Motivate Audiences With Motivation

Posted on July 14, 2008 in General Screenwriting | No Comments

It’s an age-old question: What makes a movie a domestic box-office draw?

…There is one common denominator in movies that draw crowds and earn big bucks domestically: Motivated characters. Many of the characters have strong motivation, even some who appear in only one scene. The characters in Saw have a strong motivation to escape, or identify and capture the killer. They have different motivations in their daily lives that led Jigsaw to select them as victims. Pulp Fiction is full of characters with their own motivations. Characters visit the house in The Grudge for a variety of reasons: to have an affair, to care for an elderly woman, to burn it down. The Mummy is full of motivated characters: a brother who wants to work very little to make very much; a hero who wants to keep his word to take a woman to Hamunaptra; desert people who want to keep the mummy from being discovered; a mummy who wants to revive his true love; a woman who yearns to be recognized for her scholarly knowledge. These characters seek their motivations simultaneously or, rather, the scripts stack their motivations vertically. Million Dollar Baby—which did well at the box-office—is also full of motivated characters, including a skinny, little boxer wannabe and a poor-excuse-of-a-mother who wants to cash in on her daughter’s hard-won success. Crash did very well at the box-office and is rooted in motivated characters.

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