Character
Every episode tagged Character, newest first.
2026
"First they cast Denzel Washington... and they dress him in like a tank top and suspenders... I'm in, I'm sold, whatever he wants."
— Mel Killingsworth | DZ-124: Making the Despicable Compelling
DZ-126: Secrets and Clues
How can Secrets and Clues motivate characters?
AI✦Stu, Chas, and Mel break down how Benoit Blanc is pulled through the story by his need to solve the case while Father Judd is pushed through against his will to prove innocence–two distinct motivation engines for dual protagonists.✦
Listen if you want to understand how hidden information drives character motivation and plot structure!
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“Getting information puts your character in danger. And danger rewards your character with information." — One of three ideas we steal from game design in this episode. In this two part series, we talk about how secrets, clues and hidden information motivate characters and may (or may not) help you plot from a character perspective. Part One (this episode) looks at WAKE UP DEAD MAN; while Part Two looks at SIDE EFFECTS, and the pilot episode of SHRINKING… →
Films:
Wake Up Dead Man (2025)
DZ-125: Oscars One-shot - BLUE MOON
What craft tools make a low-budget, contained, period drama riveting?
AI✦Mel and Chas examine how Larry’s motivations remain deliberately ambiguous–whether he’s genuinely trying to reconcile with Rogers or unconsciously sabotaging himself, whether the party is born of connection or performance–and how this moral complexity keeps him from being a simple tragic figure.✦
Listen if you want to understand how narrative POV, screenplay format, and dialogue craft can elevate a contained biopic into an Oscar-nominated film
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BLUE MOON is a talky, period-drama that film about an obscure songer-writer in the 1940s. Yet, it attracted world-class talent AND Academy Award nominations, including for it’s script. Join Chas & Mel as they explore how narrative POV, interweaving relationships, hooky dialogue, and even the screenplay format itself make the script for BLUE MOON so great… →
Films:
Blue Moon (2026)
DZ-124: Making the Despicable Compelling
How does Film Noir show us terrible people doing terrible things without endorsing it?
AI✦The episode isolates voiceover and given circumstances as tools that contextualize why characters make incredibly stupid or morally grey choices for understandable reasons.✦
Listen if you need audiences to root for characters who do terrible things
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Mel and Chas continue to explore what Noir (the genre) can teach writers of all other genres. In particular:… →
Films:
Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
, Woman of the Hour (2024)
, Double Indemnity (1944)
, The Long Goodbye (1973)
2025
"Subtext is whatever text is going on beneath the text, so what we mean by text? We're talking about film and TV, what are the characters literally doing and saying, and is there any other meaning underneath that, beyond the literal, beyond what they're doing and saying?"
— Chas Fisher | DZ-120: Subtext is Overrated!
DZ-123: Flawed Characters in Noir
What can Film Noir teach us about character arcs and audience engagement?
AI✦Double Indemnity makes you stressed wanting the murderers to get away with murder, and Chas notes the film accomplishes this ‘without ever endorsing this is good this is right.’✦
Listen if you want to write morally compromised characters without endorsing their choices.
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In this two part series, Mel and Chas use Noir (the genre) as a lens to interrogate flawed characters. How can characters doing reprehensible things still engage audiences? How can you ensure representation isn’t endorsement? And whether these characters undergo transformative arcs, or simply reveal their true natures… →
DZ-122: Escalating Antagonism Across Genres
How can you apply horror ideas to action and comedy?
AI✦Chas identifies how Greg’s insecurity drives his bad decisions in MEET THE PARENTS, and Stu traces Terry’s motivation in REBEL RIDGE from saving his cousin to confronting systemic corruption–showing how TOMBS clarifies what characters actually want at each stage.✦
Listen to learn how thinking of your hero as the horror (for your villains) makes your script dynamic.
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In this episode Chas, Stu and guest Kim Ho continue their exploration into the power(s) of antagonism and how focusing on them can develop story… →
DZ-121: Escalating Antagonism in SINNERS
How do the antagonistic forces in your story escalate distinctly from the protagonists’ journey?
