The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 69 - Too Many Characters

I like to write action movies. Action means big explosions. Big shootouts. Big chases. Big ensembles. In order for the bodies to stack up, I have to litter the script with C-characters, people who can get offed in the most awesome ways, while the protagonists run onward to victory. The trick, though, is making these people recognizable to the audience, while not cluttering the script with too many speaking role bit characters.

I’ve been reworking my Roman army spec recently. The first draft had a lot of speaking roles. To give you an idea of how many characters – the script opens with two opposing armies at war which, over the course of the script, come together to battle an even greater force. Yes, many, MANY characters. ‘Backer took the lead in letting me know that too many of the characters sound the same and do not distinguish themselves from one another. I just realized how this came to be.

In dealing with ensembles, I feel compelled to make sure that most if not everyone who I drop onto the page has some sort of a speaking role. Onyx and I are both guilty of this. We put a lot of people into our scripts – more people than we need – and we try to distinguish them all. What this leads to is too many characters speaking, too many descriptions of people we aren’t supposed to remember, and too many deaths of characters we haven’t begun to care about. There’s a prime example of “too many characters speaking” in the first draft of my Roman army project; during one scene, two characters are having a debate. However, each of them also has two cronies who are always at their side. In order to justify the cronies’ presence, I gave everyone lines. What was a discussion between two people became a discussion between two people but through six people. Everyone sounded the same, because I had just swapped names in throughout the dialogue. ‘Backer was right – no character (except the main two) had a unique voice.

It’s hard juggling multiple characters, especially when many of them speak. The key, though, is balance. Who needs to be there, and who doesn’t? Who has to speak, and who doesn’t? Who is just there to die onscreen, and who has a greater, story serving purpose? Onyx and I are on the lookout for one another, letting one another know when the character count is getting too high. He suggested that I’ll probably have to cut a number of characters, and he’s probably right. At the very least, I’ll have to cut their dialogue.

The Writing Week part 44 – Ensemble Casts

A while back, I wrote about beginning a project that involves voiceover – new, unexplored territory on my writing map. That idea, for which I wrote a 12 page character background, was the first new idea I’d had in a while. I was beginning to worry that I had somehow dried myself up, perhaps since I was spending so much time working on rewrites at that point. Now, I have three additional ideas, two of which I’m particularly excited about, and all I have to do is narrow it down.

In five days, I’ll be getting on a plane bound for South Africa for the second time in my life. (If any of you have any desire to travel to Africa, I strongly suggest getting your name on South African Air’s email list, as they have great deals pretty frequently.) While I don’t foresee doing a lot of writing while I’m abroad, mainly because I’ll be too busy traipsing around with lions and rhinos and giraffes to sit down and bang out a first act of anything, I’m definitely looking forward to the freedom of mobility and the sun on my to help me figure out what it is I want to work on next (outdoors + exercise can often = creative decision making time).

One of the projects I’m working on, the one I’m most strongly leaning toward, revolves around an ensemble cast. The idea is for a war movie – with a twist unique to Cake Man – and Onyx and I have spent much time recently trying to work out the optimal number of main and supporting characters. If you take a movie like BRAVEHEART, there are a few obvious leading roles, followed by a handful of secondary and tertiary characters, who, because of the number of them or the lack of lines for most of them, are more “that guy” than anything else (as in, “remember when ‘that guy’ died?” or “hey, it’s ‘that guy; I like him”). How many of “those guys” can you have before you dilute your script completely?

While the example I gave is a war movie (because that’s what I’m writing), sports movies are another great example of character juggling. If you watch any football movie, you’re going to recognize at least 8 characters pretty easily, maybe even 12. You’ll know the names to probably 4 of them (give or take). But you’ll really only follow one or two of them closely. It’s the same in a war movie. You might not like it when your favorite guy catches that fatal bullet, even though you only knew him as “the guy with the stutter.” The trick, as I’ll have to figure it out, is to know when to stop adding characters and how to allot the necessary time to those you do have, while not drowning the protagonist in a sea of gratuitous tertiary characters. The juggling, or management, of multiple characters can be difficult. I did it (somewhat successfully, I think) in my comic-book spec, but my new idea requires more acute concentration on unique characters with sufficient screen time.

Has anyone out there *coughONYXcough* worked with multiple characters in an ensemble situation (i.e. sport or war movie) before? Any experiences you’d like to share?