WILLIAM INDICK earned his bachelors degree in psychology (1993) and masters degree in music therapy (1996) from New York University. After working as a Special Education teacher and as a Creative Arts Therapist, he earned his Ph.D. in developmental psychology (2001) from Cornell University. Dr. Indick is a Professor of Psychology at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, where he writes books and teaches courses in the area of media psychology. He is particularly interested in the psychology of film and screenwriting, and the effects of media immersion on mental health.
Dr. Indick’s books include Psychology for Screenwriters (2023), Media Environments and Mental Disorder (2021), The Digital God (2015), Ancient Symbology in Fantasy Literature (2012), The Psychology of the Western (2008), Psycho Thrillers (2006), and Movies and the Mind (2004). Originally published in 2004, Psychology for Screenwriters has been translated and published into seven non-English language editions, and has been adopted as a text by screenwriting and filmmaking instructors around the world. The 2nd edition of PSYCHOLOGY FOR SCREENWRITERS is now available from Michael Wiese Productions, and it will include three new chapters on the psychology of the Western, Fantasy, and Sci-fi genres.
Dave Watson: Congratulations on a 2nd edition of Psychology for Screenwriters. What's new this time?
William Indick: The first edition had chapters devoted to some great psychoanalytic thinkers whose ideas could be applied to screenwriting. For the second edition, I had to add three new chapters I didn’t know what, so I decided to focus on genre, so the three new chapters respectively on Western, Fantasy, and Science fiction genre.
DW: Psychology seems to transcend genre. Would you agree?
WI: Absolutely. Psychology is the study of human behavior, so it applies to every aspect of human behavior. It’s a very broad field, probably closer to philosophy in lots of ways than, say, social science, so yes, it can be applied to every aspect of filmmaking, which is about capturing human behavior,, so that’s why I love it.
DW: Do certain genres explore human behavior more than others?
WI: I would say on a basic level every film is an exploration of human psychology. Certain films you would think are the least psychological like The Wizard of Oz or The Lion King are in fact the most psychological. However, at the same time, there are certain movies that advertise or promote themselves as a psychological thriller or psychological drama. So if every movie is psychology, why are some movies psychological? Maybe it’s because some movies are more deliberate and self-conscious about the psychological principles at play.
DW: Where they put psychology at the forefront, they say, “This is a psychological thriller.”
WI: The first time psychological as an advertisement for a film was back in the 1940s; the idea of a psychological thriller was born, take a Hitchcock thriller, or a movie like Gaslight, which wasn’t a Hitchcock movie but could have been in which the prime base at play is some type of psychological twist, so the movie is psychological in a basic way, but on top of that there’s a plot element that is psychological.
A bit later in the late 1940s westerns changed. Westerns became a lot darker and were psychological westerns because the characters, especially the heroes and villains, seemed to have some sort of psychological trauma they were dealing with, that their issues weren’t hero or villain issues, they were psychological issues, so those sub-genres were born, but really every movie is a psychological exploration.
DW: You mention westerns in the 1940s during that era and they had an impact on our psyches. There’s that last line of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I’m sure you know it, “When the legend becomes fact, you print the legend,” which has a huge impact on our psyches. We’d rather hold the image up than face reality.
WI: That’s a classic John Ford film, but not one of my favorites. It’s what I’d call an autumnal western, meaning we’re dealing with the death of the western, the western myth, but also the death of the genre, which John Ford was seeing. It’s like a song in an old folks home. You’ve got John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, they’re way past their prime, it’s all in faded out old, gray.
DW: It’s satisfying.
WI: Yes, it’s satisfying in a way, saying, “This is the myth, this is the legend.”
DW: Myths are powerful. The sub-header for the book is "Building Conflict in your Script." When psychology isn't worked into scripts, often it feels like the audience knows this. How do psychology and scripts work together? Would you say primarily through characters? Or the conception of the plot? Theme?
WI: From my point of view, the whole lure of watching a movie is that sense of engagement with a character, that identification of a character. If there isn’t a character that I identify with in some way, I’m not engaged, and therefore the story is irrelevant. Oftentimes the story or the plot is a hook to get somebody into the film, but then they have to get engaged with that story right away. Obviously there are usually multiple characters, but people have to find that character, and it’s usually the protagonist we identify with. As the story grows, our interest in the plot develops, not so much because it’s an interesting story and certainly if you read a screenplay, usually the story is not that interesting, it’s the development of the characters at play.
