Craft of Screenwriting: The Importance of World-Building in Earnest
“Scriptwriting is the toughest part of the whole racket…the least understood and the least noticed.”
Almost 75 years after his heydey, this Frank Capra quote still remains true. Despite requiring no understanding of science, technology, or any filmmaking equipment or jargon, screenwriting is something that is either not understood, or misunderstood by the layperson. While it’s a craft that can be learned by those willing to do it, screenwriting appears to be a bit like magic — things that you don’t understand or never think about in films suddenly seem extremely obvious when pointed out. The work of the screenwriter hides in plain sight; what you see on the screen appears to be something that just is rather than something that was created on a blank page by choosing one out of a trillion things to write.
One of the most essential aspects of screenwriting is world building. While this is applicable regardless of tone or genre, it is most clearly visible in fantasy, sci-fi, and horror. Creating a world might seem like a fun exercise purely dependent on creativity, but it is far harder than it sounds for one simple reason: once the rules of the world are created, the creator must also live by them.
Imagine if you were invited to a game night where someone created their own parlour game. They told you the rules of play and you started playing in earnest. When you got deeply invested and started enjoying yourself, the game got stuck somewhere and to fix that, they just abandoned one of the rules and said “it’s my game, I can do whatever I want” or “the whole thing is make-believe anyway, how does one more thing matter?” Well, it matters because you just can’t change the rules halfway. They apply all the way till the end even if it doesn’t suit the creator.
Perhaps the best example to illustrate the importance of world building from recent times is Game of Thrones. The writers of the show inherited the world of Westeros and Essos from George RR Martin, which made the job relatively easy for the first five seasons. Distances between places were established and the story was fleshed out, so there was no reason not to follow the rules. But when the writers ran out of source material, these rules became inconvenient because they were a hindrance to moving the plot forward. Which is why starting from the end of season five, virtually every major character had considerable plot armour almost till the end, even though this went against the essence of the world. Even vast distances, which used to take entire seasons for characters to cover, suddenly became traversable twice in one episode.
A layperson argument often heard to defend these was that it’s bizarre to point out such errors in a medieval fantasy show with dragons and magic. But this misses the point of world-building rules. The show established the existence of magic, dragons, the undead etc. very early on. Within its rules, these are acceptable. An example to highlight the difference between suspension of disbelief and internal logic is the appearance of a Starbucks coffee cup in an episode in season eight. This became the subject of widespread mockery and criticism because it was an anachronism and did not belong in the world of Game of Thrones. World building works like that; it doesn’t adhere to rules and logic from the real world but to rules established within the world of the story. Game of Thrones is free to show us dragons and magic, but what it cannot suddenly do is show time travel or aliens because while these are not anachronisms from the real world, they’ve never been established in the world of the show.
World building or “rules of play”, so to speak, also matter in thrillers, especially ones that rely on the unreliable narrator plot device. This was done very well in Fight Club, in which everything you see on screen happens from the narrator’s point of view with his involvement. When the twist is revealed, everything makes sense because there’s nothing you have been shown that is not from the narrator’s perspective, making the whole story believable as ‘unreliable’. The narrator being unreliable is also an integral element of the plot, which makes the screenplay strong.
In contrast is Andhadhun, a script that tries to use the unreliable narrator device, but only as an afterthought. It does not follow the basic principle of using this device, which is that everything the audience sees has to be something the narrator is involved in or has witnessed. Andhadhun plays out like a story narrated by the protagonist, Akash (Ayushmann Khurrana), to Sophie (Radhika Apte) and yet contains incidents that Akash did not witness or know about.
At the very end, when Akash is supposed to be blind according to the story he just told, he is shown to see a can lying in front of him and knock it aside. The film’s director and writers have claimed that this is supposed to be an open ending, but this defies narrative logic because in the entire film, Akash is never conning the audience, but only other characters. Effectively, the unreliable narrator device isn’t an integral plot element, but simply a feeble attempt to trick the audience. It also does not adhere to the internal logic of the film or the “rules of play”.
Understanding world building in cinema requires only one thing from the viewer: to ask whether the rules were established early enough and then followed by the writers. The first act of the film generally provides the viewer with the “rules of play”. In the case of a series, it is ideally the pilot or the first few episodes that tell you enough about the world to make whatever is to come believable and consistent.
A screenplay is like a game. Even the smallest breach of rules can destroy it.. and ruin your viewing experience.
