., but further drafting revealed that for Truman to embody the promises of postmodern media gluttony, he’d have to live a life so ideal that anybody would want it, making his desire to escape more meaningful than if he lived in obvious misery; the problem isn't the conditions, but the cage.

26/30 — The Matrix

Morpheus in shades sits in his red chair
Warner Bros.

The Wachowski Sisters’ The Matrix doesn’t just look at Plato’s allegory of the cave through the lens of binary code, capitalism, and gender dysmorphia, but ensures its protagonist is asphyxiating for release by being in the same chair as the viewer—a desk one in a cubicle (1999’s flagship premise, with Fight Club, American Beauty, and Office Space also clamoring for which anti-corporate movie would win out at the box office).

25/30 — Adaptation

adaptation

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation could’ve very well just been an adaptation of the novel The Orchid Thief, but by making the screenplay about the act of Charlie Kaufman adapting the novel into this screenplay, there isn’t just meta whimsy but comprehensible terror with us alongside Kaufman failing to adapt it correctly. If you have an exciting and mind-bending premise, make sure your audience can find themselves at home in Molina’s character(s), so Wonderland can spawn wonder for viewers as much as it will for the characters.

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Related: Here Are the Best Movies About Movies, Ranked

Movie Characters That Are Worth A Study

If there’s one thing that audiences demand more than all else, it’s character. If you’re mapping out a Rube Goldberg plot without planning from the start how your protagonist will fit in, you’re designing a roller coaster without planning for the riders. Who are your characters? What do they want? What do they need? How are they going to make sure that happens? (The audience will inhabit the protagonist, so characters with drive will give audiences drive, likewise, characters with lethargy will give audiences lethargy.) Once you have your premise, jumping to plot is like picking grapes and jumping to bottling—designing a character is the thoughtful and slow process of fermentation that your audience is paying $16 for.

24/30 — The Social Network

social-network
Sony Pictures Releasing

The first scene in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network introduces its protagonist impeccably and instantly: Mark cares so deeply about a social hierarchy that he neglects his girlfriend into leaving him for someone who won’t destroy democracy, and so begins his desire to bury himself in so much social hierarchy that the wound is soothed.

23/30 — Phantom Thread

Phantom Thread

Things become even more exciting when two strong characters collide: in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, Reynolds is controlling and Alma will not be controlled; their core personalities conflict and so their charming marriage promises blood.

22/30 — Carol

Carol
The Weinstein Company

Phyllis Nagy’s Carol doesn’t just pit Therese and Carol’s relationship against a homophobic 1952, but pits the two against one another as Carol’s desire to retain her daughter Rindy necessitates terminating the affair—the plot depends on Carol choosing Therese or Rindy—on Carol’s character. By putting Molina behind the wheel of the plot bus, you ensure that the plot never strays from your protagonist’s needs, and therefore from your empathetic audience.

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Conventional Plot Structures In Film

Your bags are packed and you’re ready to go—the question is how. Almost all movies function in linear plots, with the common deviations being flashbacks, flashforwards, and in media res; we experience the timeline with the same forward clogging that we’ve perfected at home. The tricks here are simple: 1) ensure we always know what Molina wants and how he’s gonna get it; 2) Molina receives a myriad of obstacles that cause him to retool and retry (this is conflict and is the ooey-gooey molten center of drama); and 3) events both current and prior are unveiled in an order that is most digestible yet interesting for the audience (this one is explored most in the rewrites so don’t eat your backspace key over it).

21/30 — Get Out

get out
Sourced via Universal Pictures

One of those screenplays so perfect that it makes screenwriting appear effortless rather than self-damning is Jordan Peele’s Get Out: we know from the prologue that Black people are being kidnapped and from there that Chris is meeting his white girlfriends’ parents upstate—without the prologue, the first forty-odd minutes of the movie are stale as french toast bread (a good cooking tip), but with the prologue, we know Chris is in danger but not why. As horror is the dance between keeping the audience in the dark and ensuring the audience desperately wants to escape that dark, reveals are paramount at maintaining hope to learn the whole picture eventually.

Related: Get Out Named Greatest Script of 21st Century by Writers Guild of America

20/30 — In the Mood for Love

Women leans head against man's shoulders while in taxi
Jet Tone Productions

On the romantic end of the filmstock, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love shows two married people (not to each other) discovering their spouses are having an affair (with each other). As the two seem to develop feelings themselves, the choice to immediately have a revenge affair would’ve been expected, but to instead allow the characters’ fears to engineer the plot invented simple yet poignant conflict through cowardice.