If you think of a story like a big machine, there are all sorts of gears turning and you start thinking, “Oh, that other gear is turning,” and all the gears are being revolved and turned around that central wheel, and that's character development. If the audience is involved with that character, they got us, but they have to keep them by putting that character through a crisis, and that’s why conflict is important. We get a sense of people with how they deal with conflict. That’s at the very heart of a movie, is this character we want the audience to identify with, and that’s why the star gets paid $100 million and the screenwriter gets $500,000 if he’s lucky. It’s the star, the character, the actor, and the plot is more or less irrelevant without that strong identification.
DW: They have to be iconic, identifiable, and relatable all at once. Some people say the time of the movie star is going to go by the wayside now with streaming.
WI: It’s an interesting shift in the medium, from analog medium like film to my book to digital media. It’s going to change everything. Will it be the end of the movie star? I think probably in a way, in terms of the movie star who gets paid $50 million a picture for thirty years like Tom Hanks. I can’t see that surviving in an age where everybody is their own filmmaker, everybody therefore is their own actor in their own films. Filmmaking is going to disburse so far and wide, I can’t see a handful of people being gods and goddesses we worship on the silver screen. It’s in everybody’s hands, and in those hands is the power to create as well as watch a movie.
DW: And the impact, the psychological impact of sitting in a theater and giving yourself over to the screen for two hours. You hear people laugh, cry, it’s very much a communal experience.
WI: Very much so. It’s like a ritual, going to church or going to a temple. My father went to Saturday matinees and not to temple. In its day, in the 1940s and ‘50s, the western was very much a part of American culture, you could not escape it. Nine out of ten TV shows, and I’m not exaggerating, were westerns. Seven out of ten films released every Friday were westerns. When children and their parents went to the matinees with their parents, children would dress up in western clothes, they’d bring pop guns, cap guns.
It was unimaginable today, but it was a part of the American ethos, living out, reenacting the myth of the west. That’s certainly not going to happen again, but the western is not going to die, it’s doing great. They’re all over Hulu, Netflix, people are attracted to them, but it will never dominate the way it did, nothing can.
DW: Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, a Best Picture contender last year, she won Best Director.
WI: It was a beautiful western. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the film as a whole. This goes back to what we talked about before: they give you a character who’s basically impossible to identify with and don’t give you a story; it’s all basically a psychological twist, and it's a very clever psychological twist, but cleverness and psychological twists to me don’t mean good filming. Obviously lots of people disagree. It was a beautiful film, though, great cinematography.
DW: It's a beautiful, memorable film. There’s the hero's journey with Joseph Campbell, and you also talk about the heroine's journey with Maureen Murdock. This delineation often goes unmarked in building stories. Why do you think that is?
WI: It goes back to what is a movie. My idea of a movie is it’s a machine with all these gears turning, lines within lines and at the center is the character.
If you think of a movie having interchangeable parts and characters: characters are interchangeable, plots are interchangeable, I can see saying, “Well, we have the basic hero structure” that can apply to any character, like some guy goes to Mexico and becomes a wrestler, like Nacho Libre, right? Then the characters doesn’t matter because the character will follow the plot, and you have your basic everyman. If that’s the way you’re thinking about it, then you don’t need a separate model for the hero structure.
However, if you’re thinking about it the way I think about it, where the character and the story are one and the story revolves around the character, is tailor-made to the character, and every scene is telling you something about the character and how they deal with conflict, then you do have to be very deliberate and say, “If this is my character, they will handle this conflict this way.. You can’t just say, “A hero is a hero is a hero.” If you’re writing a story about a woman in the twenty-first century and that’s your hero, that’s a different character than a classic male hero thousands of years ago through gladiators and horror movies in the twentieth century and things like that and westerns as well.
DW: The archetypes will show up again and again and again.
WI: Yeah, they’re the same archetypes and they’ll show up, they’re just structured differently because they’re different characters.
DW: In different times.
WI: It’s a different time, because every era will evoke a different version of the archetypes. If it’s a thousand years ago it’s a hermit living in a cave. If it’s a thousand years in the future, it’s a yoda-like figure who knows about the force. It doesn’t matter, it’s the same archetype.
DW: You also show philosophers such as Erik Erikson and Alfred Adler. How did their works come to mind?
WI: They’re both psychologists and psychoanalysts, both disciples of Freud. What they did was take Freud, which is very dense and esoteric, puts a lot of people off and uses terms like “Infantile sexuality,” or “penis envy.” It’s very deliberately provocative. Everything is symbolic, so Freudian theory is a hard nut to crack.