AI✦The episode frames Survive, Solve, Save as three distinct stakes that protagonists choose based on their position toward the antagonistic threat, moving from internal mystery to externalized action.✦
Listen if you want to stregthen your story by focusing on the antagonistic forces in your script
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We often struggle to develop the middle stages of a story. Could this be because we focus on our protagonists’ journeys and plot structure more than on how the antagonistic powers are awakened, wronged, discovered, gathering strength and revealing themselves… →
Films:
Sinners (2025)
DZ-120: Subtext is Overrated!
How do character goals, tactics, and fears create subtext automatically?
AI✦Chas, Stu, and Tom dissect how character goals and the tactics characters deploy to achieve them–what they want and how they’re trying to get it–create the scaffolding for everything else in a scene.✦
Listen if you're struggling to write subtext without it feeling forced
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DZ-119: Final Character Choices & Great Endings
How do you dramatise a protagonist's internal journey through their final decision?
AI✦Stu and Chas isolate the final choice as the mechanism through which a protagonist’s internal journey becomes visible, examining how characters are presented with options, make their selection, and face consequences.✦
Listen if you want to understand how to better dramatise a character's internal journey
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In this episode, Stu and Chas focus solely on the final choices made by protagonists and how that reflects their character journey and successfully, or not, dramatises the internal… →
Films:
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
, Finding Nemo (2003)
, Michael Clayton (2007)
, Promising Young Woman (2020)
, Talk to Me (2022)
DZ-117: Pulling Off Tonal Shifts
How can we teach our audience new storytelling rules in the middle of our story?
AI✦Mel notes that Swiss Army Man’s tonal shift happens precisely when the script stops filtering everything through Hank’s unreliable point of view and introduces Sarah as a separate consciousness.✦
Listen if you want to write tonal pivots that land on the page without a director's toolkit.
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Following on from our episodes on establishing tone through action lines and through character, this is what we have been building up to: how to pull off a tonal switch… that does NOT throw the audience out of the film. And, in particular, how to pull that off on the page when writers don’t have framing, lighting, music, editing, etc. at our disposal… →
2024
"In High Fidelity, it's Rob kind of trying to understand her story. And so she's kind of telling the story as a bit of a process. She is thinking with her mouth open, right? It's kind of like how she would do it to a therapist, I guess."
— Stu Willis | DZ-112: Breaking the 4th wall
DZ-114: Climaxes in Challengers
How does ending your story on the climax affect audience experience?
AI✦The discussion hinges on moments where what’s on the page doesn’t match what’s on screen, creating a gap between stated and obscured motivation that becomes thematically significant.✦
Listen to understand how withholding resolution can become your story's greatest statement.
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While Stu is on show, Mel and Chas sit down to analyse the meaning behind the ending of 2024’s CHALLENGERS, especially when - upon reading the script - the most impactful moment of the ending on screen (for Chas in particular) is not written on the page… →
Films:
Challengers (2024)
DZ-112: Breaking the 4th wall
How is the effect of breaking the 4th wall different to voiceover?
AI✦Breaking the fourth wall involves the audience in the character’s emotional present by establishing a direct relationship where we–the viewer–become the recipient of the character’s gaze and narrative control.✦
Listen to understand how breaking the 4th wall directly involves the audience in a character's emotional present.
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As part of our series on how filmmakers can directly communicate to the audience, we finally examine the most blatant tool of them all: when character look directly down the barrel of the camera… and thus look directly at us, the viewer. Chas, Stu and Mel take the craft tools/levers they identified in previous episodes and use them to examine the tv-version-of HIGH FIDELITY (“Top Five Breakups”), ABBOTT ELEMENTARY (“Attack Ad)”) and - of course - FLEABAG… →
DZ-111: Unreliable Narrators and FIGHT CLUB
How does the unreliability of a narrator impact the way a story is told?
AI✦Stu and Mel dissect what makes Jack an unreliable narrator and how his control over the storytelling fundamentally shapes what the audience believes they’re witnessing.✦
Listen to learn how unreliable narrators shape storytelling through voiceover, structure, and control.
