692 - Crafting the Perfect Villain
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to episode 692 of Script Dance. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it is a villain's compendium. Producer Drew Marquardt has selected four segments from previous shows where we celebrate the bad guys. Drew, tell us what we're going to hear today. Ooh, so we are going to start with episode 75 and get kind of like a villain's 101, how our bad guys operate in a story.

Then we're going to go to episode 590, which is anti-villains, sort of understanding your villain's motivation with a dozen examples of famous villains and sort of what makes them tick. I will say here, when we talk about Annie Wilkes, John, you mentioned that you say something like, I don't know if she would have been a bad guy if she hadn't found the car in the snow. And we later followed up that, yes, it's established that she murdered babies, I think, before that. In her past life as a nurse. Yeah, we don't need to do any follow-up on that. Don't write it again. Please don't.

Then we'll go to episode 465 about lackeys and henchmen and making sure that your evil organizations are believable. And then we'll finish up with episode 257 with our seven tips for unforgettable villains. Oh, Drew, these all sound great. I'm excited. Thank you for reaching back to the catalog and finding these segments and putting them together in a new form. Yeah, of course. And then in our bonus segment for premium members, let's talk about monsters. So Craig will be back here to talk about monsters.

But before we get into all that, we have a little bit of news because your new project was announced. Yes, I'm very excited. So I'm writing a new animated feature for Laker, the stop motion folks who did Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. There are also folks there who I met who worked on Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie with me. So it feels like a big reunion. This new movie is directed by Pete Candeland, who is a animation genius. So I'm so excited to be working on this. I'm so excited to be able to finally talk about this because I've known about it for months. But like, it's a really exciting project. Yeah.

Yeah, it's going to be great to write, and I'm really looking forward to it. And I'm also really excited that this is the first animated movie I've written under a WGA contract. So I have credit protections, pension and health, residuals, the whole thing, which is obviously a huge frustration with animation writing is that it's not default covered by the WGA. So Laker stepped up and made this a WGA deal. You've been fighting for this for a long time.

I have. This is the fifth animated feature I've done, and none of those other ones could I get WJ coverage on. So I'm so excited to be writing this one under this coverage. And listen, I'm excited to be writing this movie, but it's great to see companies stepping up and making WJ deals. It's great that Laker did. And I hope other companies will follow their lead because there's great animation writing that is not happening, I think, because many writers just won't take...

It's not WJDeals. So make WJDeals and you're going to get some great writers doing that. Animation writing is so valuable, so essential that it's time that it's treated like the hard work it is. And the door's open now. Yep. And now let's get started with our villains. So enjoy this compendium episode of our greatest villain segments. ♪

One of the things that came up in shows, and it's also come up in this other project that I've been working on this last week, is the idea of who the villains are and what the villain's goal is. And so I thought that would be something we could dig into this week. Because, you know, many properties are going to have some villain. So there's going to be somebody else who has a different agenda than our hero. And our hero and that villain are going to come to terms with each other over the course of the story. What happened in the discussion on this other project, they...

kept coming back to me with questions about the villain, what the villain's story was and what the villain's motivation was. It became clear that eventually they were really seeing this as a villain-driven story rather than a hero-driven story. So I want to talk through those dynamics as well. Yeah, great. Craig, who are the villains you think of when you think of movie villains? Who are they? Well, you know, immediately one's mind goes to the broadest, most obvious black hat villains like Darth Vader and Buffalo Bill, you know, people like that.

Well, it's interesting you say Buffalo Bill. It's like Buffalo Bill versus Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal Lecter is not a villain. And I think that's an important distinction. I want to get into that as well. When you think about villains, we need to really talk about what kinds of genres can support a villain that is actually a driving force villain. Because Identity Thief has bad guys, clearly. I've seen them in the trailer. But do they have their own agenda that...