19/30 — Prisoners

 Photo

There may be no greater film at teaching exposition than Aaron Guzikowski’s Prisoners: as the police fail to act on the abduction of two children, the parents take the investigation into their own hands, allowing the spiderweb to slowly be revealed as to what happened in this town; those that decry exposition as a tedious requirement neglect that it can be the greatest tool to keep your audience guessing. Yes, too often, plot is incorrectly assumed to be the most important ingredient in the cinematic figgy pudding, but it’s still what the audience is gripping onto. Make sure your timelines—both the one unfolding during the film and the one that began even before Molina’s character rolled out of Hera’s uterus—perform the most difficult spin move in screenwriting: unexpected yet could’ve happened no other way.

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Non-Conventional But Successful Plot Structures

But life, she is short; you’re allowed to write whatever in your screenplay. You’re allowed to fill a whole page with numbers and demand the director figure it out in storyboarding. If you want to explore the real depths of varying plot structures, maybe even abandon three acts altogether, you’re gonna lose brownie points with the suits but some neo-Redditor in 30 years is gonna get every shot cybertatted on their metavatar. Never believe any listicle, worst-selling book, or luxury Masterclass that dictates how to create art; if something excites you when you create it, there will be audiences as excited when they watch it.

18/30 — Memento

Guy Pearce Memento
Summit Entertainment

If you cut up Christopher Nolan’s Memento, you’d be able to piece together a linear story, but given the protagonist’s short-term memory loss, Nolan alternates between a forward narrative and a backward narrative, the ending of the movie being when the two timelines meet in the devastating middle. This plot device works with the fact that not only does the character have the disorder to warrant it, but that the story is a mystery; for us to piece together the narrative apes the plot.

17/30 — Mirror

Mirror

Watching Aleksandr Misharin and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, you’ll find a spinning dream portraying the story of a man’s life, of his mother’s life, of Soviet life, of your life—given this is Tarkovsky’s semi-autobiography, for the memories to appear without cohesion or linear organization echoes how your brain recalls your own life.

16/30 — Pulp Fiction

12-best-movies-of-the-90s-ranked
Miramax Films

Watching—and there’s a big sigh here—Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, you can note that the abstract narrative telling and retelling isn’t for kicks but due to the number of interlocking stories demanding that linear storytelling be set aside so all stories each have individual cohesion, even if that amounts to a collective hodgepodge. The movie’s good, of course, but its plot device was meant to simplify the narratives for the audience’s pleasure, not Cahiers itself onto the manifestos of impressionable young men citing it alongside Che Guevara and Elon Musk—the two most opposite people to ever share a dorm room wall. All in all, if you want the Molina from the first half of the movie to kill the Molina from the second half, the world’s your gun show.

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Great Movies Know How To Raise The Stakes

You’re gonna read again and again that ___ is the most important element of screenwriting or ___ is the most important in screenwriting—but it’s stakes and conflict, full stop. They’re the cool wax that keeps Daedalus competently in the air. Every feel-good movie you’ve ever adored with a bowl of canned soup and a sleepy dog was built on the characters fearing death. Dazed and Confused is built on the stakes of social ostracizing. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is built on quickly alleviating stakes because new ones are constantly sprouting up. Your viewer becomes Molina, and if Molina thinks his situation is the most dire event in the whole world, your viewer will get sweaty.

15/30 — Uncut Gems

Uncut_Gems_011

Ronald Bronstein and the Safdie Brothers wrote Uncut Gems as a final kill-code for folks with high blood pressure; Howard’s gambling addiction is so devastating because of how often we see his children, how close he is to getting divorced, how his own brother-in-law is the loan shark to whom he owes nine lives’ savings—Howard has so many things to lose that every reckless choice is a syringe of cringe to the soul.

14/30 — Superbad

Superbad

Even in a smaller circumstance, like trying to lose your virginities without admitting you have egalitarian feelings towards women, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Superbad turns the entirety of the protagonists’ (“Seth” and “Evan”—subtlety is for cowards) identities around supplying alcohol for a party that night—or else they won’t get the girls, which means their masculine self-worths will be drawn and quartered in the Pound Town Square.

Related: Best Emma Stone Movies, Ranked

13/30 — The Babadook

The Babadook - 2014

In Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Amelia’s a widow with the most difficult child since Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, and the movie isn’t even about him being the Antichrist; getting haunted by a picture book can only be this devastating for audiences if you’ve deeply established the value of these characters not dying—that whole “ensuring the audience desperately wants to escape the dark” bit from earlier means stakes. Audiences only fear loss if you give them something to lose, so torture your audiences. They paid for it.

