breaking down babel
My motivation for watching any movie is derived from a desire to be entertained, and in some cases educated. I'm not intelligent enough to analyze films for hidden meaning, social implications, or representations of type that may or may not have been intended by the writer. I am intrigued by those who can.
And so it will be with this analysis: simply a novice screenwriter breaking down the screenplay for the sole purpose of learning its structure and pacing.
There are indeed four stories and in a nutshell they are:
1. Young Moroccan brothers, Yussef and Ahmed, are given a rifle by their father in order to kill the jackals that hunt their goat herd. The boys, for fun and wanting to test the rifle, shoot at things in the distance.
2. Richard and Susan are on a bus tour of Northern Africa. As the bus travels along a desert road, the brothers, high above, take aim on the bus (simply to see if the gun will shoot that far) and Susan, sitting by the window, is hit.
3. Amelia, Richard and Susan's nanny, is back home in L.A. looking after their children while they are on vacation. The nanny, expecting to be at her son's wedding, is told about the accident by Richard's sister-in-law whom he had already contacted to arrange for someone else to look after the children on that day. Unfortunately, no-one could be found, so Amelia takes the children to her son's wedding across the border in Mexico.
And,
4. We get a glimpse into a day in the life of sixteen year old Japanese schoolgirl, Cheiko. She is deaf and overtly flirtatious. We follow Cheiko through the afternoon and evening, at which time we are introduced to Kenji, a Tokyo detective who wishes to ask Cheiko's father about a rifle that belonged to him at one time and is now a key element in an international incident.
Four stories, each with a common thread tying one to the other.
Of interest were the sequences. The inclusion of the page numbers only serves as a guide and really offers nothing other than it appears that each scene sequence generally runs between 4-7 pages:
And, until sequence 16 (Act3 or thereabout), followed a repeating pattern of:
I then looked at each of the stories individually:
Yussef and Ahmed
Amelia
Richard and Susan
Cheiko
It's obvious that each one of these stands as a complete story on it's own and could easily be four short films by themselves. Which got me wondering if Arriaga did in fact write each one first then cut them together. It turns out, in an interview from The Writers Guild Foundation's series Writers On Writing: Anatomy Of A Script, he provides an answer.
Creative Screenwriting Magazine's Senior Editor, Jeff Goldsmith, has another great full length interview with Guillermo Arriaga after a screening of Babel.
The lesson here may not have any value to anyone else. Perhaps, in time, my coverage may become more substantive and in-depth, but for now this is how I see it. I found the exercise worthwhile and beneficial, and one which I will definitely repeat it as I move forward.
Babel is a particularly good movie; a direct consequence of a particularly good script. I could only hope to write a screenplay as elegantly simple and intelligent.
And so it will be with this analysis: simply a novice screenwriter breaking down the screenplay for the sole purpose of learning its structure and pacing.
There are indeed four stories and in a nutshell they are:
1. Young Moroccan brothers, Yussef and Ahmed, are given a rifle by their father in order to kill the jackals that hunt their goat herd. The boys, for fun and wanting to test the rifle, shoot at things in the distance.
2. Richard and Susan are on a bus tour of Northern Africa. As the bus travels along a desert road, the brothers, high above, take aim on the bus (simply to see if the gun will shoot that far) and Susan, sitting by the window, is hit.
3. Amelia, Richard and Susan's nanny, is back home in L.A. looking after their children while they are on vacation. The nanny, expecting to be at her son's wedding, is told about the accident by Richard's sister-in-law whom he had already contacted to arrange for someone else to look after the children on that day. Unfortunately, no-one could be found, so Amelia takes the children to her son's wedding across the border in Mexico.
And,
4. We get a glimpse into a day in the life of sixteen year old Japanese schoolgirl, Cheiko. She is deaf and overtly flirtatious. We follow Cheiko through the afternoon and evening, at which time we are introduced to Kenji, a Tokyo detective who wishes to ask Cheiko's father about a rifle that belonged to him at one time and is now a key element in an international incident.
Four stories, each with a common thread tying one to the other.
Of interest were the sequences. The inclusion of the page numbers only serves as a guide and really offers nothing other than it appears that each scene sequence generally runs between 4-7 pages:
And, until sequence 16 (Act3 or thereabout), followed a repeating pattern of:
I then looked at each of the stories individually:
Yussef and Ahmed
Amelia
Richard and Susan
Cheiko
It's obvious that each one of these stands as a complete story on it's own and could easily be four short films by themselves. Which got me wondering if Arriaga did in fact write each one first then cut them together. It turns out, in an interview from The Writers Guild Foundation's series Writers On Writing: Anatomy Of A Script, he provides an answer.
Creative Screenwriting Magazine's Senior Editor, Jeff Goldsmith, has another great full length interview with Guillermo Arriaga after a screening of Babel.
The lesson here may not have any value to anyone else. Perhaps, in time, my coverage may become more substantive and in-depth, but for now this is how I see it. I found the exercise worthwhile and beneficial, and one which I will definitely repeat it as I move forward.
Babel is a particularly good movie; a direct consequence of a particularly good script. I could only hope to write a screenplay as elegantly simple and intelligent.
Labels: babel, guillermo arriaga, script analysis
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