My approach to screenwriting
Writing a screenplay begins with understanding what the audience expects.
“Writing a fictional screenplay means orchestrating an invisible trial.”
The principle
Everything starts from a simple observation:
A fictional screenplay functions because it responds to very precise expectations in the audience’s mind.
These expectations are not always conscious.
My approach consists in identifying these unconscious expectations, and deriving from them clear writing principles that make it possible to meet them.
The mechanism
The audience’s unconscious expectations mainly concern the sense of justice within the story.
When we watch a fictional film or TV show, we are not simply observing a sequence of events.
We unconsciously evaluate the behavior of the characters.
We determine in real time what they deserve,
and we check whether justice is done by the end of the story.
Understanding what the audience expects is already knowing how to write.
The origins of this approach
This approach emerged from an initial intuition, followed by an in-depth analysis of numerous films and several years of research devoted to how the audience perceives and evaluates a screenplay.
What this approach allows
Concretely, this approach makes it possible to :
- write screenplays with a clear awareness of what they provoke in the audience
- analyze precisely why a story does not “work”
- rely on a clear framework to support, teach, and refine projects
Who this approach is for
It is intended for writers, but also for anyone working with stories who wants to understand, with precision, what the audience actually judges when watching a story.
The book
This approach is developed in detail in The Screenwriting Code, where it is applied to numerous examples.
Conferences
This approach can also be presented and explored in conferences for writers, students, and professionals in screenwriting.