Film Courage: How important is it for the antagonist to be unsympathetic?
Jeffrey Alan Schechter, Author/Screenwriter/Founder of Writers Room Pro: In my balancing out of the forces in a story they have to be wildly unsympathetic but they have to believe that they’re sympathetic. It’s a bit of a distinction, it’s not even a subtle distinction. They believe that they’re the hero of their own story so they maybe go I’m misunderstood, I’m doing something for the greater good and just you people are too stupid to realize that but they come off as wildly unsympathetic as a result of it. You want your bad guy stories to deal in extremes because otherwise why are we watching it? Oh look it’s a family that’s sitting together and they have polite conversation around the dinner table. That’s going to be far less interesting than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf where it’s just fireworks from these two families, these two couples for two hours. That’s why stories exist is to live in the extremes to make you feel things that you wouldn’t have felt in your normal life so that when things do happen in your normal life you’ve experienced it so you’re somehow better able to cope with it. There’s this book called The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim which looked at fairy tales and and the purposes of fairy tales and a lot of the whole history of fairy tales was designed as horrible stories that you told your kids because the world was an incredibly scary place so by telling these stories it would prepare kids for these potentially catastrophic things that were inevitably going to happen. So things like a Little Red Riding Hood where…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
After moving to Los Angeles, Jeffrey Alan Schechter quickly established himself as a versatile writer, able to work in all genres from action films to family comedies, from pre-school to adult drama, from live action to animation. His writing has earned him a Gemini Award as well as nominations for two Emmy awards, a Writers Guild of America award, a Writer’s Guild of Canada award, and a BAFTA award. Over the years Jeff has worked with dozens of studios and networks including Warner Bros, Universal Pictures, ABC, NBC, The Discovery Channel, Nickelodeon, The Hallmark Channel, the BBC, VH1 Films, RHI, and The Walt Disney Company. Jeff is the author of a book on story structure titled My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! and is a noted speaker and lecturer on screenwriting. Jeff is the founder/creator of WritersRoom Pro software, a digital writers’ room for secure, remote creativity and collaboration.
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