Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3) really knows his stuff. His Creative Screenwriting interviews always get repeat plays on my iPod, so I was pretty happy to discover there’s a bonus feature on the latest Toy Story 3 Blu Ray disc in which Arndt discusses the first-act structure for Toy Story 3, and the ways in which it is similar to many other movies (though not all movies).

Here’s a transcription:

1. INTRODUCE YOUR CHARACTER BY SHOWING THEIR WORLD & GRAND PASSION
The thing you do when introducing your character is to show their world and show them doing the thing they love most. Show their grand passion / defining trait. The one thing that’s the centre of their whole universe.

Examples

Toy Story: In Woody’s case, he is introduced playing with Andy. That’s his favourite thing. The thing that defines who he is as a person.

Finding Nemo: Marlin is a family man. He just moved into a new house with his wife, they have a whole lot of eggs and he couldn’t be happier.

Incredibles: Mr. Incredible is introduced as a kick-ass super hero who enjoys using (and showing off) his powers.

2. SHOW YOUR CHARACTER’S FLAW
The key here is that the flaw actually comes out of his grand passion. It’s a good thing that’s just been taken too far.

Examples

Toy Story - Woody takes pride in being Andy’s favourite toy. He loves being Andy’s favourite toy so much, he doesn’t want to share it with anyone.

Finding Nemo - Marlin wants so badly to be a good parent that he’s a little bit insecure. (As he looks at the eggs with his wife, he asks “What if they don’t like me…”)

Incredibles - Mr. Incredible is a little bit like Woody in that he takes pride in being #1 - and he doesn’t want to share that with anyone (which is why he tosses a young Buddy - later Syndrome - out of his car when he wants to be his sidekick. Same on the roof when Elastigirl offers “we could share” after they both catch a burglar, and he says “I work alone”.)

3. ESTABLISH STORM CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON
Your character is walking down the road of life on a nice, bright sunny day, but off on the horizon there are some dark storm clouds gathering. This is foreshadowing the inciting incident.

Examples

Toy Story - Andy’s birthday party is coming up. All the toys are fretting about who’s getting replaced, and Woody’s saying “No one’s getting replaced”.

Finding Nemo - It’s established that there’s an “indoors” that’s safe (Marlin’s anemone) and an “outdoors”, which is implicitly dangerous.

Incredibles - Elastigirl tells Bob “things are going to change after we get married” (the actual words at the altar are “I love you, but if you want to make this work, you have to be more than Mr. Incredible”. And Buddy is showing up jealous of Mr. Incredible, saying “This is because I don’t have any powers, isn’t it? Well, not every super hero has powers, you know? You can be super without them.) So you establish that there’s a resentment from normal people toward super heroes, and you establish Helen saying “Things are going to change”.

4. KABOOM - SOMETHING OUT OF THE BLUE BLOWS APART THEIR WORLD
Something comes in and totally blows apart your hero’s life and turns it upside down by taking away the one thing they care about most.

Examples

Toy Story - Buzz arrives and Woody gets displaced.

Finding Nemo - The barracuda shows up and Marlin’s family gets killed - except for one last little egg.

The Incredibles - Mr. Incredible saves a citizen but then, KABOOM, gets sued and super heroes get banned.

In each of these cases, if you look at what their grand passion was (Woody being Andy’s favourite toy, Marlin and his family / trying to be a good father, Mr. Incredible being a super hero) THAT’S the thing that gets taken away from them.

It totally changes your character’s sense of what his future is going to be. But that bolt from the blue isn’t enough on its own. You need to…

5. ADD INSULT TO INJURY
It’s not enough to ruin your main character’s life, take away their grand passion, and change their whole sense of what the future is going to be. You have to add insult to injury. You have to have something that makes the whole world just seem a little bit unfair.

Examples

Toy Story - Not only does Woody get replaced, he gets replaced by a total doofus. An imbecile that doesn’t even know that he’s a toy. And they get into this whole argument whether Buzz can fly or not - and Buzz jumps and bounces and “flies” across the room, and all the other toys go “oh my god, he really can fly”. And they key thing here is that everyone is impressed for the wrong reasons - which exasperates Woody even more.

Finding Nemo - In this case, you don’t need to add insult to injury. We already understand that the world Marlin lives in is unfair after his family is eaten by the Barracuda.

The Incredibles - The reason super heroes get banned is because Mr. Incredible was trying to do the right thing by saving a suicide jumper - who then sues him.

6. CHARACTER MEETS FORK IN THE ROAD AND MAKES THE UNHEALTHY CHOICE, WHICH CREATES A CRISIS
So now your main character’s life has changed, his grand passion has been taken away from him, and the world has revealed itself to be unfair. This is when he comes to a fork in the road (i.e. the first act turn) and has to make a choice on how to deal with the new reality. There’s a high road he can take, a healthy, responsible choice - or a low road, which is the unhealthy, irresponsible choice. Now remember - if your character chooses to do the right thing, you don’t really have a story. So he has to make the unhealthy, irresponsible choice, which grows out of his fears and insecurities.

