Movies and Optimism Bias

by Bill Johnson

I love history. As I grew older, I began to wonder, what gave an explorer like Marco Polo the confidence, in the year 1271, to go off on a journey that would cover 15,000 miles, at a time when most people rarely traveled more than 20 miles from home?

One answer is optimism bias. This means that, compared to others, we tend to be more optimistic about our chances to succeed or survive in some adventure. This is one reason why people smoke in spite of risk of lung cancer. Individual smokers accept that others will die of lung cancer, but they don’t think they will.

I believe this bias is transferred to movie characters when we are drawn in to feel invested or enmeshed in what happens to a film’s main character. For example, in one of the Bourne films with Matt Damon, he survives a car chase in a tiny car in Moscow. I drove a Ford Festiva (tiny car, 40 mpg). Any one event in that chase would have ended the car Matt Damon was in, but I wanted to believe he and the car would survive, so I accepted what happened.

A problem I come across in scripts is when people insist their stories be realistic. I once tried to help a writer with a main character who was sickly and weak from a traumatic event. The author refused to have his main character be more active and heroic at the beginning of the story because it wouldn’t be realistic. It wasn’t interesting, either. His main character was too weak to drive the action of the story.

A movie viewer wants a main character to be larger than life so they can experience a larger than life adventure through them.

If you’re writing a screenplay or novel, it’s your job to create a main character who will take a viewer or reader to places they want to go. Keep in mind that in life, many people feel stuck. A larger than life story character who refuses to be bound can be a real pleasure to journey with.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, visit my website or check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon Kindle. Or, find me on Google+ and tell me what you think.

Getting to Feelings at The World’s End

by Bill Johnson

I find it interesting that movies that are comedies often take characters to a place of deeper feeling than some big-budget Hollywood films. A recent example is a comparison of The World’s End, Elysium, and Oblivion.

The World’s End is a comedy about a middle-aged man who knows his life hit its peak on the night he graduated from high school and, with his four mates, failed in an epic pub crawl.

When we meet the main character, we learn that this is his central issue in life. When we meet his mates as adults, we learn something about their issues. By the end of the film, we’re allowed to access each character’s dramatic truth – what drives them – and the deeper state of feelings the story’s plot takes them to.

For films aimed at any kind of general audience, this is the prime goal, to make the story a journey of feeling. In popular stories, viewers and readers get to access deeper, and more pure, states of feeling than many people experience in real life.

Films that fail to provide that journey of feeling often fail to find a large audience.

If you fail at that, your story fails.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, visit my website or check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise. Or, find me on Google+ and tell me what you think.