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The Tone Of Your Film Matters

“It’s kinda like Up meets Gran Torino” is a common tool in pitches to describe how your plot and tone interact with one another—this being a redundant example. Agents and producers want full comprehension of how the movie’s going to feel once it’s out of the oven, and that doesn’t cut as easy as comedy, drama, and “dramedy” (Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Lullaby is about an unspecified rhyme that when spoken aloud kills any listeners; the word dramedy is in there). Tone isn’t just “gay period romance” or “murder mystery”—Clue, Oldboy, and Murder on the Orient Express are all murder mysteries, but the first makes you laugh, the second makes you sit down in the shower, and the third just exhausts your patience. Tone is more than the genre, it’s the movie’s inaudible score.

12/30 — Do the Right Thing

do-the-right-thing-new-york
40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is about racism, police brutality, the Brooklyn working class, yet the lifeblood of it is playful, rhythmic, a bright red mural. Lee could’ve written more like Fruitvale Station if he wanted the movie to be more sentimentally devastating, or Crash if he wanted the movie to be worse, but his specific movie was about a lively community plagued with systemic racism, and that demanded a lively, communal tone.

11/30 — Zola

women_zola

Janicza Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris’ Zola is adapted from a Twitter thread; its soundscape is serrated with tweet chirps and notification whistles, its visuals are a rolling take on an influencer’s best day, its narration is as direct and coarse as the tweets themselves; if you want to capture this film’s tone, grab your pocket hellhound and just scroll for two hours.

10/30 — Portrait of a Lady on Fire

women_portrait

Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire needs to emphasize the seclusion of these women—every brilliant, accented character on those pages hides these two from patriarchies, societal recollections, the long hard fall that is aristocratic interpretations of responsibilities. Where some may have felt that gay period romances were already getting the liver spots that straight romances have endured, Sciamma’s solitary tone doesn’t just proclaim that the previous entries don’t exist, but that no other romance has ever existed—if you’re holding hands with your significant other in the theater, you’re lying. Tone is your piece’s look and feel; even if your cake tastes terrible, folks are paying for the fondant decorations.

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Movies With Natural Dialogue For Verisimilitude

If you’re out in public right now, pay attention to how people talk. How often do they complete sentences? Complete thoughts? What words do they use when they’re fishing for more to say—like, you know, I mean, for sure? When Anne Washburn was writing Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, she recorded actors recalling the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons, converted that text, set it in the post-apocalypse, and behold: a first act. Movie stars are lauded for how well they can act the way people do regularly; be lauded for the impossible task of keeping your words honest.

9/30 — Before Sunrise

before sunrise

When Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan wrote Before Sunrise and then Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke rewrote it, the idea was to just capture Jesse and Céline meeting in a foreign locale, talking, falling in love, then never seeing one another again. These are likable folks in an adorable circumstance, and the poetic simplicity of how they converse and what topics they land on invoke both jealousy and familiarity in the viewer.

8/30 — Lady Bird

Lady Bird - Amazon Prime

Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird script was once six hours long, a gushing wound on the relationships of Mothers and Daughters (the original title). She gave the cast and crew her old yearbooks, diaries, had them tour her hometown—the naturalism of the script has the same purpose as leaving Saoirse Ronan’s acne uncovered for her teenage character: to not hide our humiliating and universal experiences.

Related: Barbie Movie Locks in Lady Bird Director Greta Gerwig

7/30 — When Harry Met Sally

Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan eat lunch in When Harry Met Sally
Columbia Pictures

While Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally can feel elevated just because the actors are funny, recognize that naturalism doesn’t have to mean bland because there are plenty of people who aren’t. Natural dialogue out of Billy Crystal’s day-to-day is full of silly voices and banter, but his cadences in the film remain raw and unsalted; Ephron lets the protagonists’ charms flow honestly rather than through mumblecore muzzles. Give Molina the most honest lines you can and ride the coattails of the fact that people naturally enjoy Alfred Molina.

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Theatrical Dialogue As More Performative

Then again, if folks want to hear natural dialogue, a podcast would light up their Skechers. Fiction is fascism à la The Pillowman, so don’t bother trying to tell the truth. Let your inner child lie its way through a decadent story, including in the very communication these characters have with one another. Just as a director will use drastic cuts to leave their fingerprints on the filmstock, flashy dialogue is how a screenwriter bleeds their pen clean through the table and demands to be accepted as a deity. Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances is a concept for beginners and you’re a Shakespeare that will never die—make Molina scream in hand-painted bravados, joust with serrated tongues, woo with misshapen parables and pathetic adoration—you’re a liar when you write, so don’t be gentle.

6/30 — Moonstruck

Moonstruck
Metro Goldwyn Mayer

John Patrick Shanley’s Moonstruck doesn’t contend that melodrama deserves to be appreciated as an equal, but a superior. Grab a big, Italian caricature and feed it shredded Ed Hopper sketches until it becomes violently romantic—that’s the movie, and Cher and Nic Cage have an affair in it.