No, they don't. I mean, it's sort of that's the part of the movie that I think least reflects what my initial intention was. And to me, those villains really are obstacles. To me, the villain in the movie is Melissa McCarthy, but she's an interesting villain that you sort of overcome and find your way to love.

but she's the villain yeah she's a villain she's the antagonist and so right i think right automatically she's the villain yeah so i think i want to make that distinction is that um almost all movies are going to have a protagonist and antagonist structure so you're a protagonist who's generally your hero is the person who changes over the course of the movie you're gonna have an antagonist who's the person who is standing in opposition to the protagonist and is causing the change to happen so sometimes you know that's based on the trailer you can see like there's two people in the movie they're going to be those two people generally

A villain is a sort of different situation. A villain is somebody who wants to do something specific that is generally bad for the world or bad for other people in the world. So if we talk about sort of

general categories of what villains could be. There's the villains who want to control things, who want to run things. So you have your Voldemorts, your Darth Vader's, your General Zod's. I'd say Hal from 2001 is sort of that kind of controlling villain where it has this order that he wants to impose on things and if you don't obey that you're going to suffer for it. Right.

You have your revenge villains. You have Khan. You have De Niro and Cape Fear. Right. I'd argue the witch is basically, the witch in The Wizard of Oz is really a revenge villain. If you think about it, like this outsider killed her sister and stole her shoes and she wants revenge. She wants revenge. She also sort of falls into the power-hungry...

Model also. Yeah. Dual villain motivation. She does. But I think the power-hungryness is something we sort of put on the movie after the fact. If you actually look at what she's trying to do in the course of it, like, she doesn't have this big plan for Oz that we see in the course of this movie. You're right. No, basically, you killed my sister, and I'm going to get you. And your little dog, too. And your little dog, too. And speaking of animal suffering, we have Glenn Close, who's sort of the great villain in Fatal Attraction, who...

wants revenge. I mean, it's basically how dare you jilt me and this is what I'm going to do to show you. Then there's the simpler, you know, just this villain wants something and is trying to take something. So you have Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

What I love about Hans Gruber is Hans Gruber probably sees himself as, you know, he's Ocean's Eleven. He probably sees himself as like, we're pulling off this amazing heist. And it would have been an amazing heist if not for John McClane getting in the way. You have Salieri in Amadeus. And Salieri is like, he has envy. He wants that thing that Mozart has.

You have Gollum who wants the ring. Those are really simple motivations. The last kind of villain I would classify is sort of insatiability. And these are the really scary ones. They're just going to keep going no matter what. The Terminator. You can't. Unstoppable.

Anton Sugar from No Country for Old Men. He scares me more than probably anybody else I've seen on screen. Yeah, and they embody the same sort of thing that attracts us to zombies as a kind of personality-less villain, and that is inevitability. They basically represent time. They represent time and death. And mortality, exactly. Yeah.

he will not be able to escape them. So Freddy Krueger is that too. Michael Myers, he's the zombie slasher kind of. Freddy Krueger actually, I think, is really revenge. Oh yeah, that's a very good point. His underlying motivation for why he hates, why he wants to kill all the people he's trying to kill is a revenge by proxy kind of. So one of the challenges with screenwriting, I've found, is that you're trying to balance these two conflicting things. You want your hero to be driving the story, and yet you also want

create a great villain, and that villain wants to control the story as well. And finding that sweet spot between the two is often really, really hard. And this project that I was out pitching this last week, I pitched it as very much a quest movie. And here's our group of heroes, and this is what they're trying to do, and these are the obstacles along the way. And this is the villain. And so all the questions sort of came back to the villain. And the questions were natural, fair questions to ask, which I hadn't done a good enough job explaining and describing, was...

what is the villain's overall motivation? What is the villain trying to do? And because we had just done the Raiders podcast, I kept coming back to like, well, in Raiders, what is the villain trying to do?

Well, he's trying to do the exact same thing that the hero is trying to do, which is interesting. He just has far less moral compunction. And I guess really the point there is that what the hero was trying to do initially wasn't what he should be doing. And you can see that that change occurs. And this is how I tend to think of really good villains. It's a good topic because I think there's a very common screenwriting mistake and it's understandable.

