Destroyer: How to Use Flashbacks in Your Script

Destroyer: How To Use Flashbacks In Your Script
This week we’re going to be talking about Destroyer by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi.
There are so many things that we can discuss about Destroyer, so many different ways that we can learn from this film.
We can obviously talk about what a tremendous actor brings to a movie, looking at performances by Nicole Kidman, Sebastian Stan, Jade Pettyjohn and this tremendous cast, and how the specificity of a performance can amplify the quality of your writing, and bring your writing to life.
And we can talk about how finding that specificity in your writing can allow these kinds of performers to find those nuances– how this writing and directing team created a role that allowed Nicole Kidman to put together such an interesting performance, the kind of performance we don’t normally see in a mainstream film.
We can talk about, “Hey it is about darn time that we got to see ‘Dirty Harry’ with a woman!” How to update old concepts, like the dirty cop procedural, for a modern era, how you can look at films that were created in the past and think, “Okay, how would I update that?” And how sometimes you can draw inspiration from genres that have existed for a long time simply by asking yourself, “How do I make this genre new and relevant today?”
One of the places Destroyer most strongly succeeds is in its use of images. So we can talk about how the writing team of Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi worked with Karyn Kusamato do a tremendous amount of silent storytelling.
If you think of the first sequence of this film, we have a dead body, we have $100 bill with ink on it, and we have a strange tattoo of three circles.
We then see Nicole Kidman, who plays Erin Bell, the” Dirty Harry” of this particular film, forcing her way onto the crime scene. Then we’re back at work with Erin and we see that she has her own ink-stained $100 bill, and immediately we know something else is going on.
And finally, we see an image of three black dots on the back of Nicole Kidman’s neck, and we know that she’s tied to this crime in a way that we don’t understand.
So another lesson that we could draw from Destroyer is how as a storyteller you can use images to deepen the story in the quickest and most efficient way possible.
If your script is a mystery, like Destroyer, sometimes simply by creating images that even you don’t totally understand, you can start to create that feeling of that tangled web that you then have to unravel, and by doing it you can create a tremendous amount of excitement.
Digging further into that specificity of images idea, there’s a really wonderful scene in which Erin Bell, Nicole Kidman’s character, after being in a big fight and another bender, wakes up on the floor.
This is an image that we’ve seen a million times in movies—the drunk character waking up on the floor after a rough night.
Whenever you have one of those images that’s “normal” or that someone could describe as normal, you want to look at that image and you want to think, “Okay, let me just keep looking deeper until I find something that I didn’t expect.”
In this case that thing we didn’t expect is an ant walking across the floor.  And that ant walking across the floor takes this image that could be a cliché, and turns it into a specific image.
So we can talk about the power of visual storytelling and how to look deeper into your own images.
Those are all things that I wish I could do in this podcast and that I’ll get deeper into in future podcasts.
But the big thing that I want to talk about when it comes to Destroyer, is the use of flashbacks in a script.  
What Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi and Karyn Kusama are doing in Destroyer is really freaking hard.
We have two parallel storylines happening in different times, with the same actors playing characters young and old.