What is the winning formula of a movie? Well, if the people behind the movies knew the answer, there will be no dearth of box office hits. The fact of the matter is, today 9 out of 10 movies fail at the box office. Even for those movies that get a decent opening, eventually the audience stay away when the word is spread out there as to how the movie sucked big time.
While we are looking for an answer to what clicks with the audience, I think we know answers to some of the other questions on the nature of the box office. Can a movie written off by critics be a success at the box office? The answer is an 'Yes'. Can a movie that fared better with critics be a failure at the box office and the answer is again a resounding 'Yes'.
Well to begin with, it is only reasonable to think that a good movie requires a great plot or story line, a good screen play, good dialogues, great acting (the more eye candy the actors, the better), good visuals, great sounds and to top it all off with great direction. Does the list end here? What about some hype? That is some clever marketing. Would that help? Indeed it does.
The stupendous success of Ghajini, a hindi movie is largely attributed to some clever marketing hype by none other than its lead actorAamir Khan. The promo highlighted the film's physicality and Khan's new look. More than 1500 people who work at various multiplexes around India received the Ghajini Hair cut. The first thing that people noticed while they entered the movieplex was a statue of Aamir Khan with his fab abs and greetings from theatre staff sporting the Ghajini look. Total marketing cost 7.5 crore. Global gross box office take: Rs 278 crore. Not bad for a movie made at a budget of 45 crore!
Well, Ghajini did well not due to marketing alone. It indeed had a good script albeit inspired by a hollywood flick. A movie without substance can not be saved by marketing alone. A good dose of all the above mentioned ingredients will be required to save it from sinking.
It goes without saying that script is the backbone of any great movie.
Best films are lasting works of art. They contain moments of brilliance, elegance and emotional truth that make us want to return to them time and time again. Despite the continuation of the outrageous convention that the director is the sole-author of a film, a director does not make a great film artistic by themselves. They do it because they are working with a beautiful, artistic script.
It was Alan Ball, the writer of American Beauty (1999), not Sam Mendes the director, who filled the film with the symbolism of red roses and made an otherwise ordinary family melodrama evolve into something extraordinary and beautiful.
Why is it that we return to our favorite films time and time again despite knowing the ending of the story; what happens to the characters and all the carefully plotted surprises? Clearly, the emotional satisfaction gained from watching certain films more than once is more important than the intellectual satisfaction of ‘knowing' what happens.
Basic emotional satisfaction is often determined by the genre in which the film has been written. For example, an emotionally satisfying horror film is achieved when the audience is genuinely scared, or a romantic comedy is emotionally satisfying when the comic interactions of the lead characters result in a romantically uplifting conclusion.
The best films make your heart race with excitement and your heart swell with pride. You want to cheer them on. Then there are the classic comedies which make you laugh every time you watch them even though you know the punch lines.
The ultimate expression of emotional interaction is when the audience cries. There can be no coincidence that it is only the great films that make us reach for the tissue box. I bet everyone who has ever watched E.T. had a tear in their eye when E.T. appears to die (and the plant wilts) and then comes back to life (and the plant recovers). We are emotionally moved by a story about a small, brown, ugly alien being not because we can relate to an alien, but because the alien being is effectively a lost child in a strange world and we all know how that feels.
We often go to films hoping that the characters will be so good that they will live with us for the rest of our lives, acting as friends, mentors, surrogate lovers or parents. We carry them around in our hearts, wishing we were them, turning to them when we feel vulnerable and in need of inspiration.
Though the morality and social conventions of cinema vary from country to country, it is surprising to see how similar the great protagonists are.
Not every protagonist is a person we would want to be. There are numerous examples of anti-heroes or heroes so flawed we actively enjoy not being them.
Then there are those great films in which the lead protagonist is overshadowed by a supporting character. One the best example is Star Wars in which it is clear from the moment we meet him in the bar that for many the best character is Han Solo. He's cool, devious and charming; he has the best spaceship ever built, a best friend who will always stick up for him, and he ends up with fame, fortune and the love of the Princess. There isn't a man alive who doesn't dream of that.
For every effective protagonist there is an equally effective, sometimes superior, antagonist. The characters like Don Vito Carleone in The Godfather make us wish we were like them, enjoying the hedonistic lives they lead and taking the rewards from life without any work.
Great films are filled with lines that we remember and use, sometimes in private looking at the mirror. Of course, memorable lines, songs and moments in film scripts do not come in the first or even fifteenth draft. They take months of hard graft, criticism and rewriting. But the mark of a great film script is as much about the work the writer has put in it as it is the skill of the people who have created a film from the script. There was never a great film made by the writer rushing, being lazy, avoiding changes and making-do.
In the hands of the best scriptwriters, the setting takes on a life of its own with a personality that complements that of the human characters. When this happens it becomes irrelevant where the setting actually is for it has taken on an emotional, thematic quality that will allow it to be translated into any language. This was why in The Full Monty the setting of Sheffield – depicted as a run-down, working-class town filled with unemployed men – could be recognized as a symbol for every such town in the world.
The writers behind the best children's movies understand this as they often animate the setting, giving it a voice and a point of view to heighten the emotions for the younger audience.
Behind every great story there stands great structure. Structure is one of those serious craft issues which is argued over incessantly by scriptwriters, teachers and commentators. Without wishing to embark on a debate about the subject, I would point out that every great film script I have looked at possesses the same basic, highly effective structural patterns. They are essentially a means of expressing a journey that a character undergoes in pursuit of whatever it is they want: love, fame, to kill the monster, etc.
A great film is like Life itself: it possesses a sense of its characters being born new, young and naive, and then over the course of the ‘life' of the film, the characters grow up, face decisions and responsibilities, learn hard lessons and then confront death. Some defeat it for a temporary period, others become a victim but not before they save other people. This is why with the great films we derive a sense of a circle being completed, of the journey mirroring life in a satisfying manner.
Happy ending or the ‘right’ ending? There is a reason most films end happily: people want to walk away from a cinematic experience feeling better about themselves, the world and their future. Reality is hard and depressing enough as it is, so why make hard and depressing films? Yet clearly not every film has a happy ending.
This is because the best film script has the ending which is appropriate for that story, which best encapsulates the themes, drama, characters and emotions.
So there you go.
Rajesh Kumar