You have a character, you're a protagonist, and you have perhaps his flaw, and you have the way he's going to change. And then you think, well, we need a villain. And you come up with an interesting villain. The problem is the villain's motivation and the villain's villainy

has to exist specifically to fit into the space of your main character, of your protagonist. They are the villain because they represent the thing that the main character is most afraid of or is most alike and needs to destroy within himself. And if you don't match these things together dramatically, then you just have kind of a kooky villain in a story with your character. Yes. What are the challenges to...

Also keep in mind is that you want a villain who fits in the right scale for what the rest of your story is. You want somebody who feels like the things that they're after are reasonable for what the nature of your story is. So let's go back to Raiders. And so you can say Belloq is the villain and Belloq wants the same thing that Indy wants. He wants the Ark of the Covenant. But Belloq is actually an employee. He's really working for the Nazis, right?

And I felt like this pitch that I was going out with this last week, people kept asking me for like, you know, it was also a quest movie. So you could sort of think of it like Raiders and since it's a quest, you're after this one thing. Well, they kept pushing me for more information about like, well, basically who are the Nazis and what are their agendas?

What is their agenda? And you can't really stick that onto Raiders of the Lost Ark. I mean, I guess with Raiders of the Lost Ark, we sort of know what the Nazis are and you can sort of shorthand them for evil, but you can't literally stick Hitler there at the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. It wouldn't make sense. It's the wrong kind of thing. It would be bizarre. Absolutely. Yeah, no, you need to... And in that movie, they very smartly said, okay, we're going to have a character who is obsessed with objects and needs to become...

more interested in humanity. So let's make our villain just like him. And except that guy won't change at all. And so we watch our hero begin to diverge from the villain. And that's exciting, you know, and that's smart. And I have to say that there's a trend towards this. You can find villains like this throughout film history. However,

Even in broader genres, like, for instance, superhero films or even James Bond movies, there was a time when you could just put a kooky villain in because they were interesting. There is nothing thematically relevant about Jaws, for instance, from The Spy Who Loved Me. There's nothing particularly relevant even about Blofeld. You know, they're just...

They're mustache-twirling villains. Sometimes people will get this note. This villain is too much of a mustache twirler, meaning he's just evil because he's evil. Ha, ha, ha. And if you look at Batman, the Batman villains were very typically just kooky. They were nuts. You know, the Riddler is a villain because he's insane. He's so insane that he spends all of his time crafting bizarro riddles just because he's crazy.

criminally insane. But what's happened is, for instance, take Skyfall and whatever people's beefs are with Skyfall, I think, honestly, one of the reasons the movie has done better than any Bond movie before it in terms of reaching an audience is

is because the villain was matched thematically to the hero. The hero is aging, and he is concerned that he is no longer capable to do his job. And along comes a villain who is aging, who used to do his job and was thrown away.

And so all the internal conflict and sense of divided loyalty that our hero has is brought to bear by the villain. And so suddenly things begin to suggest themselves. Maybe the opening sequence should be one in which the hero's life is tossed aside by the person he trusts. And then he meets a villain whose life was tossed aside by the same person.

And they just take different paths to resolution. Look at the Nolan movies, I think very notably have taken Batman villains out of the realm of broad and silly and thematically match them specifically to Batman. The first one, you have Scarecrow, right on target. Batman is a hero born out of fear. And your villain is a master of fear. Fear personified. Yeah.

So it's a trend. It's a trend to do it more and more. And I don't think it's going away anytime soon. And frankly, I think it makes for better stories. But what I would point out is the challenge is,

You can go too far. And so I think the second Batman movie in which we have the Joker, who is phenomenal and we love it, we love every moment of it. In the third Batman movie, I became frustrated by sort of villain soup and that I didn't feel like there was a great opportunity for a Batman story because we just basically follow the villains through a lot of our time on screen.