What Erikson did was take his theory and make it more palatable from an American point of view. It was less symbolic, less focused on sexuality, less focused on discovering new and unseen qualities of the mind. Erikson focused on the mind. He de-sexualized Freud’s ideas and made them more about the individual trying to find his own identify in his own identify in his environment and society, and stretched it out so that Freud’s theory doesn’t just end in adolescence.
Adler did something similar. He took the Oedipus complex and kind of threw it out the window. He said, “I like the complex part. I like the idea that our parents and our relationships with them are complex, but he said all this, I want to kill my father and sleep with my mother” stuff isn’t necessary; it’s highly symbolic and engaging on a philosophical level but people don’t understand it. People don’t understand it because they don’t understand Freud.
DW: There’s the what-if angle in stories: What if I killed my father?
WI: Yeah, what does that mean? Adler took Freudian theory and he explained it. He said, “It’s really about these feelings we have about ourselves and how we compensate, how we over-compensate and under-compensate, and all of a sudden you have a theory about the inferiority complex which is just as interesting and even more applicable than the Freudian theory.
The inclusion of Adler and Erikson to me was a necessity. It’s like the Bible: you can read the Bible but you need the commentary to understand the deeper meaning of the words. Similarly, you need Carl Jung and Adler and Erikson to really understand what Freud was talking about.
DW: Were there any surprise philosophers that came up when you were writing this book?
WI: A lot of films came up and shows that I didn’t think I’d include that I did. One person who I don’t quote a lot in the book, especially in the fantasy and science fiction parts, was Arthur C. Clarke. In particular, there’s a quote that I did use, “Any sufficiently sophisticated technology is indistinguishable from magic.” When I was trying to understand genre, I really understood fantasy through reading Arthur C. Clarke that I realized there is no difference.
Science fiction is fantasy, it’s just fantasy where the magic at play is scientific technology. Technology is magic, and that’s science fiction. There are subtleties where science fiction is in the future and fantasy is in the past, some mythical land, but those are just surface differences, whether it’s exterior space or exterior medieval England or exterior in the future. I realized I didn’t have to understand science fiction as a separate genre but as an extension of fantasy. That really helped me understand the archetypes and the characters a bit more.
DW: 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind. It feels real, but it jumps thousands of years after the Dawn of Humankind sequence in the beginning.
WI: And when that black monolith comes down to the hominids, it certainly feels like magic to them.
DW: What's next? Your books definitely have a theme.
WI: I teach and write in the very broad area of media psychology. I actually haven’t been writing about movies outside of the second edition. The book that’s going to be coming out this year is called Media Mindfulness: Balancing Your Engagement. We spend most of our time locked into cages of information, staring at screens and pages of books. That environment is a toxic environment when we lock ourselves into it and are unable to escape. The book explores what a healthy media environment is as opposed to what a toxic media environment is, and how we can change our behaviors to make us healthier and happier.
DW: Social media comes to mind.
WI: I will not argue. I take a sharp stick and beat it pretty well, which I also did in my previous book, Media Environments in the Mind. That book developed all my theories about media psychology, and my books in 2023 helps people apply them to their actual lives. That’s what I did with Psychology for Screenwriters and how we can think about films from a psychological perspective. Ken Lee over at Michael Wiese Productions suggested that I take those same ideas and apply them to the process of screenwriting. That was a successful book, and now I want to help people understand how the media affects their thoughts and feelings.
DW: Finally, what's your favorite cinematic moment?
WI: There are so many moments that come to mind, and you gotta go with the one that comes first. That’s the moment in John Ford’s The Searchers. When John Wayne holds up Natalie Wood for the first time toward the end, seeing that in the theater, you’re not one hundred percent sure what he’s going to do. The unthinkable is that he’s going to kill her because his daughter has lost her racial purity and become Native American. He says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” There’s so much going on in that scene.
DW: And in his face.
WI: There’s almost no action. He just holds her, cradles her. The questions was challenging. Why was that cinematic moment? It’ takes so much to tell a complicated story in a very, very simple, almost puritan, simplicity with it, and it pulls it off completely, and that’s just extraordinary. Where you can be extraordinarily complex and devastatingly simple in the same moment, that’s almost impossible.
DW: It all comes down to that moment.
WI: If some other hack tried to do it these days, there would be some phony narration: “And then I knew when I looked in her eyes,” that kind of stuff, or some type of fighting with people floating in the air, trying to ramp up the drama in these superficial ways.