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In this episode, Stu and Mel (sans Chas!) take a deep dive into FIGHT CLUB and its use of the unreliable narrator. This is a bridging episode between our previous episode on VOICEOVER and our forthcoming episode on TALKING TO CAMERA as Fight Club does both.… →
Films:
Fight Club (1999)
DZ-110: Voiceover
How can you use voiceover without it feeling like a cheat?
AI✦Voiceover becomes a tool for exposing what characters actually want beneath the surface, and Mel identifies how the timing of that voice determines whether we trust the narrator’s interior truth.✦
Listen to explore how voiceover can set tone, reveal character, enhance empathy, and create tension.
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DZ-109: Talking DIRECTLY to your audience
What are the different ways a filmmaker can ask something of the audience?
AI✦Mel and Stu repeatedly return to the dramatic purpose driving communication: what does the speaker want from the audience, and how does that differ when they’re aware they’re being listened to?✦
Listen if you've wondered what a character actually wants when they're talking directly to the audience!?
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What are the different ways a filmmaker can ask something of the audience… →
Films:
Fight Club (1999)
, Fleabag (2016)
, The Big Short (2015)
, F for Fake (1973)
, Star Wars (1977)
DZ-108: The Emotional Event with Judith Weston
How and why should every scene have an emotional event?
AI✦The episode’s breakdown of each scene hinges on what characters aren’t saying directly, with Judith emphasizing how subtext emerges from the unspoken dynamics between people in a room.✦
Listen to understand why a scene's power lives in what shifts between characters, not what happens to them.
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2021
"She starts alternating between stand-up and like just pure kind of anger and emotion without trying to make anyone laugh at all."
— Chas Fisher | DZ-83: A Very Thematic Stand-up Special!
DZ-83: A Very Thematic Stand-up Special!
What can screenwriters learn from the storytelling techniques used by stand-up comedians?
AI✦The ethos pillar of the rhetorical triangle centers on who the storyteller is, and Alice Fraser discusses how a comedian’s perceived authenticity and persona become inseparable from the emotional contract with their audience.✦
Listen you want to understand how stand-up comedians grip audiences and build emotional arcs (and what narrative tools screenwriters can borrow from comedy)!
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Standup comedians can keep audiences gripped to their every word for over an hour, and often bring them to emotional climaxes by the end. So how do they do it and what tools can apply to scripted narratives… →
2014
"So long as you've got clear goals and clear sequences driving the film, I don't think you need to adhere to all this stuff."
— Chas Fisher | DZ-1: Do Screenplay Gurus win you Oscars?
DZ-6: Key Scenes and Unlocking the Story
Can one scene be the key to unlocking the whole story?
AI✦Stephen’s observation hinges on having your characters figured out first, meaning their motivations must be clear enough that they’ll naturally reveal your story’s architecture in a single scene.✦
Listen listen if you want to understand how a single key scene between protagonist and antagonist can unlock the entire structure of your story
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DZ-1: Do Screenplay Gurus win you Oscars?
Do Oscar-Nominated screenwriters follow the structural formulas prescribed by the 'gurus' and books?
AI✦Stu identifies Dallas Buyers Club’s arc as Ron’s journey ‘from helping himself to helping other people,’ a throughline that repeats cyclically rather than hitting traditional turning points.✦
Listen if you want to know whether Blake Snyder, Michael Hauge and Christopher Vogler's structural theories actually apply to Academy Award–nominated screenplays
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Stu and Chas analyse two screenplays nominated for Academy Awards in 2014 – PHILOMENA and DALLAS BUYERS CLUB – to see whether they follow the structural theories espoused by Blake Snyder, Michael Hauge and Christopher Vogler… →
DZ-0: Welcome to Draft Zero
What, exactly, is Draft Zero?
AI✦Chas mentions exploring scenarios where ‘your protagonist doesn’t go on any journey at all’ and might be ‘a point of view protagonist,’ which centers character agency rather than obligatory character arcs.✦
Listen if you're new to the podcast and want to understand our philosophy on screenwriting craft!
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Welcome to Draft Zero. A message from 2019 to those starting with our first episodes dating from 2014. We’ve learned a lot in five years. So where do you begin… →