Christopher Riley and Kathy Riley have written the award-winning German language film, After the Truth. The Rileys have written scripts for Disney's Touchstone Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Mandalay Television Pictures, Sean Connery's Fountainbridge Films, and Robert Cort Productions. Their new book THE DEFINING MOMENT: HOW WRITERS AND ACTORS BUILD CHARACTERS, is brand new from Michael Wiese Productions. Chris and I spoke recently about defining moments on and off screen, the role of introspection in the creative process, and how movies can make us see things we've never seen before in human beings.
Order Chris and Kathy's book from Michael Wiese Productions here.
Dave Watson: Congratulations on your book. You co-wrote this with Kathy and the sub-header is "How Writers and Actors Build Characters," so it seems collaborative on a few levels.
Christopher Riley: It is. Kathy and I collaborate as co-writers on a lot of our work. Film itself is an intensely collaborative medium, and something that hadn't really occurred to me clearly through many years of writing screenplays was that the characters that Kathy and I originated on the page got handed off to actors who continued to create those characters on the screen, and yet we never talked to each other, so in the process of writing this book, Kathy and I had to figure out, "What are they doing?" So when the baton gets passed to them, how do we think similarly? And where might we be able to find some common language in the creation and development of characters?
DW: So it's creative and supportive in a few ways, would you say? It's less drama.
CR: Yes, though the famous stories are when people are locked in their motorhomes and at war with each other. I think the great films, we hope, are when people come together and work together to create a single artistic vision. We would love it if the drama is on the screen and not behind the camera.
DW: True, let's hope. David Mamet said we don't have to like characters, we only must understand the logic behind their actions. Would you agree? Character actions seem to run deep, as in, much leads up to them, from picking up a pen to running after a car.
CR: I would much rather agree with Mamet than disagree with him. With characters I don't particularly like, I at least understand them, understand why they do what they do. I need to relate to them and recognize their humanity and understand the emotional logic to their behavior. You saw character motivations run deep. Often we don't know why we do what we do though we make up reasons for what we've already done. As writers, directors, actors, we have to dig down to the roots of character behavior and character choices, and that's the idea our book comes from.
Kathy and I had a mentor early on named Coleman Loch. He was mentoring us while we were writing a feature film script. He was a co-executive producer on the television series The Equalizer. Really good writer, storyteller. He had this theory that each one of us is profoundly shaped by a surprisingly small number of experiences or moments; our lives are made up of an infinite number of small moments. If we can locate that handful small moments that have shaped our characters, that would be the most important information we could have in understanding them. so often we think of a character who is broken or flawed in some way, The Defining Moment asks, how did they get that way? Whaty happened to them?
If we could understand that moment, we could think of Marlin in Finding Nemo. In the opening, a barracuda comes along and devours Marlin's family. All that's left is that one egg that hatches into little Nemo. Because we witness that moment, we understand why Marlin is an overprotective dad. We feel it, we don't just think, "Oh, what a neurotic little fish. That's quirky and interesting." We say, "Oh now, we know what happened to this guy," and we feel with him. We don't make the calculation of if we like or don't like him, we identify with him. When his only surviving member is snatched up, we don't need any explanation of why Marlin would do anything to rescue his son, we know the defining moment of that character.
DW: Yes, and it's a very brief opening to that film, the devouring happens in the first two or three minutes, and Nemo is taken in the first ten. You and I remember it and Finding Nemo came out nineteen years ago this June.
CR: I have come to believe things like that (laughs) as I've gotten older but it still surprises me.
DW: That to me is the power of film. You can I can still readily recall the sequence of scenes vividly well over a decade later. With defining moments on film, you discuss characteristics of them. What were some of the original ones that jumped out and inspired you when you and Kathy sat down to write this book?
CR: When we think about defining moments, I do think that moment from Finding Nemo jumped out at us. Another one we talked about at length was from the first Godfather film. When Michael Corleone, the good son, the law-abiding son, the hero son who's just come home from World War II, who's never been involved in the family crime business, his father's been gunned down by a rival crime boss, and Michael decides he has to take up a gun in his own hand and kill the crime boss and the police captain who protects this crime boss. He's told that's never been done. Michael does that to avenge his father, to protect his family. The entire movie pivots on that moment. It defines him, sets him on that course to become the next godfather.
We can look at that moment, we can talk about at Michael's life before that moment, and talk about Michael's life after that moment. That's one of the real clues of defining moments. They create this boundary of before and after. In our own lives we can talk about, say, the time before the house fire and the time after, the time I met my wife and the time after. Those are all pivot moments that create this before and after. Part of the idea with defining moments is the people who know me best know those defining moments are my closest friends. The people that don't are just acquaintances. When it comes to filmmaking, we don't want to be acquaintances of those characters, we want to be intimates of those characters.
