Sunday, April 06, 2003
Lesson 7 Everything I ever learned about character I learned from Hannibal Lecter
In the movie Silence of the Lambs, FBI agent in training Clarice Starling is on the edge of discovering just what makes her quarry, Buffalo Bill, tick. But she’s stuck. She knows that if she can just figure out one last piece of the puzzle, she can catch him. So once again, she turns to serial killer—and psychiatrist—Hannibal Lecter. Lecter badgers Starling, asking: “What does he covet?”
Covet.
Crave.
Lust for.
These words should never be far from you when you are constructing the characters in your screenplay. What would they die to have? What would they die from if they were denied? What do they secretly lust for?
Once Clarice knew what Buffalo Bill craved, her own journey became much simpler. We, the audience, knew that we were in the final stretch of the movie, and this is perhaps Lesson 6B: once you announce a central character’s deepest desire, his or her burning question, it is usually either the beginning of a heroic quest, or the slam bang finale.
We knew—because we had traveled this far with that Buffalo Bill craved not so much the death of his victims as a kind of sexual transformation that he believed was only possible through acquiring another’s skin. And that he had craved it first when it was directly in front of him.
In the movie Silence of the Lambs, FBI agent in training Clarice Starling is on the edge of discovering just what makes her quarry, Buffalo Bill, tick. But she’s stuck. She knows that if she can just figure out one last piece of the puzzle, she can catch him. So once again, she turns to serial killer—and psychiatrist—Hannibal Lecter. Lecter badgers Starling, asking: “What does he covet?”
Covet.
Crave.
Lust for.
These words should never be far from you when you are constructing the characters in your screenplay. What would they die to have? What would they die from if they were denied? What do they secretly lust for?
Once Clarice knew what Buffalo Bill craved, her own journey became much simpler. We, the audience, knew that we were in the final stretch of the movie, and this is perhaps Lesson 6B: once you announce a central character’s deepest desire, his or her burning question, it is usually either the beginning of a heroic quest, or the slam bang finale.
We knew—because we had traveled this far with that Buffalo Bill craved not so much the death of his victims as a kind of sexual transformation that he believed was only possible through acquiring another’s skin. And that he had craved it first when it was directly in front of him.