Examples

Toy Story - For Woody, the responsible thing is to say “I was Andy’s favorite toy, I had my day in the sun, but I have to cede my place at a certain point.” But what happens is that Woody makes the unhealthy choice. Woody pushes Buzz behind the desk. And the key here is everyone rooting for Woody to do the unhealthy, irresponsible thing, because we feel his pain of getting replaced. And the character’s unhealthy choice - Woody’s unhealthy choice (Buzz getting pushed out the window) creates a CRISIS that leads to the other toys confronting Woody and telling him you can’t come back into Andy’s room until he finds Buzz and brings him back safe and sound. And that’s your first act break.

Finding Nemo - When Marlin finds Nemo at the edge of the open ocean, Marlin’s unhealthy choice to drag his son back home from the school excursion (i.e. his over-protectiveness) comes out of his grand passion (his love for his son). And his unhealthy choice provokes a crisis, which is his son swimming out into the ocean toward the boat to prove his independence - and then getting caught by the diver (i.e. CRISIS). And now Marlin has a goal that’s gonna take him all the way through the rest of the story.

The Incredibles - The responsible choice is for Bob to do what his wife tells him to do. But that would be boring and you’d have no story. So for Bob, the irresponsible, unhealthy choice is to lie to his wife and go moonlighting with his buddy Frozone. And we’re totally rooting for Bob to make the irresponsible choice, because we saw how much he loved being a super hero, we saw how good he was at it, and we saw how unfairly it was taken away from him. And that unhealthy choice - sneaking around - leads to a crisis - Mirage tracking him down - which leads to Syndrome bringing Bob out of retirement - and you’re off into your second act.

Conclusion

So your story is coming out of your character’s deepest desires and his darkest fears. The thing they love gets taken away from them, and the world is revealed to be unfair. And to make things right, they have to take the journey that is the rest of the film. And by the end of the journey, hopefully they don’t only get back what they lost, but are forced to fix that little flaw they had when we first met them.

Got to love a great logline. I laughed out loud when I read this one.

DAN HELSING

“When a twenty-something stoner learns he is related to legendary monster hunter Van Helsing, he changes his slacker ways to save the world.”

Think of it like music.

Music a series of notes in a sequence, right? Well, it can also be understood as a series of spaces between notes. You can’t have a rhythm or melody without empty spaces of different lengths. In fact, the spaces are as important as the notes. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t have music without silence.

It’s the same with writing. The bad days allow the good to exist. So instead of seeing the off days as negative, perhaps we can see them as being part of the process.

But can we really be content with an “unproductive” writing day? Even as I write this I’m thinking it’s a load of crap. But there’s also some part of me that knows it’s just how things are. No amount of frustration is ever going to change the fact that I can’t be on all the time. I need to be off to be on, and vice versa – just like rhythm and melody.

My writing rhythm over a given week is going to be made up of a series of ons and offs, and if I can come to see the offs as being as valuable as the ons, then perhaps I can inch toward avoiding the pain, anguish and orgasms that come when I feel off.

Actually, it’s not about valuing them – it’s about accepting them. It’s about seeing the relatively empty part of the canvas as being as vital as the detailed part. If you look at a painting of a country house at night, the black sky is as fundamental to the painting as the glowing lights of the house. Without the empty space the meaning of the painting would be completely different. It wouldn’t be a little house on the night prairie. It’d be a little house in the sunshine. Or a little house among flying sugar sachets or whatever else replaced the empty night sky.

Nothing is something. So on those days when you’re actively working but seem to be getting “nothing” done, know that you are, in fact, getting something done – and, ultimately, that is everything and all you can do.

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Heard this in an interview with Ted Griffin:

“Analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog - no-one enjoys it and the frog dies.”

Perfect.

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Have you ever noticed that sometimes dreams have set-ups and pay-offs? I had one last night in which I was doing something or other when I saw a small group of people that looked like a cross between Devo and a diver from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou – they had these coloured breathing apparatus on. They didn’t serve any real function in the rambling story of the dream – they were just there. I noticed them and moved on.

So the dream continues and I’m trying to outrun something. Anyway, I get to this cliff-edge and I have to jump off into the water. But guess what? I can’t because the group of divers are down there swimming around in the water!

So what’s going on here? If the story was being constructed by my brain, then how come I didn’t know that the divers were a set-up when I first saw them? It was like I was watching a story constructed by someone else and they wanted to establish that these divers exist in the world so that later on in the climax they could use them as an obstacle for the main character - me. See what I mean? It was good storytelling. Bad storytelling would have had the divers just appear in the end as deus ex machina.

But who is setting this stuff up? How come I experienced the story for the first time even though I had made it up? How did I not know that the divers would come back later? How can my brain be one step ahead of… my brain?