Spider Man Homecoming Part 2 – Creating Unforgettable Characters & The Game of Screenplay Structure

In last week’s podcast we talked about writing a great antagonist by letting go of our need to see them as the bad-guy, who “antagonizes” the main character, and instead stepping into our antagonists as real human beings.

Because every character in your script believes that they are the hero of the story (just like every human being sees themselves as the hero of their story), to write a great character of any kind– a character that actually lives and breathes–we need to see world through their eyes. And this begins by connecting to what our characters want.

And what’s exciting is that when we start to think about our scripts in this way, we not only find unforgettable characters, we also start to organically discover the exact structure we need to tell our stories.

In Spider-Man, Homecoming, what makes the character of the Vulture, Adrian Toomes (played by Michael Keaton) so compelling is that everything he does grows directly out of his simple human desire to provide for his family.

And you can see, if you look at the structure of Spider-Man: Homecoming, that this isn’t just the formula for creating a great bad guy, it is actually a way of creating an entire cast of unforgettable characters, and shaping the journeys they all go on in the script.

Because every single one of these characters is really just a person with a really strong want and a really strong obstacle that forces them to reveal their really strong “how”—the way that they pursue the things that they want differently from everybody else...