I think it's less important to know how much change is in their pocket or about the gum stuck to their shoe. I think it's far more important to know how they got that limp or how they heal.
DW: I still remember the godfather scene. Seeing it in high school I didn't know about that scene, and remember the camera slowly circling Michael as his eyes move up and down, and he breaks the code and law, you zeroed in on it, in swift, cunning form.
CR: And writer, director, actor, editor, even production designer, all work together to create that moment. Even sound design. When Michael enters the restroom to retrieve the gun, he passes through three doors when he comes back into the restaurant, which visually tells us that this character is crossing a threshold. He is passing from one space into an entirely different space, there is no return, so that's both a production design, a director of photography, all of them are involved and of course the actor knows, "I'm going to stand here in the bathroom for a moment, and sort of mediate on this step I'm about to take." The camera dwells on that moment and you described that circling camera move, Michael pausing before he takes that step, before he takes out the gun. The movie sort of rushes on from that point. the rest of Godfather I, II, and II, all flow from that moment because of the change that happens in that defining moment.
DW: You also talk about discovering your own defining moments. Is introspection key to artistic expression? Before or during the creative process?
CR: I think we really have to look inside ourselves as writers and storytellers, because we are our best raw material. I have a front row seat to the inner life of one human being and that's me. Kathy has said, "Before you understand your characters' story, you have to understand your own." so that implies a process of introspection. If I say, "I have a dream to become involved in filmmaking, where did that dream come from?" Can I locate the moment where that dream was born? For decades my life has been shaped by that pursuit. I can locate that moment. I think about the ways I've been damaged, the emotional limps I have, and I can look back, sometimes I can locate those moments, sometimes we can't. Sometimes things happen to us when we're so young, we can't remember them, or they're so traumatic we don't remember them, by choice or not, yet they shape us. I can see the outlines of the gunshot wound in my own chest. I don't remember the gunshot, but I can see how it shaped me in ways that only as a full-grown adult I've begun to understand and find healing from. That healing also has a locus in a moment. It doesn't all take place in a snap, but there is a very clear moment for me when I realize, "Oh, this pattern of weird quirks about me, they're not random!" They're actually connected and form a pattern and point back to a moment. Now as an adult I can look at the things I've always believed at sort of a firmware level, just programmed into me, and there's a moment when I realize, "Oh, those things aren't true, those are lies." One of them was being, If people really know you, they won't want you. I was taught that, I believed it, I lived it, and at some point a counselor said to me, "You know Chris, I hate to tell you this but your friends already know you're not perfect, and they still love you. And in that instant, I laughed because I realized, of course that has to be true, and number two, that thought had never entered my mind before, as obvious as it was, and that was, for me, a defining moment and a moment that began a healing process, and by locating that, I can now draw on that if I have a character who is going through a moment of growth or healing, and it now takes on an emotional authenticity instead of something I sort of make up.
DW: You don't have to make it up out of thin air. I recently watched Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman from 1978 with Jill Clayburgh. It's in a three-act structure. You and Kathy also discuss moments in the context of the three act structure. How did you and Kathy arrive at this part of the book?
CR: Well, working as screenwriters we do a lot of pitching, to get hired to write a script. We end up having to analyze a lot of stories and break them down into three act structures to understand how the characters interact with that structure, so we arrived a simple understanding at how the classic three-act Hollywood structure works. We noticed that defining moments often line up with, say, the end of Act One or a movie's midpoint like Michael Corleone's moment at the midpoint of The Godfather. Other times are the "All hope is lost" moment at the end of Act Two or the climactic moment at the end of the film.
If you think of the first Lord of the Rings, we start in the distant, distant battle where Sauron loses the ring of power and it falls into the hands of Matt. That's a defining moment for the ring. It leaves the hands of Sauron, comes into the possession of humans, there's a before and after because for all of the age of Middle Earth Sauron is seeking to get that ring back. And then there's a moment where it's an Inciting Incident or "Upsetting the applecart" moment where the ring comes to Frodo. That's a before-and-after moment for Frodo, he doesn't realize it, but his life will never be the same. Now structure is not for the characters, structure is for the audience, and the audience knows it's game on when the ring falls into Frodo's hands.
In the second or third Lord of the Rings movie which also begins in flashback where the ring comes to the character who will evolve into Gollem. For him, that is the defining moment of his existence. The ring comes to dominate him, to rule over him, to drive him with a lust to recover it after he loses it, and that's another opening.
