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It's absolutely critical in any film to have a character

that you're willing to go on the journey with.

And people use the term a fully-realized character.

But I think it's important to understand that film

is a very stylized art form.

It it's not capable of the kind of novelistic detail of a 600

or 1,000-page novel.

So you're never going to know everything

about that character.

You have to fill in the blanks with bits

and pieces of your own life, and those of your friends,

and so on.

So how do you do all that?

Well, you have to find little, universal things

that you can relate to from one's life,

as an audience member, and have the character do

something or do things that you recognize.

You can set huge challenges for yourself

if it's a nonverbal character.

And you're putting so much on the actor

to express with their eyes, with their face,

with their yearning expression, or whatever it is.

But every character is a creation that exists between

the screenplay-- the imagined character--

which is still out of focus, we don't apply a face yet,

and then the director's imagination of what

that can be on the screen.

And then the actor fills in the final and, ultimately, the most

important piece, what does this person look like?

How do they move?

How do they speak?

So a character is really never more than a sketch.

But it has to be a very compelling sketch.

Giving an average person, a relatable, average person,

an enormous problem and seeing how

they solve that problem or process that problem

is a good way to get buy-in.

You basically want the audience to buy into the narrative.

And they usually buy into the narrative

through the characters.

It's key in the way that you introduce a character

to understand where they are in their life, what they're

feeling, and what their problem is.

Any character that you're going to follow has got a problem.

And that problem needs to be declared fairly early on.

Sometimes you can do it in the very first scene.

And then the whole movie should ultimately be about somehow

that problem gets addressed, gets resolved, or at least

we understand that it's the thing that

drove that character into whatever situation evolves.

And the problem may escalate as well.

But I do believe in the kind of principle of character

is destiny.

That character winds up in a situation of their own creation

in some way.

And it's somehow related to them solving their problem,

whatever their problem might be.

It might be that nobody sees them,

that they're kind of invisible to the people around them,

that they haven't found who they are

yet or a way of expressing it.

It may be that they don't have love, or that they've lost love

and are now incapable of opening themselves

to a new relationship.

Whatever the character's problem is,

you need to define it early on.

And you need to do it in an interesting way where

the audience can sympathize because we

have this capacity for empathy and for understanding

other people.

It's innate to who we are as human beings.

So you introduce a character.

And then we somehow relate to that character.

Even if that character is Frankenstein's monster

and the story is told from the perspective of the monster,

we must somehow find a way, a sense of empathy.

The film must create that in us, an interest in that character.

I think it's about expressing something

that the audience can relate to and you care about the outcome.

Or at the very least, you care about seeing

what this person is going to do next

and what they're what's around the corner for them.

In the case of "The Terminator," the initial idea

was that there was an entity sent from the future

to kill somebody in the past whose life had great meaning.

I pretty quickly went to a female character

whose son, in the future, will become a great sort of prophet,

so basically a kind of Virgin Mary character,

because that's an archetype that we all get quite quickly.

And she was, in the biblical story, of very humble origins,

basically a kind of a peasant.

Her husband was a tradesman, a carpenter.

So I said, all right, a waitress, a very common job,

a very dismissible person.

I wanted the most dismissable person you could imagine.

It could have been a secretary.

It could have been a waitress, somebody like that.

It like, they couldn't possibly be

an important, earth-shaking existence.

And I thought that's good because that's

how most people feel.

Most people going to a movie theater

are not presidents, or heads of major corporations,

or big, important people.

They're average people.

And they could, I thought, invest

in the idea of an average person who is suddenly snatched out

of their daily existence and finds out

that their life has great meaning in another framework,

in another frame of reference, which the film supplies.

And all of a sudden, not only is she fighting for her life,

but she's fighting for the future of the entire world.

She becomes the most important person

in the world for a moment in history.

So now I'm telling the story from a female perspective.

So now I have to draw upon all the women

that I've ever known in my life and/or read

about in anything from comic books, to novels, to the news.

Now, it just so happens that just before I wrote that,

I was married to a Bob's Big Boy waitress.

So I went, Bob's Big Boy waitress, perfect.

Write what you know.

