Tag: Movement

Breaking the Jump, Breaking the Story: Parkour and Screenwriting

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I recently watched a fun little video about gymnasts and parkour experts sharing the basics of their disciplines with one another. I absolutely love cross-pollination between disciplines, and because I have some (minimal) experience in both parkour and gymnastics, this was especially fun – when I was teaching at Synetic I would incorporate elements of both disciplines in training for combat and stunts, and was always fascinated to see who would take to the different forms, and in what way.

But the big thing both disciplines teach, in different ways, is an approach to fear. A traceur (parkour practitioner) must always approach a new jump or a new move, a gymnast must approach a new combination or tricky movement. Both, if they really mess up, can end up seriously injured.

In parkour, landing a tricky jump for the first time is called “breaking the jump.” Overcoming the fear of approaching that jump is a first step – then you can repeat the jump, or others like it, and perfect it, incorporate it into the flow of your movements.

This is interesting to a filmmaker because writing the first draft of a screenplay is often called “breaking the story.” Yes this term can mean a couple different things, but in this context I’ll keep it to the act of blasting through a first draft, often without editing along the way.

Having done both of these things, I can say the sensation at the end is somewhat the same. After you break a jump for the first time, often the first thing you want to do is go at it again, preserve the adrenaline and bravery you’ve just built up and get the jump deeper into your nervous system. Screenwriting can be much the same – as soon as I finish a draft, I’m eager to get feedback and start cracking on the next pass.

But deeper than this, there’s a feeling of relief as well. A story that’s gnawing at my insides is deeply uncomfortable. Getting a first draft out is a kind of a release. I end up feeling un-knotted just by getting it out on the page. A jump that has always bothered you, intimidated you, is still waiting for you to crack it, can be a little source of madness – you HAVE to break it.

It’s funny, but this discomfort is probably a good sign. It means you have something spring loaded with enough tension that if you lean on it it’ll start becoming something. A jump. A story. A set of characters.

This discomfort is something I listen for now, I try to become aware of in my day to day, because discomfort can signify an opportunity.

How Many Moves Does an Actor Have?

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There’s a million things that a character can want, in a writing sense, or a psychological sense.

But much of the work of directing or writing or acting isn’t actually working on the subconscious wants. Once you’ve got those worked out (or, in a director’s case, a script that presumably has those built in), you’ve got to physically realize the scene itself.

Then I think there’s a limited number of things in terms of a physical want. Maybe this doesn’t work for every scene, but I think it might be a useful lens through which to see every scene.

Let’s keep the traditional maxim – there’s only two directions in a scene: toward and away. (I’ve had the privilege to learn this a few times over from my professor and early mentor at USC, Barnet Kellman, who teaches a masterful class on working with actors, rehearsing, and blocking – this next bit is something of an expansion on things I’ve learned from him).

The physics of the wants then probably break down into these:

A thing you want to hold or get rid of

A place you want to get to or escape from

A person you want to be close to or far from

Maybe we could define it as simply as this: the physical want of any given moment in a scene may be defined as the person, place or thing a character wants to move towards or away from. (Maybe there’s an action of “maintain the current distance” as well)

I had another two basic actions that I initially thought might count as fundamental on this level:

A thing or person you want to destroy

A thing or person you want to create, heal, or repair

And I thought that they may count as fundamental. But now I don’t think so. It’s hard to call the physics of repairing a car, wielding a hammer, or fixing a computer a basic action – they’re typically obstacles overcome in service of the initial three. R2-D2 messes with the computer in order to open the door so the characters can move away from the soldiers and towards the ship.

But there are scenes in which the primary action of the character is somehow poured into making something — scenes of Michaelangelo painting a masterpiece or Hunter S. Thompson furiously writing…but are these scenes? Or do scenes just involve them somehow, and the primary drama of the scene still boils down to that simple dance of towards and away? A painting scene is hard to interpret as drama. But if Michaelangelo is painting the Sistine Chapel, and drops his paintbrush to the floor far below, and has to climb down a rickety ladder to get there, a ladder that, unbeknownst to him, is slipping against the floor, maybe that’s physical drama.

Is there more to human drama than this? Sure, on an abstract, psychological, dialogue level. But when you turn the sound off on the tv, the fundamentals of the scene still play out in a grammar that boils down to something like this.

How to Make Great Things Fast

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Across all the professions I’ve happened to work in, I’ve realized there’s a common phrase all the seasoned professionals have said to me at one time or another.

“Don’t rush.”

Acting, directing, fight choreography, personal training, fundraising, construction, writing…in all of these, at one time or another, one or more old pros have said this to me. “Don’t rush.”

At the same time, across all the jobs I’ve held, I’ve always had times where we had to deliver fast. In fact, a demand for speed is absolutely the norm.

So what gives? Why do all the people who know their stuff say “don’t rush” but at the same time we are constantly demanding speed out of our work?

First of all, yes, there are times when the boss is demanding impossible speed, when the market wants something before it’s ready, when I myself am demanding too much out of my own capacity to deliver. Sometimes somebody has to be told things will have to slow down or else things will fall apart.

But the boss isn’t always wrong. And sometimes great things get done quickly.

So there must be a difference between speed and rushing.

Rushing is blind – it’s focusing on the finish line, it’s cutting corners. It’s heedless – let’s just get something to show that we’ve done something. I’m going to write 5 pages today so I can tell myself I wrote 5 pages. For me, it often comes from a place of needing to validate my identity as an artist, a writer, a mature person, what have you.

Speed is different. Speed requires focus, concentrated energy drilling down on the immediate problem. You can’t rush a screenplay, but a professional knows how to focus in and work on THIS scene, THIS character moment, THIS line, this action beat. And then how to step back and assess it QUICKLY against the mechanisms of the whole story, then dive back into the immediate.

In weightlifting, I’ve encountered a phrase that I think is a key concept, perhaps even worthy of being called a mental model. I first encountered it specifically in Olympic lifting, which is a VERY technical art form, and can result in a lot of bodily pain if done wrong, repeatedly. The phrase is this:

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

It doesn’t mean move in slow motion. It means give every overlapping portion of the movement its due – there’s a setup, an initial pull off the ground, a movement of the hips, a pulling from the shoulders, almost pulling yourself DOWN under the bar as it moves up over your head, and a solidifying of the body as you land beneath the bar.

It’s a lot different from “throw this bar over your head 20 times.”

So if you’ve trained each movement, separately, and also how to move from one to the next, a more complete movement emerges. A smooth one.

But this also refers to taking action. When you slow down your mind, you focus on the moment, and then the next moment can follow smoothly, and the next, and the next, and because you’ve smoothed out the motions, the bar travels upwards at unbelievable speeds. Instead of focusing on several movements, you’ve re-integrated them into a single smooth motion.

You can muscle things out, or you can remove the friction. One beats you up. The other doesn’t, and leaves you ready for the NEXT movement.

So when the old timers have said to me “don’t rush” they didn’t necessarily mean “don’t ever move fast.” Rushing, to me, means I’m prioritizing muscle over removing friction.

You can’t rush writing. You can’t rush acting. You can’t rush directing. You can’t rush producing. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t go fast. The key components, then, are knowledge and focus. KNOWING what to focus on, one moment at a time. Knowing HOW to slow down in order to speed up.

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

(To be clear – I think this quote originates the Navy SEALS, referring to how to train for operations, and also execute them. I may have gotten it from Jocko Willink, Tim Ferriss, or Dan John – I honestly don’t remember)