Great Stories Use This Key Component Early And Often by Peter Russell at Story Expo
Great Stories Use This Key Component Early And Often by Peter Russell at Story Expo
Film Courage: Flawed character versus a train wreck or is that what we want to see?
Peter Russell: Yeah, we want to see everybody train wreck. You want to see everybody in a room grappling with their flaws. I mean in a story like Madmen everybody had a deep core wound. Peggy’s core wound is that she’s a woman in a man’s world but she thinks like a man. She was damaged deeply.
Joan has deep core wound I’m only a sex object, right? And by the way, these didn’t heal right? At the end of the show Joan is still dealing with the fact that she essentially whored herself out with this car executive and is not taken seriously by men, yes? They never heal but it is the core wounds that when they bump up against each other in the story that makes you wanna watch them and audiences never need to know this. But if you ask yourself why a character is interesting you’re looking at it’s almost always because of that. How are they bleeding, right? The other thing done did because he was unlovable was he made up an entire story about who he was he took someone else’s identity, yeah? He took the identity of a guy who was killed in Korea. Again I’m not lovable. I couldn’t be loved for me. I gotta be somebody else. So it’s always there in a great story. There’s never a story that it’s not.
Film Courage: Why do we love confessions?
Peter: Well….let me ask you.. what’s your deepest most personal, embarrassing secret?
