RULES OF THE THRILLER

While at the Austin Film Festival, one of the seminars was on the writing thriller scripts and the most common rules that those scripts adhere to. The seminar was given by writers SCOTT FRANK (Dead Again, Get Shorty) and action-thriller pro SHANE BLACK(Lethal Weapon, Last Boy Scout).

- The Thriller combines the detective story with the horror story

- The Thriller is a crime story in which a detective or an average person acting like a detective becomes the victim to a plot (or storyline) and comes under great danger

- The Thriller focuses on the inner feelings of the hero, especially the feeling of being on the edge, of being lost or insecure, hovering on the void

- The hero has to have some sort of weakness, some sort of quality that makes him/her especially susceptible to danger because Thrillers are about the heros being thrown into their worst nightmare, things and situations that they're most afraid of.

- The Thriller hero most often lacks the physical skills of an Action/Adventure hero - while the hero may ultimately perform a physical act to reach safety, the principal energy of the story is devoted to ingenuity, the hero solving a puzzle to expose the corruption of the villain and extract him/herself from danger

- The ghost, or defining moment from the hero's past, motivates the hero in such that he/she is trying to relive or avoid a replay of that past moment

- Thrillers are about each characters wants and needs in an encounter between the agent of the forces of moral order and the arrogant forces of disorder, through which we perceive the endless basic struggle of abstract (or opposing) principles

- Thrillers must be full of reversals - setting up a character, setting up his/her place in the plot, then having the action reverse what we expect of that character in order to push the plot forward

- Humor must be present in a Thriller story to make it feel natural and humanized

- Tension must be maintained throughout the story through the conflicts (keeping it difficult for the hero to get what he/she wants) and through the writer's style and story pacing

- Tension, especially in a crime thriller, is often maintained by knowing that violence may erupt from certain characters anytime they walk into a room

- The 1st Act is all about set-up and setting the tone of the story

- The writer should open the script with a lot of questions for the audience, then provide answers that aren't necessarily the true answers

- The 2nd Act is about uncovering characters, finding out information that affects the characters, and letting the characters find out information that affects them

- The story should develop along a line whereby layer after layer is stripped from the surface of the story to reveal what is truly going on, even though some of the revelations should suggest answers that may not necessarily be the truth (part of the building up of the reversals)

- The 3rd Act is usually fairly short and should answer all the questions posed by the story

- The writer should try to hold back answers to the audience's questions as long as possible, but when the answers are revealed they must seem logical in light of what the story has set up about the characters and the plot

- One approach is to make one character the logical solution to the mystery, then reverse expectations