The character exercise completed in class really inspired me to create complex, realistic and really fleshed-out characters in future projects. I realised just how much we stereotype people into their own archetypes based on their appearance, and although this does have its negative connotations, it was really great to experiment with this in a creative way.
I have a thing for people-watching (in the most legal, least weird way possible), and often observe people on public transport, sitting in cafes and driving in their cars, thinking about how each of us are protagonists of our own self-centred stories. It was cool to step out of mine and into someone else’s.
I chose to focus on Benjamin:
This was my take on Benjamin:
Single. Raised by a single mother, younger brother passed away in a car accident when they were teenagers.
Owner of trendy Brunswick cafe – he is a talented barista with a super in-depth knowledge and passion for coffee. Customers are mostly women aged 25-45 who go there for him more than they do for the coffee. He is very charismatic, and knows his regular customers by name and order. Customers take this personally and are flattered by this gesture.
Ben has a gambling problem on the side, and loses all of the cafe’s money. Nobody is aware of the financial struggles aside from himself, leaving him very alone and isolated. He supports his mother – she is all he has; all he has is the cafe and his mother. Regardless, he continues making business deals, putting up a front that everything’s fine. All of the figures are completely fabricated. Ben never meant for this to happen – he is not intentionally a criminal or a fraud/bad person. He just started drowning and made a string of bad decisions – he’s in too deep. He knows if he admits to his mistakes he’ll probably go to jail.
Ultimately – he has hit rock bottom.
I brought this up in class, but the idea of writing with a specific actor in mind really started to make sense to me. It’s so easy to conjure up a character with a perfect vision of them in mind, yet so difficult to find an eager actor who fits the position to a T – especially as a student with a significantly lower pool of actors to work with. I know that as a detail-oriented perfectionist, everything that I have produced thus far has left me slightly frustrated as the final product never quite matches up to what I envision. This usually comes down to the actors. It also made me think about the way by which most well known actors are typecast to specific characters – we are so used to seeing them in a particular role – as are writers, producers and directors – that often they cannot separate from them. I know I’m one to roll my eyes and say ‘omg Adam Sandler/Owen Wilson/Jim Carrey always plays the same annoying character, whatever happened to a little diversity?’.
As my final project is all about pre-production and process, I realised how this exercise perfectly linked to it. It’s a little late now, but I think a really great research experiment would be to begin pre-production by casting a bunch of actors and only then piecing the film/show together around the characters inspired by the actors… there’s always next semester? 😉
