[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: Is it possible to have a tragedy or a sad ending that is also satisfying to the audience?
Jill Chamberlain, Script Consultant/Author/Writer: It is, it’s tricky though. What a lot of people get wrong is that a tragedy is not like the colloquial usage of the word tragic. We’re not just pummeling someone down and down and down for a tragedy to be satisfying. They’re actually going up, up, up before they come down and so that’s what a lot of people miss. It’s not satisfying to see someone just pummeled to death. It is satisfying to see someone whose flaw is greed, get richer and richer and richer as they go up, and then get pulled down by that own flaw.
Also related to that is that their downfall should be primarily about their flaw, it should not be about external things. I mean their external things will contribute to it but we don’t want characters that are merely victims, that are just victims of bad things happening to them.
A protagonist is a character that isn’t just a victim. There may also be a victim in some senses of the word but there’s a reason why we’re putting them on this journey and there’s something in them that needs to be tested. There’s some ways they asked for this journey, they’re not just a victim of it. I think people sometimes when writing tragedies they just think Oh this is a sad ending story and so I’m going to make it a tragedy. You have to have an up, up, up. We also have to see that with the choice they make at the climax that it’s a bad choice…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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About:
Jill Chamberlain is the founder of a screenwriting school, a script consultant, a screenwriter, and the author of The Nutshell Technique: Crack the Secret to Successful Screenwriting.
The Nutshell Technique is considered the go-to manual many professionals swear by. It’s on the syllabus at film schools all over the world and has been published in Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Italian, and in audiobook format.
As a script consultant, Jill has fixed and fine tuned scripts for Oscar-nominated screenwriters, top television showrunners, screenwriters whose movies have made over a billion dollars at the box office, award-winning independent filmmakers, and for many, many spec script writers.
In 2006, Jill founded The Screenplay Workshop with Jill Chamberlain (Screenplayworkshop.org) where she has personally taught thousands of screenwriters feature film and episodic television writing. Complete beginners to Emmy-winning screenwriters and award-winning producers enroll in her classes.
Find out more about her and her script consultancy at jillchamberlain.com.
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