…or how the hell are they going to get me to empathise with THIS hero!
on december 16th of this year, a film will open in the u.s., the premise of which chills me to the bone!
not a horror film, ghost story or an intense drama about the terrors of war. nope! this is a biopic about the second most influential woman of my young life – margaret thatcher, one of the most strong-minded women in modern history.
to help you understand where i’m coming from with this post, i just want to give you a very brief personal history.
when mrs. thatcher became prime minister of great britain in 1979, i was a mere boy of 10 years old. when she was finally ousted from power by her own party, i was 21, enjoying a theatre career in london and a socialist!
in addition to this, my favourite film director, ken loach, was practically blacklisted and only made 2 feature films during her time in office – one of which was made primarily in germany.
margaret thatcher will be played by meryl streep, one of the most revered actors in film history, and an actor i like very much. however, she has really got her work cut out to make me empathise with a person who stirs such feelings of anger and disdain in me. i suppose it could be argued that the negativity of these feelings has, in the end, created a positive effect in me, but that still doesn’t make me grateful to her or make me in any way forgiving.
so how will meryl streep win me over?
in my mind, there are a few options open to a writer when creating characters that, on the surface, will struggle to gain empathy from the audience.
the first possibility is to make your main character funny. i recently saw the terrific movie four lions. now, a suicide bomber isn’t necessarily the first type of person you think of as a hero of your story, but omar and his fellow jihadis won me over with their humour. this humour enabled the writers to show the human side of the members of the terrorist cell, so when combined with the dark subject matter, it gave the film a perfect balance and made me enjoy the journey that these characters take.
i can’t see that the makers of the iron lady will be taking the edgy comedy route (although there is a little humour in the trailer), so let’s look at the next option.
make your main character so compelling and fascinating that the audience won’t be able to take their eyes off the screen. when i sit down to watch a film or to read a script, i want to be drawn into the story, regardless of the subject matter. if the writer gets it right, then no matter who the character is – hero, villain, car park attendant #2 – then the audience will engage with that character. for example, der untergang (downfall), the story of adolf hitler’s last days captured the attention of the world. great writing and a superb performance by bruno ganz managed to humanise hitler without detracting from all the horror that he caused. it shows a once powerful man trapped in a desperate situation that he himself caused. however, it also shows us a man that has had his hopes and dreams shattered, and regardless of how wrong those hopes and dreams were, it made the character and the film not only palatable, but compelling.
i suspect that the story of margaret thatcher will focus on her hopes and dreams and the sacrifices she made in attempting to attain them, thereby humanising her as much as possible for people like me! and just for the record, i am not comparing margaret thatcher to hitler, nor to muslim terrorists!
a third option might be to make your main character the lesser of two evils. this idea has been utilised in countless films. there is the ‘hitman with a heart of gold’ (the killer), where the main character decides that the bad guys he is working for have no honour or morals and need to be punished, or for example in absolute power, where a burglar on a job witnesses the president of the united states beating a woman and her subsequent shooting by the president’s bodyguards. the lesser of two evils is a common choice for stories set in the world of crime, gangsters and even police corruption.
another example of how to create a ‘hero who does a bad thing’ is brilliantly described in stephen king’s must-read book on writing. in it he talks about his novel the dead zone, later filmed by david cronenberg. the hero, johnny, is a man who is in a car accident, a side effect of which enables him to see the future of anyone he touches. when he shakes hands with a presidential candidate, he sees that this man will start a nuclear war, so johnny decides to assassinate him. king’s main concern was how to get his audience on the side of the assassin. he does this by making johnny the nicest guy you have ever met – he even makes johnny refuse to have sex with his longtime girlfriend until they are married (something king himself admits to be pushing the boundaries of believability!). he also makes the politician a really nasty man, who is introduced in the book in a scene where he kicks a dog to death!
unless the film makers really demonise the members of the party that caused margaret thatcher’s own downfall, i don’t think that the lesser of two evils will be a truly viable option either.
so, will the makers of the iron lady be able to make the character of margaret thatcher compelling and fascinating enough for me to get me on her side and empathise with her? who knows, but i hereby vow to watch the film leaving my preconceptions at the door, so i guess we’ll have to wait and see if they succeed or not!
happy writing
phil
scriptguyphil 