So I basically wrote my first wife, which was plucky,

a lot of humor, kind of cynical, but likable.

And so, boom, there's your character.

Now put that character in an extraordinary circumstance.

And I think what I would advise is

that people be kind of authentic to their own life experience,

but not to the extent that you're literally just telling

your own life story.

I happen to enjoy writing female characters.

That's controversial now.

There are people that say, oh, well,

female characters and films about female characters

should be directed by women and they

should be written by women.

It's like, okay, so I can only write

paunchy, middle-aged Canadian white guys?

I don't think that's how art works.

The whole point of acting, the whole point of storytelling,

I think, is to live outside yourself.

But you have to do it with some connection

to your own personal experience.

You have to make it personal.

But that shouldn't prevent you from writing a character that

is not like you.

How am I going to introduce my main characters?

And how am I going to do that in a way that

is the quintessence of that character?

What is the quintessence of that character?

And how can I encapsulate that in a kind

of almost a synecdoche.

A synecdoche is-- if I get this right--

it's like if you call somebody a suit.

You're using the suit as a stand-in

for an entire description of them

as a corporate executive or whatever.

It's basically taking a person or reducing them

to a single object or principle.

But you want a kind of creative synecdoche of your character

when that character's introduced.

So I think that there are interesting ways to do that.

Colonel Quaritch in "Avatar," he was a military guy.

He was very formal.

And he was in a position of command and authority.

And he was introduced with the image of his military boots

on a steel floor.

We hear the creak of the leather.

We hear his voice.

He was a very verbal character and he carried a lot of power

in his voice.

We see his pistol.

We see his broad shoulders.

We see the back of his tightly-clipped Marine Corps

haircut.

And we think we know who the guy is.

And then he turns to us and he's got these massive scars.

And he delivers a line on that turn.

Wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes.

I was reasonably pleased with that as a as a character

introduction because, once again, he

was reduced to that synecdoche of his greater character.

He was also a character that didn't exist in shades of gray,

kind of to a fault. He was, what you see is what you get.

And there wasn't a lot of nuance to his character.

There was just a lot of flourish in creating

that relatively simplistic character, which

is another way to go.

I use the Darth Vader example.

Darth Vader didn't have a lot of shades

of gray in the first movie.

But there was some subtlety that was

brought into it later, obviously, which

was interesting then.

But he was kind of archetypal.

And that was okay because it was just

do the archetype really, really well and in a new creative way.

You also look forward to the moment

where that main character meets that main character.

So that moment of introduction is also very important.

So when you went to Titanic, and you probably

knew from the poster, at least, that there

was going to be a girl and going to be a guy.

And if you knew more about the film, that there was Rose,

and there was Jack, and Leonardo, and Kate Winslet.

Well, how are they going to meet?

Are they going to meet cute?

Which is the sort of classic screenwriter term for,

do they get in a car crash, and have a big argument,

and then realize they actually like each other?

And there are infinite number of variations of that.

And people generally look forward to that moment

when the characters collide.

In "Terminator" it was interesting, structurally,

because it was the end of act one

was the three main characters meeting.

And they met in a violent life-or-death confrontation.

But we had been following them as individual story streams

for an entire act, and literally just jumping back and forth

between three plot lines, and watching these plot lines

slowly converging to a point in space and time

where everything exploded.

[SHOTGUN BLASTING]

And that turned out to be a powerful storytelling method.

There's a stylistic cinematic relish

in how you introduce Character A and Character B.

And then you look forward to the inevitable moment

where Character A meets Character B, interacts

with Character B. And then you, I think, as a filmmaker,

as a screenwriter, you have fun with that.

And as actors, you have fun with that.

And typically, where the characters are going to wind up

is not where they are initially.

There's the classic sort of, you get two characters together

that you know are going to be together later

and you create conflict.

And there's an art to that because the audience

can smell that a mile away if that conflict feels forced,

like the screenwriter really needed them to fight.

So put a lot of obstacles in their path.

And if it doesn't feel authentic and it

doesn't feel natural to the situation,

it feels overblown, the audience goes, yeah, predictable,

I knew that.

