In North By Northwest, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most celebrated films, the director revisited one of his favourite motifs — the innocent man on the run. Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive, who is mistaken for enigmatic spy George Kaplan. …

In Robert Altman’s 1992 Hollywood satire The Player, Tim Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a Hollywood studio executive receiving death threats from a bitter screenwriter. After narrowing the list of suspects down, Griffin meets with the culprit (Vincent D’Onofrio). After some initial diplomacy, things turn violent and Griffin ends up killing…

Controlling Idea vs Counter-Idea — In Story, Robert McKee argues that: Progressions build by moving dynamically between the positive and negative charges of the values at stake in the story…You have to build a bridge of story from the opening to the ending, a progression of events that spans from Premise to Controlling Idea. These…

The Debate Over The Dominant Storytelling Paradigms — In his seminal screenwriting guide Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, Syd Field brought three-act structure to global recognition and practice. Field’s outline was simple. …

Thoughts on the greatest British film ever made — The Third Man is a detective story without a detective. Often hailed as one of the best British film ever made, Graham Greene’s story weaves two archetypal plots into its narrative. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is the Candide ‘innocent abroad’ who embarks on an Orpheus-like journey to discover the truth…

Venturing Into The Woods with John Yorke — In his bestselling guide for screenwriting, Into The Woods, story expert John Yorke advocates that “Change is the bedrock of life and, consequently, the bedrock of narrative”. For the screenwriter, this process of change can be mapped across a five-act structure.

Summing Up The Seven Basic Plots: Part Three — “In truth, there’s only one story. In essence we have told one another the same tale, one way or another, since the dawn of humanity…All stories take the form of a Quest”. (Robert McKee, Story, 1999) “No type of story is more instantly recognisable to us than a Quest” writes…

Summing Up The Seven Basic Plots: Part Two — Cinderella. That’s probably a word that springs to mind when you hear “Rags to Riches”, the second archetypal story pattern explored by Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots. In the third chapter to his epic volume, Booker agrees and cites plenty of other examples. The Ugly Duckling. Pygmalion. Dick…