A Man Called Otto: Character Building

This episode, we’re going to be talking about A Man Called Otto and looking at a very important screenwriting topic that we haven’t covered for a while on this podcast: emotional need.  We’re going to be talking about how to get in touch with your own emotional needs and the emotional needs of your characters. We’ll also be talking about a process called meditative writing, through which we can get past our inner censors in order to access those emotional needs in boht our characters and ourselves.  Meditative writing can be a very powerful way of writing, particularly if we are struggling to figure out what our characters want. If we’re struggling to connect to our characters, or if we feel like our characters are two-dimensional puppets that we’re puppeteering around the plots of our screenplay, the solution is to get in touch with universal emotional needs and how they drive a character’s actions. In our script analysis of A Man Called Otto, we’re not only going to understand the structure and the stakes of the film, but also develop some tools as screenwriters to connect to our characters at the primal level.  We’re going to explore some cool hypnotic stuff to get deep underneath our own inner censor, and hopefully, we’re going to be learning a lot about writing and emotional need.  Now, the screenplay for A Man Called Otto is not without its problems: there’s a level on which this movie functions like a Hallmark movie. It’s predictable. It’s sappy. There are some places where the writers are simply not connected to their characters, and that lack of connection creates a level of falseness that we can feel.  Oddly, that’s also part of what makes the movie work tonally. A Man Called Otto is a feel-good movie, you know you’re going to feel good the whole time and you’re never going to have to wonder is this going to turn out OK?  This is not Succession. This is a really, really expensive Hallmark movie.   At the same time, there are moments in the screenplay for A Man Called Otto in which the writers are deeply connected to the emotional needs of the characters. As the audience, you can feel those moments of connection as strongly as you can feel the moments of disconnection. Which makes the script a great model for understanding what happens when we connect to– and also disconnect from– our characters as we write. What we’re going to talk about today is a technique that can hopefully help you stay more connected, more often.  If you were working on a script like A Man Called Otto, a stronger connection to the emotional needs of all your characters could help get underneath some of the problems in the script and maybe take it to a deeper level.  There’s one character that you can see the writers of A Man Called Otto are nearly always deeply connected to on the primal level of emotional need: Otto.  You can see that connection in the very first scene. For those of you who are worried about spoilers: you don’t really have to worry about spoilers in A Man Called Otto. If you’re experienced with screenwriting, you will watch the first scene and you will know everything that’s going to happen. You will know where it’s going to end… and all the places that you expect it to go are correct.  That said, I’m going to focus mostly on the first scene of the screenplay of A Man Called Otto, and then we’ll talk a little bit about the larger arcs of the characters as we get deeper into the concepts of meditative writing and emotional needs. The first scene in A Man Called Otto takes place in a big-box hardware store called the Busy Beaver– basically a Home Depot. Otto,Tom Hanks’s character, is trying to buy five feet of rope. The rope a tangible object, a tangible goal, that both we and Otto are consciously aware of,