DW: Defining moments come at different points for the characters so se wee them at different points in the story. That enriches it and rewards us.
CR: Yes, and we think about stories are not just about this outer journey like Frodo disposing of jewelry on Mt. Doom, but it's about character transformation and so it stands to reason that these pivot points for character would be structural moments within a movie because they are the moments when characters are transforming before our eyes. Now there are often defining moments that happen even before the movie begins, now we may hear about those because the characters tells us the story or see those in flashback. And then there are moments that happen live in front of their eyes.
I do encourage writers to discover defining moments regardless of whether or not they play on screen because it enriches the writer's understanding of the character whether or not the audience knows about that event. If the writer knows, I will know what the character will choose to say at any given moment because I understand the forces at work that is shaping and driving them.
DW: Speaking of which, what's next?
CR: On my wall I have six post-it notes; I always have to keep track of what I'm doing. I just directed s short film, I've never directed before so I decided to try that. I'm in post on that. I'm working with a writer finishing up a new feature screenplay, a dramatic thriller that takes place at the U.S.-Mexico border, so that is getting deliciously close to going out the door to readers. I'm thinking of directing a documentary that has to do with my son who is a long-term brain tumor survivor, he's a real-life Forrest Gump. It would be titled, Don't Mind the Radiation Damage, Please Hire My Son.
DW: Goodness that's a memorable title. What's your favorite cinematic moment? A defining moment?
CR: Yes. I am really drawn to unexpected connections between characters, so I could have many favorites along those lines, but I have an unusual moment between a character and the audience. This comes from The Elephant Man. When we first see the elephant man on screen, we're horrified. We can't even look bear to look at the screen because of the hideous deformity of this man's face.
DW: Neither can the other character played by Anthony Hopkins.
CR: Yeah, so this burlap bag is pulled off of his head and all the characters look away, we the audience look away, and we go through the rest of this movie, and famously at that moment the character says, "I am not an animal. I am a man. By the end of that movie, the face of the elephant man has not changed, it looks exactly the way it did in the first shot when it was revealed, but now we look at it with love, and we see the beauty of this character that we originally. He didn't change; somewhere in that movie, we changed. That movie becomes for us a defining moment that opens our eyes to see the beauty of the character that we originally thought was monstrous and hideous, and we have changed to see him as beautiful. I love movies that help us to see things we would have never seen.
Clip: The Elephant Man
Founder and editor of Movies Matter, Dave Watson is a writer and educator in Madison, WI.
Order Chris and Kathy's book from Michael Wiese Productions here.
Dave Watson: Congratulations on your book. You co-wrote this with Kathy and the sub-header is "How Writers and Actors Build Characters," so it seems collaborative on a few levels.
Christopher Riley: It is. Kathy and I collaborate as co-writers on a lot of our work. Film itself is an intensely collaborative medium, and something that hadn't really occurred to me clearly through many years of writing screenplays was that the characters that Kathy and I originated on the page got handed off to actors who continued to create those characters on the screen, and yet we never talked to each other, so in the process of writing this book, Kathy and I had to figure out, "What are they doing?" So when the baton gets passed to them, how do we think similarly? And where might we be able to find some common language in the creation and development of characters?
DW: So it's creative and supportive in a few ways, would you say? It's less drama.
CR: Yes, though the famous stories are when people are locked in their motorhomes and at war with each other. I think the great films, we hope, are when people come together and work together to create a single artistic vision. We would love it if the drama is on the screen and not behind the camera.
DW: True, let's hope. David Mamet said we don't have to like characters, we only must understand the logic behind their actions. Would you agree? Character actions seem to run deep, as in, much leads up to them, from picking up a pen to running after a car.
CR: I would much rather agree with Mamet than disagree with him. With characters I don't particularly like, I at least understand them, understand why they do what they do. I need to relate to them and recognize their humanity and understand the emotional logic to their behavior. You saw character motivations run deep. Often we don't know why we do what we do though we make up reasons for what we've already done. As writers, directors, actors, we have to dig down to the roots of character behavior and character choices, and that's the idea our book comes from.
Kathy and I had a mentor early on named Coleman Loch. He was mentoring us while we were writing a feature film script. He was a co-executive producer on the television series The Equalizer. Really good writer, storyteller. He had this theory that each one of us is profoundly shaped by a surprisingly small number of experiences or moments; our lives are made up of an infinite number of small moments. If we can locate that handful small moments that have shaped our characters, that would be the most important information we could have in understanding them. so often we think of a character who is broken or flawed in some way, The Defining Moment asks, how did they get that way? Whaty happened to them?
