The importance of sadism in writing a great screenplay

How do you tell a great story? According to Craig Mazin, you have to be a sadist.

‘As a writer, you are not the New Testament God who turns water into wine,’ Mazin chuckles on his long-running podcast Scriptnotes. ‘You are the Old Testament God who tortures Job because, I don’t know, it seems like fun.’ Mazin wrote HBO’s horrifying, incandescent miniseries Chernobyl, and so knows of what he speaks. In the episode of this podcast titled ‘How to Write a Movie’, he describes how screenwriters build plot out of suffering.

He outlines a scenario, making the stakes higher each time. Suppose our main character is a single father desperate to protect his child. Not good enough. Okay, now suppose he is a single father who witnessed his entire family being murdered, leaving him only one child. Better — but how about this: a man’s entire family are murdered before his eyes, leaving him only one child, and the child is disabled and vulnerable. Then the man loses his child.

It sounds like pure sadism. In fact, it’s the opening ten minutes of Finding Nemo.

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There is a particular kind of woolly shoptalk specific to people who write screenplays. They speak about ‘stakes’, ‘inciting incidents’ and ‘redemptive arcs’ in a way that makes them sound like a cross between forklift operators and members of an extremely specialised cult. But incitements to child murder aside, Scriptnotes is pleasantly normal: a series of technical but undogmatic conversations about screenwriting and storytelling, conducted by people who know what they’re talking about but aren’t trying to sell you a book.

Shopping around their extensive back catalogue, I found lots that film buffs will enjoy. There are high-profile guests (Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig) and eloquent discussions of genres (political movies, buddy movies).