> but I think that an even cheesier method than shlocky dialogue is just a shot of Billy in his room with a newspaper clipping dated five years ago with the headline “Billy’s Parents Dead in Horrible Factory Accident” as Billy sheds a single tear Native-American-seeing-trash-style. Amen! Thank you for this, Brandon. When we saw The Woman in Black in this winter, it seemed like half the clues that Daniel Radcliffe turned up amounted to him pulling a piece of paper out of the heap, and the camera zooming in to text that read: "PAY ATTENTION! THIS IS A VITAL CLUE!" It was as if someone had been told "show, don't tell" and didn't understand what it meant. It got so silly we were hard-pressed not to laugh out loud and irritate the other people in the theatre. > but before you can get into the story that’s going to blow them away, you have to bore them with the backgrounds of all the pertinent people so that it’ll make sense. But do you really? I have noticed a trend in the past 10 or 15 years to spell out backstory, more in America than in the UK. A lot of the backstory choices are terribly cliched and the relating of backstory is often (not always, but often) ham-handed and bogs down the forward motion of the narrative with exposition or irrelevant flashbacks. I really don't care about why a character behaves the way s/he does, so long as the character has an internal cohesion and I believe that character would really make those choices. I'm much more interested in WHO a character is and HOW s/he behaves than WHY they're like that. A good example: Rapt (2009), written and directed by Lucas Belvaux, tells the story of a kidnapping of a rich industrialist that goes wrong when everyone in his life hates him so much they don't want to pay the ransom. The movie takes about 3 minutes to set up what a bastard the guy is to everyone in his life--by showing him interacting with them--and then the kidnapping takes place. Why is he a jerk? No one tells us. Would the movie be better if we knew why? I don't think it would. (If you don't know the film, it is a brilliant example of fast-paced, economical set-up.) Screenwriting has become bogged down in creating "psychologically complex characters". It reminds me of taking math tests in school, and the teacher telling us to "show our work". I feel like writers put in so much work to create a character or build a world, that they have this huge urge to "show their work" and put all that backstory on the page. But screenwriting isn't a math test. Back to your example: if the hero lost a child to a blood disorder, fine. Write her or him that way. But as long as the audience can see that the hero is driven, that this fight is personal...does it really matter why? Ultimately, I think we're squeezing audiences out with our tidy writing. Leave them room to participate and fill in the blanks. What they come up with to fill in the gaps, just as with the details of under-the-bed monsters and the gore of off-screen violence, will be better and more satisfying than anything we can spoon-feed them. I'm not saying to abdicate our responsibilities and writers and leave everything up to the audience, but I am saying: - leave room for the audience to collaborate; - the best way (in most cases) to "show" backstory is to show how it affects characters in the present day in the course of the story; - one easy way to go light on exposition is to rigorously question whether the audience needs to know the backstory at all. Radical stuff, right? Maybe even blasphemous. But think about how much energy goes into pointing stories backwards, and consider what we could accomplish if we used those resources to move the story forwards instead.

It depends. A back story shouldn't be used on screen unless it is moving the story forward. Never go backward unless you need it to go forwards. Back story shouldn't be like a MacGuffin. It needs to be specific to that character and it produces a particular change in their behavior. Back story has the ability to add weight to your character's motivations and goals. If all you knew was that the character was an asshole and he wants money... wouldn't that feel empty in most situations? The best back story usages comes flowing naturally out of the character situations and their decisions / reactions. For example, in a toss away say a child's father abandoned him and ran off. Now in the current scene, Mom takes the kid to kindergarten and the kid starts freaking out. Instead of the kid coming off as a brat who loves his mother... it's a kid that's scared of losing his mother. It tweaks that.

I think these are both great points. I keep going back and forth about the idea of backstory. On the one hand, I think that backstory adds very little to a movie, and often bogs it down, but for some reason it seems to have become a "thing" that writers feel like they have to address in their screenplay or the audience won't understand their characters' motivation. That seems like such a Hollywood note that development people would give when they don't really have anything to say - "but WHY does he love his daughter so much?" Ummm, I dunno, because he's human? But at the same time, we've learned a lot about the themeline of characters, and how a protagonist starts off in a state of disunity, and by entering the new world he's been thrust into as a result of the plotline, he's forced to address his issues and end up in a state of unity. What I'm struggling with is, do we really need to know exactly what has driven him into the state of disunity? It seems that for the most part, yes, we need to know what has gotten him to the point he's at now in order for him to change. Do I feel like that's necessary in all stories? Not really. Does it seem like it has become the norm...yeah, and I'm not really at the point right now where I can start breaking boundaries. Maybe after my third spec sale... PS - The Woman in Black creeped me out because for some reason I pictured the whole movie as Daniel Radcliffe dressed up as a weird lady in an old timey costume. Sounds like I didn't miss much.

> It seems that for the most part, yes, we need to know what has gotten him to the point he’s at now in order for him to change. I feel like films used to start by establishing "the norm" (and European films often take much more time with this than Hollywood films), and then show the transition into disunity in the present timeline, and move forward from there. In other words, it's what's happening to this person right now that's disrupting their normal life, not what happened 5 or 10 or 30 years ago. (If not, why isn't this story taking place then and not now?) I wonder if we need to see all the straws that got the protagonist to this point, or if we can just show the one that breaks his back--and imply the mountain of straws that built up before it. As a viewer, I'd rather see mainly the tipping point--but I prefer scripts written with a light hand. (As always, this stuff is story- and genre dependent.) I wonder how all this emphasis on backstory became the norm and if/when we'll get out from under it. Re: The Woman in Black I've given it short shrift. There was a lot right with it: it solidly hit the relevant gothic horror tropes, the Victorian mechanical toys were creepy as hell, the underlying premise was good. I wasn't all that happy with the ending--it broke the logic of the story world (and genre) for me. But the real problem is that Radcliffe's character is sent to a (haunted) house to solve a mystery...alone. And he's sorting through papers. And because all of the relevant events have happened in the past, leaving no witnesses, he's dealing with artifacts, not people, and all of the "exposition" got moved from dialogue to text. I realize that isolating him is part of the horror but if only he'd had a sidekick, or there'd been a caretaker, or the presence of some other human being had been justified inside the story, there would have been more options for reveals. The script placed a huge burden on Radcliffe as an actor: no one / no dialogue to work with or react to, just endless scenes of him alone, being scared, carrying almost the entire movie alone. Tough gig for an actor and he pulled it off well. It's probably an object lesson in the difficulties of adapting novels to film: in a novel, if a character discovers a bundle of letters or a birth certificate or some other document, the reveal is much more seamless and organic than if we do the same thing on screen. At any rate, your post really got me thinking about backstory. Thank you! I have a feeling that most movies I like go really light on it. For example, I just read and then watched Four Lions, which has completely blown my mind, and as I think about it, you've got a story about these guys who want to be jihadis, including a caucasian Muslim convert, and there is NO backstory given at all about how they've arrived at this point in their lives: they're just here, in the thick of it, and the script establishes their norm and the presents an inciting incident (a chance to train as muhajideen in Pakistan). All forward motion, no backstory, no exposition. Strong, distinct characters with internal cohesion. Brilliant writing. I'm going to start paying more attention to how current films that I like handle backstory and if it's done through exposition. Thanks again for the post, Brandon.