If we could understand that moment, we could think of Marlin in Finding Nemo. In the opening, a barracuda comes along and devours Marlin's family. All that's left is that one egg that hatches into little Nemo. Because we witness that moment, we understand why Marlin is an overprotective dad. We feel it, we don't just think, "Oh, what a neurotic little fish. That's quirky and interesting." We say, "Oh now, we know what happened to this guy," and we feel with him. We don't make the calculation of if we like or don't like him, we identify with him. When his only surviving member is snatched up, we don't need any explanation of why Marlin would do anything to rescue his son, we know the defining moment of that character.
DW: Yes, and it's a very brief opening to that film, the devouring happens in the first two or three minutes, and Nemo is taken in the first ten. You and I remember it and Finding Nemo came out nineteen years ago this June.
CR: I have come to believe things like that (laughs) as I've gotten older but it still surprises me.
DW: That to me is the power of film. You can I can still readily recall the sequence of scenes vividly well over a decade later. With defining moments on film, you discuss characteristics of them. What were some of the original ones that jumped out and inspired you when you and Kathy sat down to write this book?
CR: When we think about defining moments, I do think that moment from Finding Nemo jumped out at us. Another one we talked about at length was from the first Godfather film. When Michael Corleone, the good son, the law-abiding son, the hero son who's just come home from World War II, who's never been involved in the family crime business, his father's been gunned down by a rival crime boss, and Michael decides he has to take up a gun in his own hand and kill the crime boss and the police captain who protects this crime boss. He's told that's never been done. Michael does that to avenge his father, to protect his family. The entire movie pivots on that moment. It defines him, sets him on that course to become the next godfather.
We can look at that moment, we can talk about at Michael's life before that moment, and talk about Michael's life after that moment. That's one of the real clues of defining moments. They create this boundary of before and after. In our own lives we can talk about, say, the time before the house fire and the time after, the time I met my wife and the time after. Those are all pivot moments that create this before and after. Part of the idea with defining moments is the people who know me best know those defining moments are my closest friends. The people that don't are just acquaintances. When it comes to filmmaking, we don't want to be acquaintances of those characters, we want to be intimates of those characters.
I think it's less important to know how much change is in their pocket or about the gum stuck to their shoe. I think it's far more important to know how they got that limp or how they heal.
DW: I still remember the godfather scene. Seeing it in high school I didn't know about that scene, and remember the camera slowly circling Michael as his eyes move up and down, and he breaks the code and law, you zeroed in on it, in swift, cunning form.
CR: And writer, director, actor, editor, even production designer, all work together to create that moment. Even sound design. When Michael enters the restroom to retrieve the gun, he passes through three doors when he comes back into the restaurant, which visually tells us that this character is crossing a threshold. He is passing from one space into an entirely different space, there is no return, so that's both a production design, a director of photography, all of them are involved and of course the actor knows, "I'm going to stand here in the bathroom for a moment, and sort of mediate on this step I'm about to take." The camera dwells on that moment and you described that circling camera move, Michael pausing before he takes that step, before he takes out the gun. The movie sort of rushes on from that point. the rest of Godfather I, II, and II, all flow from that moment because of the change that happens in that defining moment.
DW: You also talk about discovering your own defining moments. Is introspection key to artistic expression? Before or during the creative process?
CR: I think we really have to look inside ourselves as writers and storytellers, because we are our best raw material. I have a front row seat to the inner life of one human being and that's me. Kathy has said, "Before you understand your characters' story, you have to understand your own." so that implies a process of introspection. If I say, "I have a dream to become involved in filmmaking, where did that dream come from?" Can I locate the moment where that dream was born? For decades my life has been shaped by that pursuit. I can locate that moment. I think about the ways I've been damaged, the emotional limps I have, and I can look back, sometimes I can locate those moments, sometimes we can't. Sometimes things happen to us when we're so young, we can't remember them, or they're so traumatic we don't remember them, by choice or not, yet they shape us. I can see the outlines of the gunshot wound in my own chest. I don't remember the gunshot, but I can see how it shaped me in ways that only as a full-grown adult I've begun to understand and find healing from. That healing also has a locus in a moment. It doesn't all take place in a snap, but there is a very clear moment for me when I realize, "Oh, this pattern of weird quirks about me, they're not random!" They're actually connected and form a pattern and point back to a moment. Now as an adult I can look at the things I've always believed at sort of a firmware level, just programmed into me, and there's a moment when I realize, "Oh, those things aren't true, those are lies." One of them was being, If people really know you, they won't want you. I was taught that, I believed it, I lived it, and at some point a counselor said to me, "You know Chris, I hate to tell you this but your friends already know you're not perfect, and they still love you. And in that instant, I laughed because I realized, of course that has to be true, and number two, that thought had never entered my mind before, as obvious as it was, and that was, for me, a defining moment and a moment that began a healing process, and by locating that, I can now draw on that if I have a character who is going through a moment of growth or healing, and it now takes on an emotional authenticity instead of something I sort of make up.