John Ford knew exactly what to do, to draw us into this cave and do very, very little, and it’s so powerful.
Clip: The Searchers
Founder and editor of Movies Matter, Dave Watson is a writer and educator in Madison, WI.
Dr. Indick’s books include Psychology for Screenwriters (2023), Media Environments and Mental Disorder (2021), The Digital God (2015), Ancient Symbology in Fantasy Literature (2012), The Psychology of the Western (2008), Psycho Thrillers (2006), and Movies and the Mind (2004). Originally published in 2004, Psychology for Screenwriters has been translated and published into seven non-English language editions, and has been adopted as a text by screenwriting and filmmaking instructors around the world. The 2nd edition of PSYCHOLOGY FOR SCREENWRITERS is now available from Michael Wiese Productions, and it will include three new chapters on the psychology of the Western, Fantasy, and Sci-fi genres.
Dave Watson: Congratulations on a 2nd edition of Psychology for Screenwriters. What's new this time?
William Indick: The first edition had chapters devoted to some great psychoanalytic thinkers whose ideas could be applied to screenwriting. For the second edition, I had to add three new chapters I didn’t know what, so I decided to focus on genre, so the three new chapters respectively on Western, Fantasy, and Science fiction genre.
DW: Psychology seems to transcend genre. Would you agree?
WI: Absolutely. Psychology is the study of human behavior, so it applies to every aspect of human behavior. It’s a very broad field, probably closer to philosophy in lots of ways than, say, social science, so yes, it can be applied to every aspect of filmmaking, which is about capturing human behavior,, so that’s why I love it.
DW: Do certain genres explore human behavior more than others?
WI: I would say on a basic level every film is an exploration of human psychology. Certain films you would think are the least psychological like The Wizard of Oz or The Lion King are in fact the most psychological. However, at the same time, there are certain movies that advertise or promote themselves as a psychological thriller or psychological drama. So if every movie is psychology, why are some movies psychological? Maybe it’s because some movies are more deliberate and self-conscious about the psychological principles at play.
DW: Where they put psychology at the forefront, they say, “This is a psychological thriller.”
WI: The first time psychological as an advertisement for a film was back in the 1940s; the idea of a psychological thriller was born, take a Hitchcock thriller, or a movie like Gaslight, which wasn’t a Hitchcock movie but could have been in which the prime base at play is some type of psychological twist, so the movie is psychological in a basic way, but on top of that there’s a plot element that is psychological.
A bit later in the late 1940s westerns changed. Westerns became a lot darker and were psychological westerns because the characters, especially the heroes and villains, seemed to have some sort of psychological trauma they were dealing with, that their issues weren’t hero or villain issues, they were psychological issues, so those sub-genres were born, but really every movie is a psychological exploration.
DW: You mention westerns in the 1940s during that era and they had an impact on our psyches. There’s that last line of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I’m sure you know it, “When the legend becomes fact, you print the legend,” which has a huge impact on our psyches. We’d rather hold the image up than face reality.
WI: That’s a classic John Ford film, but not one of my favorites. It’s what I’d call an autumnal western, meaning we’re dealing with the death of the western, the western myth, but also the death of the genre, which John Ford was seeing. It’s like a song in an old folks home. You’ve got John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, they’re way past their prime, it’s all in faded out old, gray.
DW: It’s satisfying.
WI: Yes, it’s satisfying in a way, saying, “This is the myth, this is the legend.”
DW: Myths are powerful. The sub-header for the book is "Building Conflict in your Script." When psychology isn't worked into scripts, often it feels like the audience knows this. How do psychology and scripts work together? Would you say primarily through characters? Or the conception of the plot? Theme?
WI: From my point of view, the whole lure of watching a movie is that sense of engagement with a character, that identification of a character. If there isn’t a character that I identify with in some way, I’m not engaged, and therefore the story is irrelevant. Oftentimes the story or the plot is a hook to get somebody into the film, but then they have to get engaged with that story right away. Obviously there are usually multiple characters, but people have to find that character, and it’s usually the protagonist we identify with. As the story grows, our interest in the plot develops, not so much because it’s an interesting story and certainly if you read a screenplay, usually the story is not that interesting, it’s the development of the characters at play.
