Character Motivation

"To me, the pilot specifically is really setting up that he may be a good person and be incapable of actioning that because of how damaged he is by losing his wife. And how he lost his wife is a big part of why he's broken the way that he is broken."

"The voiceover.. is coming from the middle of the film. So Judd the Narrator has more information than the Judd we're seeing and experiencing it with... Which actually makes the plotting somewhat more difficult because he's acting on knowledge that without the knowledge that future Judd has - so it's coloured for us."

"When a character is being pushed... a lot of the stakes can be external. But when they're being pulled, you're going to have to work a lot harder on the stakes because they want the information and there's going to have to be much more cost to that journey."

"If you're writing something that's *not a mystery*: how does thinking about secrets and clues from your character's perspective help you... build plot?"

"and all these all every single one of these films has someone doing something that we know is incredibly stupid but for understandable reasons and they all contextualize it different ways"

"And like one of the most important bits of voiceover where like voiceover, we've got whole episodes on voiceover. Go and look at that. But it gives you that access to a character's motivation such that you will jump over hurdles, what might otherwise be narrative hurdles."

"Because they've told you that the transgression already happened, You don't need to carry the audience along with a pure introduction into this character. That first decision to do wrong, you don't have to put the work in, in terms of backstory or given circumstances."

"There is a related idea... which is: **Save. Survive. Save.** All which are goals for your characters."

"Survive. Solve. Save. We're really talking about stakes, right?."

"Yo want them to have something to survive. Something to solve. And then someone to save."

"It's just tactics and fear. It is how are you trying to get what you want and what are you afraid of revealing?"

"There is no subtext from a character perspective. They are doing exactly and saying exactly what they mean and want. There's zero subtext from a character perspective."

"What are you trying to achieve? What is their tactic in revealing the truth of themselves? What is it they want that they've been left with no other recourse other than to reveal the truth of themselves?"

"So much of subtext is your fear, you know, of like what you don't reveal. And so like because we tend to think in terms of tactics as what you want."

"It will be part of my toolkit. It will be the kind of thing I listen to in the car driving to set, you know, just to kind of get my brain firing."