DW: You don't have to make it up out of thin air. I recently watched Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman from 1978 with Jill Clayburgh. It's in a three-act structure. You and Kathy also discuss moments in the context of the three act structure. How did you and Kathy arrive at this part of the book?
CR: Well, working as screenwriters we do a lot of pitching, to get hired to write a script. We end up having to analyze a lot of stories and break them down into three act structures to understand how the characters interact with that structure, so we arrived a simple understanding at how the classic three-act Hollywood structure works. We noticed that defining moments often line up with, say, the end of Act One or a movie's midpoint like Michael Corleone's moment at the midpoint of The Godfather. Other times are the "All hope is lost" moment at the end of Act Two or the climactic moment at the end of the film.
If you think of the first Lord of the Rings, we start in the distant, distant battle where Sauron loses the ring of power and it falls into the hands of Matt. That's a defining moment for the ring. It leaves the hands of Sauron, comes into the possession of humans, there's a before and after because for all of the age of Middle Earth Sauron is seeking to get that ring back. And then there's a moment where it's an Inciting Incident or "Upsetting the applecart" moment where the ring comes to Frodo. That's a before-and-after moment for Frodo, he doesn't realize it, but his life will never be the same. Now structure is not for the characters, structure is for the audience, and the audience knows it's game on when the ring falls into Frodo's hands.
In the second or third Lord of the Rings movie which also begins in flashback where the ring comes to the character who will evolve into Gollem. For him, that is the defining moment of his existence. The ring comes to dominate him, to rule over him, to drive him with a lust to recover it after he loses it, and that's another opening.
DW: Defining moments come at different points for the characters so se wee them at different points in the story. That enriches it and rewards us.
CR: Yes, and we think about stories are not just about this outer journey like Frodo disposing of jewelry on Mt. Doom, but it's about character transformation and so it stands to reason that these pivot points for character would be structural moments within a movie because they are the moments when characters are transforming before our eyes. Now there are often defining moments that happen even before the movie begins, now we may hear about those because the characters tells us the story or see those in flashback. And then there are moments that happen live in front of their eyes.
I do encourage writers to discover defining moments regardless of whether or not they play on screen because it enriches the writer's understanding of the character whether or not the audience knows about that event. If the writer knows, I will know what the character will choose to say at any given moment because I understand the forces at work that is shaping and driving them.
DW: Speaking of which, what's next?
CR: On my wall I have six post-it notes; I always have to keep track of what I'm doing. I just directed s short film, I've never directed before so I decided to try that. I'm in post on that. I'm working with a writer finishing up a new feature screenplay, a dramatic thriller that takes place at the U.S.-Mexico border, so that is getting deliciously close to going out the door to readers. I'm thinking of directing a documentary that has to do with my son who is a long-term brain tumor survivor, he's a real-life Forrest Gump. It would be titled, Don't Mind the Radiation Damage, Please Hire My Son.
DW: Goodness that's a memorable title. What's your favorite cinematic moment? A defining moment?
CR: Yes. I am really drawn to unexpected connections between characters, so I could have many favorites along those lines, but I have an unusual moment between a character and the audience. This comes from The Elephant Man. When we first see the elephant man on screen, we're horrified. We can't even look bear to look at the screen because of the hideous deformity of this man's face.
DW: Neither can the other character played by Anthony Hopkins.
CR: Yeah, so this burlap bag is pulled off of his head and all the characters look away, we the audience look away, and we go through the rest of this movie, and famously at that moment the character says, "I am not an animal. I am a man. By the end of that movie, the face of the elephant man has not changed, it looks exactly the way it did in the first shot when it was revealed, but now we look at it with love, and we see the beauty of this character that we originally. He didn't change; somewhere in that movie, we changed. That movie becomes for us a defining moment that opens our eyes to see the beauty of the character that we originally thought was monstrous and hideous, and we have changed to see him as beautiful. I love movies that help us to see things we would have never seen.
Clip: The Elephant Man
Founder and editor of Movies Matter, Dave Watson is a writer and educator in Madison, WI.