5/30 — Juno

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Fox Searchlight Pictures

Diablo Cody’s Juno is written in a new dialect instantly fluent to the audience, a feat incomprehensibly difficult that allows the heavyweight of teen pregnancy to be swallowed with a spoonful of diddlies and snaparinos—because teens turn the heavies into lights and the lights into heavies.

4/30 — The Philadelphia Story

philadelphia story

Donald Ogden Stewart and Waldo Salt’s The Philadelphia Story (based on Philip Barry’s play and the only film on this list you have to wear a tie to see) stands the test of time with some marionette-esque acting, farcically predictable yet delightful plotlines, and its dynamite dialogue—the last one obviously doing all the heavy lifting. In the theatre, where you can’t have a million locations or actors, dialogue has to tap dance through the hearts and brains of the audience, and this film is a great example of a stage-to-screen translation that doesn’t collapse under the weight of the screenwriters’ egos. Dialogue is what your audience will quote when their kids are born, will put as their AOL away messages, will turn into the repetitive and only jokes they know how to tell—if you’re up for the artistry, donate to them words they can launder into their own cinematic lives.

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Social Commentary And Being Relevant

Don’t write as a thinking audience member, but as a thinking writer; never formulate the dissertations about your script in your script. Good and thought-provoking commentary investigates, the bad and preachy commentary explains—that means you have to ask questions, not answer them while standing on a 110-page soapbox. Don’t be helplessly daft about your symbols, your parallels, or your inquisitions, but make sure that those items are provoking conversations among circles with whom you tend to agree, not with whom you tend to find ignorant. You don’t know everything. Flaunt it.

3/30 — Thelma & Louise

Thelma & Louise

Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise can be immediately identifiable as social commentary: rape culture dominates, police aren’t stopping it but are integral to its maintenance, feminine expectations ensure women won’t retaliate but even sometimes lend a hand. What would happen if women disregarded that last bit and just popped men who were going to rape them? If police are famously antagonistic towards women who get raped, how much worse would they be towards women who refuse to be? What if the women simultaneously allowed promiscuity to blossom? The women don’t move around as innocent martyrs but rob a convenience store, Officer Hal is surprisingly sympathetic to the women’s plight, Thelma’s one night stand with J.D. results in him stealing everything from her—the movie responds with further questions and complications, forcing the audience to analyze the discussion as something that can’t be solved in just one night of adderall abuse and vlogging.

2/30 — Parasite

Woman holds cake at birthday party
Barunson E&A

Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won’s Parasite gives capitalism a nice jab in its big, Sauron eyes, but simultaneously dissects working-class perceptions of capitalists as malicious vampires and not ignorant, fellow human beings with families and cares. It doesn’t just wrestle with rightwing hierarchies, but liberal cosigning of those same systems; its acclaim and majesty derives from how it reworks well-traveled concepts in these novel ways, riding populist sympathies while forcing working-class self-interrogation on the validity of class cooperation. It rocks.

1/30 — Fight Club

Fight Club

Jim Uhls’ Fight Club is one of the most debated movies in modern history, on one hand, adored by masculine young folks who believe their hierarchical dominance is regularly usurped by corporations, women, and intellectuals, and is on the other adored by academia for its scathing satire of those very men, and is on the other hand adored by LGBT folks seeing the film’s men as so closeted they’ll fisticuffs their way into physically touching, and is on the other hand adored by anarcho-communists who see Tyler as a Lenin figure demonizing capitalism and classism while propping up his own franchises that uphold those very thrones but with King Tyler—you get the point. What is the film’s social commentary? It’s so loaded with questions and provocative images that the Rorschach blackens the entire canvas. Does your script need social commentary? No. It can just be Molina and the solar apocalypse—the kids are big on that. But a good script asks questions, and any microcosmic circumstance can be fit over a larger metaphor; a good script will invoke social commentary whether it likes it or not.

As always, remember that every feature on How-To-Art is your mom's new boyfriend and you don't have to listen to it. We, as a society, often mistakenly believed the mavericks that changed the world were so countercultural that they didn't even know the culture when in reality they were so over-researched that they could back up their theses. Writing a movie isn't an exact science like baking or a manifested blueprint like knitting, but also if you Jackson Pollack your way through the keyboard, don't be surprised if your GoFundMe resembles an Ancestry. A screenwriter sketches, a director paints. The work directors do may be what people celebrate over yours, but you’re the one that assigned them that labor. It’s your set-up and their spike, your genesis and their revelation, your script and their interpretation. To quote The Departed quoting Hamlet, “The readiness is all”—if you’ve eaten, drunk, and bathed in great movies, you’re not just equipped to write, but to stand on their shoulders and write something better. Break a leg, superstars.

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