If you're doing a character from a certain period,

a historical period or a certain specific situation

that you're dramatizing, do your research.

Learn everything you can about that world.

And if it was a real person, learn everything

you can about that person.

Ask yourself what was really going on.

Because we can't even get the facts right

in a news story about something that happened the day before.

And different outlets will argue with each other

over what actually happened and what it means.

Now imagine history as a distillation

of a little bit of coming down to us of, basically, a bunch

of news stories from back then.

How much can we trust that?

So as you go into history-- and I found this on "Titanic"--

you have to ask yourself questions about like,

what was really happening?

Who was really doing what to who here?

So you got to do your research.

You got to understand the character,

if it was a real historical person, really understand them.

If it's a made-up person in a real historical setting,

what would the forces be at work on that character?

What would expectations of them be?

How is this character unique?

What makes this character interesting?

It's relatively easy, in a sense,

to write outstanding women outside of the present time

because they were always misunderstood and dismissed.

And audiences hate it when they're

investing in a character and that character is dismissed,

or misunderstood, or judged harshly, or not

seen for how great they are.

So these are all techniques for getting your character

to be interesting.

Ultimately, what's important is that your characters

come to life in your mind.

And then they're going to come to life again when

you cast the film.

How you imagine that character is

going to find its final expression through a living,

breathing human being who has a look, has a physiognomy,

and has a skill set.

And they are going to change that character.

The key to it is to get the actor to a safe place

where they can explore and they can feel empowered to go

as far as they feel like going.

Maybe later in the cutting room, you

say that might be a little bit too much.

Or maybe on the set, your own instinct kicks in

and you say, you know, maybe let's try muting that.

And let me feel that that crazy energy is going on in your mind

but there's something holding you back

from saying it quite that way.

And let's feel that tension.

I mean, after a while I think one

learns to speak a language that actors can hear.

Because I think the most sacred part of the job,

ultimately, is to help the actor achieve their best work.

I like to have done rehearsal so that we can talk through ideas,

not lock them in, but stand them up.

Try it, workshop.

But I think of it more as sort of work-shopping the script.

And often I'll find the dialogue shakes out.

Because I'll say, all right, just

forget about the written word.

Forget about the page.

Just improv the scene.

This was very helpful in "Titanic"

because some of the language was a bit stilted

because it was of its period.

And I wanted these two young actors

to get a sense for, well, just play

the scene the way you'd play it now in your current idiom,

the way you would speak.

And so they just played it as themselves, essentially.

I mean, the sort of halfway between the character

was the character, but interpreted

through contemporary language.

And some interesting ideas came out of that.

An interesting dynamic came out of it.

I said, all right, I'm going to go off

and I'm going to rewrite the scene.

And I'm going to put it into the idiom of the time.

But it'll be these ideas.

It'll be these things that we discovered in rehearsal.

I mean, a really good example that I think really

added value to a particular scene in "Titanic,"

we were rehearsing the scene where Cal, her fiancee,

grabs her arm and tries to drag her aboard the lifeboat,

tries to control her, not listen to her, as usual.

And the way I had written it, she

pulls a hatpin out of her hair and sticks him in the arm,

forcing him to release her.

And she runs away into the crowd.

But then we were talking about the hatpin

and Kate said, well, why don't I just spit in his face?

And it was so brilliant.

I don't even think she realized how great it

was because it was a callback to a previous scene, the scene

in the film where Jack--

Leonardo's character-- teaches her how to spit like a man.

So it was a perfect closure of the ellipse.

It was something Jack taught her how to do.

And she used it in that moment to break,

to end the relationship, or at least she thought so, with Cal.

Where are you going?

What, to him?

To be a whore to a gutter rat?

I'd rather be his whore than your wife.

No.

I said no.

WOMAN: Rose, please stop.

It was perfect.

It was like it was like a moment a writer would go aha,

this is great.

I've solved the problem.

And she solved it.

So that's how we did it.

Now, poor Billy Zane didn't particularly

like having a big old loogie shot into his face 50 times.

By the time we were done shooting that scene,

he was well over the idea.

But I think it turned out to be a nice moment.