If you think of a story like a big machine, there are all sorts of gears turning and you start thinking, “Oh, that other gear is turning,” and all the gears are being revolved and turned around that central wheel, and that's character development. If the audience is involved with that character, they got us, but they have to keep them by putting that character through a crisis, and that’s why conflict is important. We get a sense of people with how they deal with conflict. That’s at the very heart of a movie, is this character we want the audience to identify with, and that’s why the star gets paid $100 million and the screenwriter gets $500,000 if he’s lucky. It’s the star, the character, the actor, and the plot is more or less irrelevant without that strong identification.
DW: They have to be iconic, identifiable, and relatable all at once. Some people say the time of the movie star is going to go by the wayside now with streaming.
WI: It’s an interesting shift in the medium, from analog medium like film to my book to digital media. It’s going to change everything. Will it be the end of the movie star? I think probably in a way, in terms of the movie star who gets paid $50 million a picture for thirty years like Tom Hanks. I can’t see that surviving in an age where everybody is their own filmmaker, everybody therefore is their own actor in their own films. Filmmaking is going to disburse so far and wide, I can’t see a handful of people being gods and goddesses we worship on the silver screen. It’s in everybody’s hands, and in those hands is the power to create as well as watch a movie.
DW: And the impact, the psychological impact of sitting in a theater and giving yourself over to the screen for two hours. You hear people laugh, cry, it’s very much a communal experience.
WI: Very much so. It’s like a ritual, going to church or going to a temple. My father went to Saturday matinees and not to temple. In its day, in the 1940s and ‘50s, the western was very much a part of American culture, you could not escape it. Nine out of ten TV shows, and I’m not exaggerating, were westerns. Seven out of ten films released every Friday were westerns. When children and their parents went to the matinees with their parents, children would dress up in western clothes, they’d bring pop guns, cap guns.
It was unimaginable today, but it was a part of the American ethos, living out, reenacting the myth of the west. That’s certainly not going to happen again, but the western is not going to die, it’s doing great. They’re all over Hulu, Netflix, people are attracted to them, but it will never dominate the way it did, nothing can.
DW: Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, a Best Picture contender last year, she won Best Director.
WI: It was a beautiful western. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the film as a whole. This goes back to what we talked about before: they give you a character who’s basically impossible to identify with and don’t give you a story; it’s all basically a psychological twist, and it's a very clever psychological twist, but cleverness and psychological twists to me don’t mean good filming. Obviously lots of people disagree. It was a beautiful film, though, great cinematography.
DW: It's a beautiful, memorable film. There’s the hero's journey with Joseph Campbell, and you also talk about the heroine's journey with Maureen Murdock. This delineation often goes unmarked in building stories. Why do you think that is?
WI: It goes back to what is a movie. My idea of a movie is it’s a machine with all these gears turning, lines within lines and at the center is the character.
If you think of a movie having interchangeable parts and characters: characters are interchangeable, plots are interchangeable, I can see saying, “Well, we have the basic hero structure” that can apply to any character, like some guy goes to Mexico and becomes a wrestler, like Nacho Libre, right? Then the characters doesn’t matter because the character will follow the plot, and you have your basic everyman. If that’s the way you’re thinking about it, then you don’t need a separate model for the hero structure.
However, if you’re thinking about it the way I think about it, where the character and the story are one and the story revolves around the character, is tailor-made to the character, and every scene is telling you something about the character and how they deal with conflict, then you do have to be very deliberate and say, “If this is my character, they will handle this conflict this way.. You can’t just say, “A hero is a hero is a hero.” If you’re writing a story about a woman in the twenty-first century and that’s your hero, that’s a different character than a classic male hero thousands of years ago through gladiators and horror movies in the twentieth century and things like that and westerns as well.
DW: The archetypes will show up again and again and again.
WI: Yeah, they’re the same archetypes and they’ll show up, they’re just structured differently because they’re different characters.
DW: In different times.
WI: It’s a different time, because every era will evoke a different version of the archetypes. If it’s a thousand years ago it’s a hermit living in a cave. If it’s a thousand years in the future, it’s a yoda-like figure who knows about the force. It doesn’t matter, it’s the same archetype.
DW: You also show philosophers such as Erik Erikson and Alfred Adler. How did their works come to mind?
WI: They’re both psychologists and psychoanalysts, both disciples of Freud. What they did was take Freud, which is very dense and esoteric, puts a lot of people off and uses terms like “Infantile sexuality,” or “penis envy.” It’s very deliberately provocative. Everything is symbolic, so Freudian theory is a hard nut to crack.
What Erikson did was take his theory and make it more palatable from an American point of view. It was less symbolic, less focused on sexuality, less focused on discovering new and unseen qualities of the mind. Erikson focused on the mind. He de-sexualized Freud’s ideas and made them more about the individual trying to find his own identify in his own identify in his environment and society, and stretched it out so that Freud’s theory doesn’t just end in adolescence.
