Hereditary: The Power of the First & Last Image

Hereditary: The Power of the First & Last Image This week we’ll be talking about Hereditary written and directed by Ari Aster. I want to start by talking about the first image of this film. So, if you're worried about spoilers, we will get to some spoilers later, but you can listen to the beginning of this podcast without concern. The first image of Hereditary is the most important image of Hereditary. That's because the first image of any screenplay is the most important image of the film. It’s the most important image of your film creatively. It’s the most important image of your film structurally and it’s the most important image of your film commercially. So, it’s actually the most important image on three different levels. I want to talk about how the first image functions on each of these levels. We’re going to start on the most external and then we’re going to work down to the most connected. Externally, as a commercial device, the first image is the most important image of your film because the first image is the only image that everybody is actually going to read. When your producer or agent or manager flips the script of the first page and takes a look, it’s actually that line that makes them decide, “You know what, I’m going to send this one out for coverage,” or, “Maybe I’ll read this myself.” Similarly, if you think about the math of being a coverage reader, you as a consumer are likely going to pay about $150 for coverage, but they’re actually getting paid $50 a script. And, if you think of what it would take you to write a logline, a commentary, and a summary of a film, you’ll realize that if they were actually carefully reading each film, and carefully writing summaries, log lines and commentaries, that they would be working for about 32 cents an hour. So that’s not possible. You can’t eat from that. Which means that coverage readers need to choose which scripts they’re going to fully read and which scripts they’re going to skim. And that’s true for festival readers and readers who read for production companies. They actually can’t afford to read every single script carefully. And even if the economic reason for skimming didn’t exist, there’s an emotional reason that’s even more powerful, which is that almost everything they read is bad. If you’re a coverage reader and you read a thousand screenplays and one of them is producible, you had a pretty good year. Most of the scripts they’re reading—and I’m not talking about scripts by student writers or beginning writers or amateur writers, I’m talking about scripts by professional writers with agents—most of what they read isn't just bad, it’s actually un-producible. Many of these professional writers are just slamming out ideas, playing within a formula, trying to get something to throw against the wall to see if it sticks, rather than doing the real work of carefully mining their subconscious for the real story they want to tell. The downside of that is that there’s a lot of bad stuff that you’ve got to cut through in order to get your script noticed. The good thing about that is that if you start to learn some of the things we talk about here, and you start to do this real work, your script really will stand out from the pack. And that starts with the very first image. If you’ve got a great first image in your screenplay, it will actually change the whole perspective of the person reading. It will stop them from saying, “Oh... another bad script, okay let’s see if I can get through this,” and it will start them saying, “Oh wow! This is actually kind of cool!” Because the secret of every coverage reader is that even though they dread reading another bad script, they’re desperately hoping to find that diamond in the rough. So that first image is your place commercially to say, “You know what, pay attention. This one is going to be cool.” I actually learned this lesson doing Off-Off Broadway theatre. If you’ve ever been to an Off-Off Broadway theatre piece, you probably went there supporting a friend. You didn’t go thinking, “Hmm, Off-Off Broadway theatre. I bet I’m going to have a great entertaining experience.” You probably went going, “Oh God, Jimmy is in another play. I hope it isn't terrible so I don’t have to confront him afterwards, but I’m going to show up and I’m going to support him.” And so, as a producer of Off-Off Broadway and Off-Broadway Theater, I knew that my audience was going to come in often feeling like they were doing charity. And that isn't where you want someone coming in, just like if you’re working with a coverage reader you don’t want them coming in expecting to slog through another bad script by an amateur writer. So, what I used to do—most Off-Off Broadway black box theatres don’t have a curtain—so what I used to do was invest real money in the set. I had a wonderful set designer, Niluka Hotaling, and we knew that as the audience filed in, their expectation was that they were going to see a bunch of tables and chairs and maybe some black boxes. And instead they would walk in and see a set that looked like it could be on a Broadway show. Even though it cost me—Niluka was amazing and it cost me a few extra thousand dollars to do that that other Off-Off Broadway plays weren’t spending—the effect on the audience was huge. Because as they sat there waiting for the play to start, they realized, “Oh, maybe I’m going to see something entertaining, maybe I’m going to see something actually good.” Their entire expectation changed, and by changing their expectations, I actually could change their experience of the play, just like when you’re really excited to go see a film it changes your experience. So, from a commercial perspective your first image is the most important image, the first line of action is the most important line. But, it’s also the most important image and the most important line from an artistic perspective. Artistically, what the first image of your screenplay does is set the rules of the world for both you and your audience. It sets the tone of the world, it sets the feeling of the script, it creates a window through which your audience can experience the story of your film—through which they can interpret it. And it also creates a window through which you can interpret it. It creates a feeling in you you can return to which can guide you as you write things—as you wonder, “Should I put this in or take things out?” It creates a feeling, a mise-en-scène, an atmosphere that shows you what this movie wants to be. You can think of it like this, if you’ve ever had one of those terrible dreams where you are off to a job interview and you realize, “Oh my God, I’m not wearing pants!” If you’ve ever had that dream, you know why that dream is so terrifying. That dream is so terrifying because you know that once they see you like that, there’s going to be no recovery. You know that that first image, the way you come in, whether you're wearing a beautiful suit or whether you’re wearing a worn out pair of track pants, is going to change the way they experience you and the way they interpret everything. And it’s going to change also the way you feel about yourself in that meeting. So artistically, the first image of your film gives you a window into the world of your movie, and reminds you what your movie is supposed to be, and how it’s supposed to work. It points towards the themes of your movie and the things that really matter. And what’s cool is that, oftentimes, when you first start writing, you aren't fully aware of your themes. But, simply by pushing on that first image until you find something you haven't seen in a movie before—until you find something unexpected, and fresh, and new—you’ll start to learn, just through the action of closing your eyes and looking or pushing on that image, what your movie is really about. So, the first image of your screenplay is incredibly important commercially, and the first image is incredibly important artistically. But the first image is also incredibly important structurally. In fact, everything structurally in your film is going to build from that very first image. In a well-structured film, if you take the first image and the last image of the film and you put them together, it should tell you the journey of the characters, at least metaphorically. You should feel the journey of the character just by looking at that first image and that last image. So, let’s talk for a moment about the first image of Hereditary. The first image of Hereditary could very well have been a cliché one. In fact, we start out and we’re in a scene that’s very familiar if we’re used to horror movies: we’re in a creepy room and a kind of creepy house, and that creepy room is filled with dioramas, and there’s creepy music playing, and we’re kind of drifting with the camera among these dioramas. And, if we watch a lot of horror movies we already recognize this image. We’ve seen this image in other films. In fact, if you listen to my podcast on Annabelle: Creation you know this is essentially the first image of Annabelle: Creation: we’re in a creepy doll show filled with creepy dolls and a creepy doll’s eye. And that isn't the only film that has done this; there are many horror movies that have done this. So the good thing is that this familiar image is dropping us into a genre that we understand. We immediately know, “I get it. I’m in a horror movie. I get it. Dioramas are creepy.” And, what a lot of us might do when we realize, “Oh my God, I’ve written a cliché image,” is freak out. We might think, “Oh my God, cut it, cut it, I’m wrong, I’m wrong, it’s a mistake!” What great writers do, instead of throwing out that image, is look closer and keep looking closer, until they find something that they didn’t expect.