[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: Why do you say the more people dislike the antagonist the more they’ll get involved in the story?
Writer/Professor Jeffrey Davis: I don’t agree with that, so go ahead. I think that’s a little…I don’t know if we said that in the book, did we? I think that’s too simple.
Writer/Professor/Psychologist Peter Desberg: Let’s put it this way, think of it as we talked about two basic factors, you’ve got your conflict, you got your character. Within conflict you have an antagonist who’s going to provide a big source of your conflict and then you’ve got your protagonist who’s going to fight against it. The bigger the conflict, how are you going to raise the conflict? One of the easiest ways is you have a better and better antagonist. If the person is clever, ruthless, creative, it’s a much more interesting antagonist than big teeth and a lot of saliva.
Again, if you want to make the conflict look insurmountable and I mean it could be a fire breathing monster or it could be a professor who is not going to let you get your degree because your work was too close to his, doesn’t matter, they can be equally diabolical. The more bad traits you give that person, the more bad things that person is willing to do, the bigger your conflict is going to be. It could be very obviously ruthless things or it could be very, very subtle things and sometimes the subtler things are more Insidious because nobody sees them but it’s still the worse your antagonist is the more you can raise the stakes, the more you can make the conflict bigger.
Jeffrey: I’m going to go back to Die Hard because I still think it’s the best movie in that genre.
Peter: He was a great antagonist.
Jeffrey: And what made him great, well two things…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
CONNECT WITH JEFFREY DAVIS
CONNECT WITH PETER DESBERG
MORE VIDEOS WITH JEFFREY DAVIS and PETER DESBERG
BUY THE BOOK – NOW THAT’S FUNNY!: The Art and Craft of Writing Comedy
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BIO:
Peter Desberg is professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award and Outstanding Professor Award. He is also a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in the area of stage fright and performance anxiety. The author of 23 books, he has been quoted by such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today and The New York Times, and has consulted for companies including Apple, Boeing and Toyota in the areas of pitching and persuasion, corporate presentations, and using storytelling and humor in business presentations.
Jeffrey Davis is a professor of screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and served from 2009–2019 as the department chair. Davis has also written and produced trade shows for Dick Clark Productions and counted among his advertising clients Dell Computers, Toyota of America and Honda. His has more than 30 credits to his name, including Night Court, Remington Steele, and documentaries for A&E, Discovery, and The History Channel. As a consultant, his areas have also included writing, pitching, and employing storytelling and humor in business presentations.
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