It's also dangerous because it raises the expectation that, well, the villain has to be this big, giant, magnetic character. And that's any time... If that villain is driving your story, then your hero is going to have a harder time driving the story. What it comes down to is like...

Movies can only start once. A movie can start because the hero does something that starts the engine of the film, or it can start because the villain does something that starts the engine of the movie. In many movies with a villain, the villain is really starting things. And so even Jaws, like, you know, the shark attacks. The shark is the problem. The shark happens first. It's not that you can envision a scenario in which a scientist went and found the shark and tracked it down and it became the whole start of things. But no, the shark happens first.

where I ran into this, both with the TV show and with this other project we're pitching, is this fascination of who the villain is and what the villain's motivation is. It's good to ask those questions, but in trying to dramatize those questions on screen, you're probably going to be taking time away from your hero, and your hero should be the most interesting person on screen. Yeah, you know, I just don't know enough about TV to... I mean, I watch TV, but I don't watch it the way that I watch movies. I don't think about it the way I think about movies, but...

Certainly, if you have a very oppositional kind of show where it really is about one person versus another, they both, I mean, they both ultimately will occupy a lot of screen time, I suppose. But, you know, like, that's why I think it's pretty smart what they do in Dexter, for instance. Every season there is one new arch villain who thematically tweaks at some part of Dexter. But when that season's over, they're gone because they're dead. Yeah.

Did you watch Lost? You probably watched Lost, didn't you? I didn't. My wife watched it, and I should say on behalf of our friend Damon Lindelof, my wife loved the final episode and cried copiously. I don't know anything about it. I know that there's an island and a smoke monster, and in the end, they were in a church. Okay. A point I was going to make about Lost, which I could also make about Alias or many other shows that have elaborate villainous...

is that while it became incredibly rewarding that you did know what the villains were and why the villains were doing the things they were doing, if you had known that information from the start of the project, if you'd known what the villain's whole deal was at the very start, it wouldn't have been nearly so interesting. Or you would have spent so much time at the start explaining what the villain's motivation was that you would have been able to kickstart the hero's story. And so I guess I'm just making a pitch for, you know, there can be a good cause for like,

understanding what the whole scope of the villain is, but you have to realize in the two hours or the one hour or the amount of time that you have allotted, how are you going to get the best version of the hero's story to happen and service the villain that needs to be serviced? Yeah, I tend to think about these things in a somewhat odd dichotomy. So forgive me if this sounds bizarre, but

Hero-villain relationships are either religious or atheistic in nature. And meaning this, the case where there's a villain who is doing an evil thing and there's a hero who is trying to stop them is basically religious in nature. It's a morality play and good tends to win, obviously, in those morality plays. And in fact, the satisfaction of

of the morality play is that good does triumph against seemingly impossible odds. Yes. And we want to believe that about the world that we live in, that even though oftentimes it is the evil who are strong and the good who are weak, good still triumphs. So there's a religious nature to that struggle. But there are also an atheistic type of stories, actually a religious type of stories, because they're not making a point about the existence of God, but rather...

They are saying the drama that exists between the hero and the villain is one of absurd dread, the kind of existential nausea.

For instance, the classic PBS series, The Prisoner, where the nature of evil was Kafkaesque. It was uncaring. It was inexplicable. It would simply emerge out of the ocean like a bubble or oppress you by simply being a disembodied voice. It was essentially, it was, again, that kind of unquantifiable dread of mortality and death.

And so that will color if you're trying to tell a story that is seeped in existential dread, don't over-explain your villains because the point is there is no explanation. It's absurd, as absurd as existence is, which is scary in and of itself. Yeah.

Yeah, I think the root of all slasher films, which Terminator is sort of an extension, like a smarter extension of a slasher film, but it's that wave is coming for you and you will not be able to get away from it. Zombie movies work in the same situation too. It's not one zombie that you're afraid of. It's the fact that all the zombies are always going to be out there and the world is always a very, very dangerous place. Yeah, zombies don't have, zombies aren't even evil. No.