Adler did something similar. He took the Oedipus complex and kind of threw it out the window. He said, “I like the complex part. I like the idea that our parents and our relationships with them are complex, but he said all this, I want to kill my father and sleep with my mother” stuff isn’t necessary; it’s highly symbolic and engaging on a philosophical level but people don’t understand it. People don’t understand it because they don’t understand Freud.
DW: There’s the what-if angle in stories: What if I killed my father?
WI: Yeah, what does that mean? Adler took Freudian theory and he explained it. He said, “It’s really about these feelings we have about ourselves and how we compensate, how we over-compensate and under-compensate, and all of a sudden you have a theory about the inferiority complex which is just as interesting and even more applicable than the Freudian theory.
The inclusion of Adler and Erikson to me was a necessity. It’s like the Bible: you can read the Bible but you need the commentary to understand the deeper meaning of the words. Similarly, you need Carl Jung and Adler and Erikson to really understand what Freud was talking about.
DW: Were there any surprise philosophers that came up when you were writing this book?
WI: A lot of films came up and shows that I didn’t think I’d include that I did. One person who I don’t quote a lot in the book, especially in the fantasy and science fiction parts, was Arthur C. Clarke. In particular, there’s a quote that I did use, “Any sufficiently sophisticated technology is indistinguishable from magic.” When I was trying to understand genre, I really understood fantasy through reading Arthur C. Clarke that I realized there is no difference.
Science fiction is fantasy, it’s just fantasy where the magic at play is scientific technology. Technology is magic, and that’s science fiction. There are subtleties where science fiction is in the future and fantasy is in the past, some mythical land, but those are just surface differences, whether it’s exterior space or exterior medieval England or exterior in the future. I realized I didn’t have to understand science fiction as a separate genre but as an extension of fantasy. That really helped me understand the archetypes and the characters a bit more.
DW: 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind. It feels real, but it jumps thousands of years after the Dawn of Humankind sequence in the beginning.
WI: And when that black monolith comes down to the hominids, it certainly feels like magic to them.
DW: What's next? Your books definitely have a theme.
WI: I teach and write in the very broad area of media psychology. I actually haven’t been writing about movies outside of the second edition. The book that’s going to be coming out this year is called Media Mindfulness: Balancing Your Engagement. We spend most of our time locked into cages of information, staring at screens and pages of books. That environment is a toxic environment when we lock ourselves into it and are unable to escape. The book explores what a healthy media environment is as opposed to what a toxic media environment is, and how we can change our behaviors to make us healthier and happier.
DW: Social media comes to mind.
WI: I will not argue. I take a sharp stick and beat it pretty well, which I also did in my previous book, Media Environments in the Mind. That book developed all my theories about media psychology, and my books in 2023 helps people apply them to their actual lives. That’s what I did with Psychology for Screenwriters and how we can think about films from a psychological perspective. Ken Lee over at Michael Wiese Productions suggested that I take those same ideas and apply them to the process of screenwriting. That was a successful book, and now I want to help people understand how the media affects their thoughts and feelings.
DW: Finally, what's your favorite cinematic moment?
WI: There are so many moments that come to mind, and you gotta go with the one that comes first. That’s the moment in John Ford’s The Searchers. When John Wayne holds up Natalie Wood for the first time toward the end, seeing that in the theater, you’re not one hundred percent sure what he’s going to do. The unthinkable is that he’s going to kill her because his daughter has lost her racial purity and become Native American. He says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” There’s so much going on in that scene.
DW: And in his face.
WI: There’s almost no action. He just holds her, cradles her. The questions was challenging. Why was that cinematic moment? It’ takes so much to tell a complicated story in a very, very simple, almost puritan, simplicity with it, and it pulls it off completely, and that’s just extraordinary. Where you can be extraordinarily complex and devastatingly simple in the same moment, that’s almost impossible.
DW: It all comes down to that moment.
WI: If some other hack tried to do it these days, there would be some phony narration: “And then I knew when I looked in her eyes,” that kind of stuff, or some type of fighting with people floating in the air, trying to ramp up the drama in these superficial ways.
John Ford knew exactly what to do, to draw us into this cave and do very, very little, and it’s so powerful.
Clip: The Searchers
Founder and editor of Movies Matter, Dave Watson is a writer and educator in Madison, WI.
