Frank Cottrell Boyce: "How to write a movie"

H/T to @San_MonkeyGod from a Tweet for recommending this Guardian piece: Frank Cottrell Boyce: "How to write a movie":

A while back, I was on Radio 4's Film Programme the same day as Simon Pegg. We were asked what we thought of screenwriting manuals. I dismissed them as get-rich-quick compendiums of cliche. Pegg said he thought they were really useful. Our films opened that weekend. His vacuumed up money. Mine tanked. It may well be, I thought, that I've been missing something.

I decided to watch all my favourite movies again, notebook in hand, to figure out what made them work. Here are some of my observations. This is not a description of how I write. It's more how I wish I'd written. A map of the rocks on which I perished.

If you're not familiar with Boyce, here is a partial list of his movie credits: Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), Hilary and Jackie (1998), Millions (2004), and Grow Your Own (2007). I'd have to say Millions would be my particular favorite, a little gem of a story.

In The Guardian article, Boyce 12 tips (for some reason, #5 is missing):

1. Write a play instead
2. Do the title first
3. Read it to people
4. Forget the three-act structure
6. Don't write excuse notes
7. Avoid the German funk trap
8. Do a favourite bit
9. Cast it in your head
10. Learn to love rewrites
11. Don't wait for inspiration
12. Celebrate your invisibility
13. Read, read, read, read, read

Let's zero in on "Forget the three-act structure":

All the manuals insist on a three-act structure. I think this is a useless model. It's static. All it really means is that your screenplay should have a beginning, middle and end. When you're shaping things, it's more useful to think about suspense. Suspense is the hidden energy that holds a story together. It connects two points and sends a charge between them. But it doesn't have to be all action. Emotions create their own suspense. In American Splendor, the film about comic-book creator Harvey Pekar, you hope till it hurts that his relationship will work out. Secrets are good at generating tension, too. In A Knight's Tale, you fret all the way through that someone will discover that William is not really Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein.

While I agree with Boyce's point about the value of a writer being aware of and thinking about suspense, I would humbly suggest that when he says three-act structure is a "useless model," it's more helpful to limit the perimeters of that comment to himself and any other professional writer who doesn't opt to use that particular narrative paradigm. Two reasons:

(1) Writers who are just learning how to write screenplays will almost always benefit from thinking about stories from a structural point of view. One of the main values of three-act structure as a learning tool is the fact, as Boyce points out, "that your screenplay should have a beginning, middle and end." That is an easy concept to grasp and a good starting point for engaging the idea of screenplay structure for the first time.

(2) Most iterations of three-act structure that I've studied go beyond merely looking at a screenplay as "beginning, middle, and end." Typically there are certain things that go on in each act including:

Act One: character introductions, plot-set up, much of the story's exposition, themes established, key plot points that twist the story out of the Protagonist's ordinary world

Act Two: plunge into a new world, trials and tribulations, transition from deconstruction to reconstruction, major plot points leading to a significant challenge

Act Three: on the offensive, putting all knowledge (both emotional and intellectual) together, some sort of final struggle, and resolution

Moreover three-act structure might seem to be "static" if it were understood to be rules, but why not look at it as an externalized version of what we - as humans - know intuitively?

Between all the stories to which we've been exposed (an article I saw some time ago suggested that by the time the average person is a freshman in college, they will have read, seen, or heard 10,000 stories) or what we 'know' through the collective unconscious, each of us has an intuitive sense of story. As far as I know, three-act structure is as effective in describing that intuitive sensibility as any other theory.

Besides it's only static if we as writers allow it to restrict our creativity. Instead why not look at it this way: Within the context of the broad perimeters of three-act structure, we are free to write anything we want in any way we want.

Thoughts?