Triangle Of Sadness: Meaning, Structure and the Power of Location in Screenwriting

Triangle Of Sadness: Meaning, Structure and the Power of Location in Screenwriting [sf_button colour=”blue” type=”standard” size=”small” link=”https://youtu.be/Nu82LANSo9Q” target=”_self” icon=”” dropshadow=”no” extraclass=””]WATCH VIDEO HERE![/sf_button] Hello, I’m Jacob Krueger, and this is the Write Your Screenplay podcast. This week, we’re going to be talking about Triangle of Sadness by Ruben Ostlund.  There are so many valuable things that we can talk about, looking at this movie. You can think of Triangle of Sadness as basically “White Lotus on a boat,” but there’s also something fascinating happening in the structure of Triangle of Sadness.  Triangle of Sadness has a dialectical structure, banging ideas about  capitalism and socialism together in an attempt to arrive at something closer to the truth, and it’s in that structure that the meaning of Triangle of Sadness is found. The script looks at those competing political point of views in a really complicated way, and by the end of it, Triangle of Sadness is looking at the challenges of making any kind of sense out of political philosophy in a world where everybody is ultimately motivated by power.  So we’re going to be talking about the meaning of Triangle of Sadness and how to convey meaning in structure. But we’re going to be pressing all those complicated concepts through a very simple idea, one that I think is going to be hugely helpful for you as a screenwriter.  We are going to be analyzing Triangle of Sadness in the context of how to use location in your screenwriting, not only in relation to budget but as a structural element.  Location is one of those elements of screenwriting that most screenwriters don’t think about enough. Sure, if you’re an indie filmmaker, you’ve probably been told to write a “contained” movie. Maybe, if you’re a horror filmmaker, you’ve been told to write a “contained horror” movie. The idea of limiting locations is pretty simple at its core: you limit locations, you limit budget.  Every time you go to a new location in your screenwriting, you’re asking for more money. It makes sense for any movie with budget constraints to try to limit its locations. But there are also big budget movies, where it seems like there is no limit on locations. Not every horror film is a contained horror film, and not every independent film takes place in just a handful of locations.  It is true that every time you introduce a new location into your screenplay, as a screenwriter or TV writer, you are asking for money. You are saying “I’m raising the budget,” and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it means that you want to get the most out of your locations. So I want to give you a stronger way of thinking about location, and help you understand the value of location in your script.  Too many screenwriters think about location as simply a place where they happen to write a scene in their screenplay. Not something valuable in itself, just the place where the thing that happens, happens.  Often, we think, okay, well, what’s the normal location for this to happen? And there’s nothing wrong with that: there are normal locations for things to happen, and those normal locations can appear in your screenplay and be used for good purpose. For example, in Triangle of Sadness: the argument between Yaya and Carl starts off at a restaurant, which is a really normal location for that kind of relationship argument to take place.  But we want to get the most value out of every location, and that means closely observing each location, and thinking about how to have the most fun with each location we use. If,