FRIDAY'S SCRIPT TIP:

TWO-TONED COWBOY HAT

Can a hero also be the villain?

Short answer: No.

The protagonist *can* be a badguy - many of my favorite movies have criminal lead characters. I watched THE DRIVER again a couple of weeks ago - Ryan O'Neal is the best getaway driver on the West Coast. He is involved in a whole bunch of armed robberies. Bruce Dern is the cop trying to capture him. You'd think because Dern is the policeman that he's the hero... the lead character... the protagonist. But this story is told from the criminal's point of view. The criminal is the protagonist. Protagonists don't have to be "heroes", they can be badguys. You can "root for the badguy", as that Mel Gibson remake of POINT BLANK's tagline said. The protagonist can be a villain. A badguy with a badguy's goal. Ryan O'Neal wants to continue to be the best getaway driver for armed robbers on the West Coast.

The guy who gets in the way of criminal O'Neal's goal is the police... so Detective Dern is the "villain" in this story. Really we're talking about protagonists and antagonists rather than "heroes" and "villains" - and Dern is the *antagonist*. The terminology can mix you up, because when we look at the story from the getaway driver's POV he IS a hero - he lives by a strict moral code. The policeman IS the villain - he'll do anything, even break the law, to capture the getaway driver. Dern's character actually lets a group of violent armed robbers go free, knowing that someone may get killed, in order to trap O'Neal's getaway driver. Hey, if some innocent bystanders get killed, that's okay with Dern's Detective. Easy to see him as the "villain" if you are seeing the story through O'Neal's eyes. But really O'Neal's getaway driver is the *protagonist* - the lead character in the story we are telling. The character that the audience identifies with and "becomes" for two hours. Dern's detective is the *antagonist* - the character we gets in the way of the protagonist.

The hero can't be the same person as the villain because we can't SEE any struggle between the two. We have to SEE the obstacle on film or it doesn't exist. Movies are about things we can SEE.

Your hero may have some big emotional problem - he may be his own worst enemy - but that just gives us an emotional problem to resolve. It's half a movie story... and the half we can't really see! A story like this is better suited for a novel, where we can get inside the character's head and understand their struggle.

On film we need a PHYSICAL conflict of some sort, because we can see those. That means some one or some thing that physically stands in the way of your protagonist and their goal. That doesn't mean it has to be fist fights and car chases, the conflict might be an argument... or it might be an unspoken conflict. It just has to be something we can see - something in the physical world.

If your hero has tourette's syndrome, and swears up a storm when he's nervous, that may make it tough for him to win the heart of the girl he loves. But if he's the last man on Earth, you know she'll eventually HAVE to date him. There are no other choices. Now, think of your story as a world... Your story is the Earth. If your foul mouthed Romeo is the only man in the story, the female lead has no choice but to date him. You need to give her a choice - some other guy to go out with - or there's no real conflict. So let's create this guy our lady love works with. He may have been a character before, but now he's part of the STORY. He symbolizes the woman's choice NOT to date our hero. That way, we can SEE HER DECISION. Before, our hero was in no rush to get her to accept him, tourettes and all. She had no other romantic choice in the story. Now you've given her a choice... which means your hero really has to solve to problem. He must face the conflict head on, or she'll end up with that other guy.

That other guy may be the nicest fellow on Earth, but he's your antagonist. He's the guy who SYMBOLIZES the girl not falling in love with our hero.

In BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY our slightly overweight singleton vows not to date womanizers in the opening scene... in fact, she reads off a whole list of awful traits a man could have, then the story introduces a man who has all of them: her boss Hugh Grant. She falls for him, even though he's the WRONG MAN. But in order to show Bridget slowly realizing that he's the wrong man we must give her a right man. We need to be able to SEE HER DECISION.

You can't choose if there's only one item to choose from.

So we have stuffy-but-dependable lawyer Colin Firth. Now we can see her conflict - will she choose Grant or Firth? That conflict becomes physical in the film as the two men get into the most realistic fist-fight I've ever seen (except for the part where they break a window). Now Bridget must decide between the two, and we can SEE her decision. She stays with Grant... it's the wrong decision! Grant represents the "dark side" - casual sex, too many units of booze, packs and packs of cigarettes. He is the antagonist!

You have to have an antagonist of some sort or you have no real conflict. I have a broad definition of antagonist - it can be a shark or a mummy or the wrong man or a mountain. It has to be something your hero can PHYSICALLY struggle with. That way we can SEE the struggle.

If you can't SEE it, it doesn't exist on film.

You need a *visible* antagonist who is *not* the protagonist.

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