The First 10 Pages of A Script

The opening scenes – the first 10 pages..

• How long do you wait – 5 minutes? 10 minutes … possibly 20 minutes before you switch off a movie where you’re just not ‘getting‘ it. There’s a lack of engagement in the story and characters; the rules of the world are unclear – and you don’t want to spend more time getting to the climax of a tale that didn’t grab you in the first place.
• So … as a filmmaker, how do you engage a busy acquisitions executive, with a pile of screenplays to read, to keep going beyond the first 10 pages?
• Personally, I aim to read at least 25 pages – I appreciate how much work has gone into writing & feel bad if I don’t (just in case it gets better – but sadly, it rarely does).  However, if it takes on average one page per minute to read a script … you’ll understand why someone with 10 scripts to read will only give you 10 pages of their time.
• We want to be transported – to be taken into someone else’s world for 90 minutes; to follow their lives – everything you show us in the first 10 pages has to illustrate why we have to stick with the story yet to come.

Thoughts:

• Q. What does the acquisitions executive want from you?
• A. Engagement with the central character.  What is going on in their lives & what are they going to do about it?  Make us care about what happens to your protagonist.   We want to feel what they are feeling.

• Who is this person?
• What is their motivation?
• Where is this going to happen?
• Why should we care?

• As an ‘audience’ we want to know the quest our central character will take and to follow that to its conclusion. Make your character human – show us who they are:
• Is this a good person – are things going well in their every day life? (Unlikely, or it would be a pretty dull movie!).
• Are they a bad person – that’s fine, Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs, has some cool peccadilloes – he’s very well read; loves fine wine; he’s self assured – lives by his own rules.  He does things we wouldn’t dream of doing & our inner selves love that about him.  PLUS – he’s going to help Clarice Starling.
• How do the characters react to the world around them – is life throwing them a curve ball? Do they sleep well; drink too much; fight with their partners?  Get us to connect to them and then we invest emotionally in their journey – all the blood & guts; car chases; amazing effects mean NOTHING if we don’t empathise with what happens to the people in the story.

Examples:

• A QUIET PLACE – Parents will go to any lengths to protect their children … when they lose a child, our heart breaks for them.  How will they bring a new child into this terrible place and face down the enemy.

• BRAVEHEART – William Wallace suffers brutal loss as a small boy; he finds love but then cruelly witnesses his wife’s execution – both due to the laws of a heartless King of England.  We can’t help but want this underdog to get his revenge.