How to write a modern screenplay

I watched a film last week about a town in Swedish Lapland where a mine collapsed and caused lots of misery. I won’t tell you the name of the film in case, out of curiosity, you watch it yourselves and then later blame me for having alerted you to it. The plot was simple – a huge iron ore mine had left so many holes in the mountain that eventually it swallowed up the town.

The problem I had was what we might call reverse-identification: I found the characters so odious and stereotypical (in the modern sense) that no conflagration or disaster would have been quite enough to sate my appetite for vengeance. And so instead of yelling at the TV ‘Run, run, run for your lives!’ as the earth began to subside and holes appeared on the main street – swallowing up all the resilient lesbians, stoical handicapped people, radical young things, gentle and caring immigrants – I was instead cheering their downfall and dismayed at how many escaped.

It was useful, though, as a template for how to write a screenplay – or, rather, how to write a screenplay which will gain the approval of people who finance films these days: I have seen a countless number of movies in the past five years which follow the template exactly. I thought I might share this template with you. Follow it and you will not end up with a film you could possibly enjoy watching, but it will at least get made and might earn you some money.

Much of my advice concerns characterisation. First, then, the relationships between leading characters. All ‘straight’ relationships, and especially married ‘straight’ relationships, should be founded on lies, hypocrisy and an imbalance of power and be perpetually on the verge of breaking up in rancour.