​Stan Williams is an award-winning veteran filmmaker of hundreds of corporate and non-profit documentaries. He has worked on over a dozen major Hollywood motion pictures as a screenplay and script doctor, and seen many of his projects distributed around the world. He is the author of THE MORAL PREMISE: HARNESSING VIRTUE AND VICE FOR BOX OFFICE SUCCESS and holds a B.A. in Physics, and a Ph.D. in Narrative Theory. He is the writer-director behind the forthcoming romantic comedy ANNALIESE! ANNALIESE! We spoke recently about audiences as moral agents, what Socrates and Seinfeld have in common, and his favorite cinematic moment from a destined classic.

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You can order Stan's book The Moral Premise here. Visit the website for Annaliese! Annaliese! upcoming event here.
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DW: The sub-header of your book is "Harnessing Virtue & Vice for Box Office Success." What do you mean by virtue and vice? Do they go hand in hand?

SW: Well, they’re opposite. Virtue and vice can also be described as a strength or a weakness. You have characters that have strengths and weaknesses. It’s the audience who decides what character trait is a virtue or vice, or a strengthen or weakness. Such determinations by audiences are not arbitrary, but generally align themselves with universal values. As humans we don't know everything. Most of life and the human condition is mysterious and unknown. Nonetheless, when we’re talking about successful stories, the best thing a writer can do is stay with a universal value. The audience will stick with stories that are about something that’s universal. For instance, a story will probably not succeed if it holds up oil-drilling in Alaska. The idea is too controversial.

Selfishness vs. selflessness, or being prejudiced vs. accepting, are more universal stories that large audiences will understand. That is where my interest lies, although, some parts of my book deal with niche audiences and values that are narrower.

I had an experience recently with an audience member from one of those niche audiences. I was giving a conference talk on The Moral Premise. At the end I showed the class a video webisode from a project I'm working on called ANNALIESE! ANNALIESE! It's about a woman who hates men, and the scene is an interview with her therapist. When the seminar was over, a guy came up to me and said, “Why did I hate that so much? Can you tell me?”

DW: And he asked you for an answer?

SW: Yeah. I was a little dumbfounded. Obviously, as the writer and director I liked it. HA! But I said to him, "I don’t know, but here’s my card, and when you figure it out, write and tell me!" Now, Dave, I’ve shown that particular webisode to many people and received universal positive feedback. The next day I shared a link of it with a co-panelist, Weam Namou is her name. She's a published author and documentary producer. She wrote back what almost everyone else has said, "This is wonderful." So, this lone guy, who hated it, is a good example of a niche audience, and I wasn’t trying to play to a niche audience. But they exist, and it just proves you’re not going to please all the people all the time.

Dave, you’ve read my book more recently than I have. I don’t remember if I use this term in the book, but the concept that applies here to universal values is "Natural Law." I define Natural Law as those laws of the universe, which we cannot change, but which protect and rejuvenate life or create life or something that’s beneficial to humanity. Nature is for our benefit, if we pay attention to it. The extreme example is gravity. If we respect gravity, we know not to walk off a cliff. It’s when we disrespect nature, by walking off that cliff that we're going to get hurt and maybe die.

So, a vice is a value that destroys, marginalizes or hurts life; and a virtue is something that creates, benefits or supports life. Good stories deal with universal truths that general audiences can easily identify. Such values mostly surround Natural Law...whatever generates, protects or rejuvenates life and health.

DW: Are virtue and vice limited to characters, as in character-driven stories, or can a story not be character-driven and still be about some virtue and vice?

SW: You have to ask, who is in your audience? Your audience is comprised of moral agents who are constantly making judgements about what is right and wrong, or what is a virtue and a vice. So, to connect with an audience filled with moral agents there needs to be a moral dilemma that a moral agent in your story confronts. And only human characters (or characters that are personified with human traits (e.g. Finding Nemo) can be moral agents. It is that moral agency confronting a moral dilemma that an audience identifies and subconsciously roots for.

That’s what helps an audience to identify with that character. Do you remember Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo? It’s really about audience identification, isn’t it?

DW: It came out in ’84 so I was young but I remember it was different than many other films.

SW: It’s all about how audience member Mia Farrow sees something in Jeff Daniels’s movie character. The reason that happens is because Mia Farrow identifies a moral dilemma that Jeff Daniels character is dealing with, and one of the things that attracts her to Jeff Daniels character is that he is not an abuser, like her husband.

DW: He’s a very soft spoken actor, or at least used to be.

SW: Yes, he is. In fact, Daniels lives about twenty minutes away from me in Chelsea, Michigan. In The Purple Rose of Cairo, Mia's world is one of abuse and one in which she’s striving for respect—a value she holds, which is very universal and very much in the news today. That’s what she wants to see. That’s what audiences do all the time. They put themselves into the story, at least in their minds. People want to put themselves in the story and help the characters make decisions. It’s like the vulnerable woman walking down the hallway in a horror movie and the audience is silently screaming, “Don’t open the door! Don’t do it! Don’t!”

DW: We’re in their shoes, almost leading to empathy.

SW: Absolutely. My perspective is that if you’re going to connect with an audience, it has to involve a moral agent on screen. Namely a human character, which is why all your stories about animals are personifications. Yes, you can tell a story without humans. But audiences and characters, they identify only with the moral agents in your story. That moral bonding is what brings us emotionally along in stories. Have you watched the Blue Planet series?

DW: I have the hard cover book, and believe it or not haven’t seen the series.

SW: The section on oceans is amazing. There’s a lot of violence between marine animals. You see one animal eat another which eats another. These are not human beings, but they are living beings and we project onto them the human traits. We ask ourselves, "What if I had to kill someone in order to survive?" That kind of question enraptures us. That’s what engages us and that’s what makes us become moral agents. We don’t hate the animals because of this, but their plight for survival does engage us.

