Character Development Through Emotional Needs

Character Development Through Emotional Needs This week, we're going to be talking about connecting to your character’s emotional needs.  Usually when we talk about characters, we don't talk about their emotional need at all. We talk about their tangible goal, the tangible object: What do they want? What are they going for? What's their dream? What's their goal?  If you want to talk in acting terms, what's their super objective? What's their intention? What's their objective in the scene? What's the thing they want more than anything else that they're trying to get?  If you want to talk in Hitchcock terms, what's the MacGuffin that everyone's trying to get in the movie?  We're really comfortable with this idea of the tangible object.  For examples of a tangible object, in Raising Arizona, everybody wants the baby. In The Godfather, Michael wants to protect the family. In The Handmaid's Tale, June wants to save her children. Almost every character has this tangible object that they are seeking. If you know that tangible object, character development becomes much easier.  In fact, all you have to do is make it hard for them to get the tangible object and they will go on a journey. They will have to start making new choices and those new choices will change them, just like in your own life.  If you know what you want and you start going for it, you will hit obstacles. We think about those obstacles as bad things, but oftentimes when it comes to character development they're not. The obstacle is just the thing that makes it hard. The thing that makes it hard is the thing that forces you to learn who you really are and to make choices you've never made before and to experience who you really can be.  If you've ever had a great creative partner, great director, great actor, that person doesn't just say, “Sure, anything you want, boss!” A great collaborator, a great mentor, pushes you, asks you hard questions and forces you to think more deeply, to get under the surface. They don't make it easy, they make it hard.  In making it hard, they force you to discover who you really are as a person and as an artist and as a writer.  It’s the same way with our characters, if you know the tangible object and you attack the tangible object and you make it hard, the character has to make new choices, and that sends them on a journey.  This raises two really interesting questions: 1) How to develop characters when you don't know what the character wants? 2) Why is it that we care so much about what some characters want and we don't care at all about what other characters want?  Why is it that sometimes you go to see a movie and sometimes the character wants something that you don't even connect to?  If you're watching There Will Be Blood, the character wants oil. How many of us are seeking oil? How many for how many of us are like, “Yeah, that's my dream. You know, I just really want to be an oil man.” Most of us don't have that dream. So, why do we care about Daniel Plainview?  If you watch The Wrestler, the wrestler wants to wrestle again. Well, most of us don't have the desire to get the crap beat out of us in a ring by a 300 pound man. Most of us don't connect to that tangible object. So, why is it that we care about the wrestler?  Yet, there are other movies that you've probably watched where they're trying to save the baby or save the world, and you're like, “Who cares? This feels so fake. I don't get it. I don't connect to it. I don't care.” Sometimes we root for characters pursuing tangible objects that we don't even agree with.  If you think of Breaking Bad, we don't agree (hopefully) with the idea of becoming drug lords. We don't agree with the idea of manipulating our own worst student—who b...