DW: An earlier interview discussed screwball comedies and how not all the characters can be screwballs. There’s another Jeff Daniels movie, Dumb and Dumber, where one character has to be recognizable, and that’s Mike Starr.

SW: Yes. We have to identify with someone, even in a screwball comedy.

DW: What you said earlier really about being universal, lends itself to film being an international or global phenomenon. Yet, some movies die at the cultural barrier. Some transfer, others don’t. Do you think the ones that do are more universal no matter the special effects?

SW: When subjects and values don’t apply particularly to the audience they’re not going to catch on. True and consistently applied moral premises are necessary for audience connection, even internationally. If the story's values align with the audience's values, then it’ll connect.

DW: Last year’s Best Picture winner, Moonlight, was very specific with its characters and story. It ties to that irony that the more specific your choices, the more universal they apply.

SW: Moonlight is a good example of what I mean when I say that a successful a story or movie must have a true and consistently applied moral premise. But having such a truthful premise does not mean the movie will be successful. At the same time, I say a false moral premise, or an ironic combination of moral premise themes will always prevent a story from connecting deeply with an audience.

So, Moonlight, a film about men who are poor, gay and black, has a true moral premise, but it was not successful. Why? In this case, it's the misalignment of the story's imbued values of being poor, gay, and black, with an audience that is none of those things. It clearly connected with those that had familiarity with the niche values of being poor, gay and black. By the way, I think Moonlight is an important film to see, if for no other reason it helps those of us who are not like those characters to understand and have empathy for such a sub-culture.

But it's a niche-niche film. As I said, I thought it was truthful and had a true moral premise. But it would not have connected with audiences because audience members would not have any connection with the issues confronting poor, gay, black men from the South. It was also a tragedy, and illustrates the negative consequences of the many and complex issues that imbue such a culture. Consequently, Moonlight doesn't point strongly or clearly toward solutions that lead to happiness. Thus, there is not a strong value alignment between general audiences and the themes in Moonlight.

DW: Chapter two of your book is about what Socrates and Seinfeld have in common. Do you see many Greek mythological influences in TV shows now?

SW: Sorry, I know very little about Greek mythology or television shows. I had to narrow my interest, although I have written about a few. Yes, I've read a lot of such topics, but not enough to converse about the Greeks or television with any competence. My book, however, is somewhat of a sequel to Lajos Egri's book The Art of Dramatic Writing. The premise of the two books is identical, and Egri uses many examples which invoke the Greek stories.

DW: What is the moral premise of your new movie, ANNALIESE! ANNALIESE!?

SW: In general terms, the moral premise of ANNALIESE! ANNALIESE! is "Selfish indifference leads to aimless confusion, but selfless diligence leads to directed purpose." It's the story of a beautiful, millennial woman who hates men because she's been sexually harassed all her teen and young adult life. So, in an attempt to live a life without men, she recruits the gay guy next door to help her become a nun, although she isn't religious.

It's a quirky romantic comedy about the dangers of separating rights from responsibilities. Annaliese, our protagonist, has enjoyed the benefits of being a Trust Fund baby the last fifteen years and has shirked the responsibilities of adulthood. And now that her trust fund disbursements are over (she turned twenty-six), she has to decide what to do with her life.

You can read more about the project, watch trailers, and even buy tickets to the premiere of The Backstory Webisodes at our main website, http://www.AnnalieseTheMovie.com. The Backstory Webisodes are actually a forty-five-minute feature that will premiere on January 28th to launch our Kickstarter Crowd Funding campaign to raise the production budget for the full-length movie.

DW: My last question is always, what is your favorite cinematic moment? This can be a scene, a moment, or a sequence that made film come alive when you were growing up and inspires you to this day, or a recent moment that you love.

SW: A good example is a recent movie, can be found in Hidden Figures. The movie follows three African American women who were "calculators" in the early days of NASA, before the time of computers. They helped calculate the launch and orbital parameters of space capsules. One of the women was Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), clearly a genius at mathematics. In elementary school a teacher hands Katherine Johnson a piece of chalk to work out a math problem for the class on a blackboard. It's a close-up image of the two hands coming together and the chalk passing from the teacher's hand to Katherine's. It is much like the image of God reaching out to give the spark of life to Adam as portrayed on the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. The chalk represents knowledge and responsibility. The moral premise here is: withholding knowledge and responsibility leads to oppression, disrespect and failure; but passing on knowledge and responsibility leads to freedom, respect and success. Much of the story is focused on the Freedom #7 space capsule that took John Glenn on the first U.S. orbital mission around the Earth. That moral premise is the theme for every character in the movie. For example, the moral premise is evident when Katherine puts her name on the reports she wrote with Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons). Paul refuses to give her credit and he fails.
He's finally forced to acknowledge that his success depends on her freedom, and her knowledge, and her name on the reports with his, assures his success.

​The motif finds its climax when, in the NASA Task Force room, the group's leader, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), finally relents and in a shot, which duplicates the setup from the elementary school, hands a piece of chalk to Katherine, so she can demonstrate an important set of calculations on a huge blackboard to a room full of white, male, racially prejudice scientists. Of course, she nails the calculation that ensures John Glenn's successful return from space. And in a final scene, when Harrison discovers that to go to the bathroom Katherine is often gone from her desk for twenty-to-forty minutes because the only colored bathrooms are across campus, he takes a crowbar, which represents chalk, and violently beats down a sign in the hall that reads "Colored Ladies Room.” It's a wonderfully redemptive scene.

Clip: Hidden Figures