They're like the shark, basically. They just eat. And you can't stop them. That's why, by the way, so many zombie movies end on a downer note. They don't make it. Heroes just don't make it. You can't beat zombies. So what I would say, though, is if you look at, regardless of which kind of class of villain you're facing, you're going to have to make some decisions about perspective and point

point of view and to what degree are we sticking with the hero's point of view and that we're learning about the villain through the hero and to what degree do we as the audience get to see things the hero doesn't know from the villain's point of view and from the villain's perspective and making those decisions is it's a very early part of the process is how much are we going to stay in point of view of our hero and to which we are going to go see other stuff

In Die Hard, we stay with John McClane through a lot of it, but eventually we do get to see stuff from Alan Ripken's point of view, and we see what he's really trying to do. With slasher movies, we tend to stay with our hero's point of view for most of the time because it's just...

it's actually much more frightening to not know where the bad guy is and what the bad guy is trying to do. If you have a villain who's smart, if you have a Joker, at some point you will want to see them explain themselves and have that moment at which they can talk about what it is they're trying to do. And ideally, you'd love for them to be able to communicate that mission and that goal to the protagonist. That's...

very challenging to do. In Silence of the Lambs, to the degree that Hannibal Lecter is a villain, Hannibal Lecter is a person you fear in the movie, he's in jail. So he can talk to her through the bars and we know that she's safe and it's reasonable for her to be in that situation and not be killed. When we talked about Raiders, Belloc and Indy had that conversation at the bar. Indy's able to get out of this, but Belloc is at least able to explain himself. If you can find those moments to allow those two situations

sides to confront each other without killing each other before the end of the story, you're often better off. Yeah, you need some sense of rationality. It is discomforting to watch a villain behave randomly. Random behavior is inherently undramatic.

Even if your villain's motivation is, in fact, just mindless chaos, they need to express that that is their motivation. In the second Batman movie, they say some men just want to watch the world burn, and the Joker can express that. But, okay, that's a choice. You made it. Your job now is to create chaos because you love chaos. But you've articulated a goal.

And if we don't have that, then we're just watching somebody blow stuff up willy-nilly and we start wondering why. And you never want anyone to stop, to stop their engagement with the narrative. One of the great things about all those wonderful scenes is

between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter is that while they are doing this fascinating dance with each other and falling in love in a matter of speaking, what Hannibal Lecter is promising her, and in fact, the entire context of those meetings, the plot context of those meetings, is he is explaining to her why the villain of the movie is doing what he's doing. He is grounding that villain in some kind of rational context. Yeah.

Which is spooky. What I would recommend all writers do is if you have a story that has a villain, especially like a bigger villain, like someone who is doing some pretty serious stuff, take a second before you begin and write the whole story from the villain's point of view.

point of view. And right, because remember, every villain really does see himself as the hero of the story. So if you're making Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton sees herself as a savior trying to protect this company and protect herself. But like, she sees herself as the good person here. And if she's being forced into some, like, doing murder or whatever to protect herself, she will. Even, God, the...

queen mother in Aliens, she is protecting her brood. From her perspective, these outsiders came in and started killing everything she's going to protect. And when you see things from their perspective, you can often find some really great moments. Figure out what the story is from their point of view.

But remember, you're probably not going to tell it from their point of view. You're going to tell it from our hero's point of view and make sure that you're going to find those moments in which our hero is going to keep making things worse for the villain, and therefore the villain is going to be able to keep making things worse for the hero. And there's going to be a natural confrontation, but that the final confrontation won't come until the climax that you want to have happen. Yeah. There's a...

There's a nice way of approaching certain villain stories where the movie is in many ways about...

figuring out the rational context for the villain that you're trying to unearth a mystery and that in fact if you figure out why the villain's doing what they're doing you can stop them um mama which is out in theaters right now i don't know if you saw it it's a good horror movie it's very thoughtful and um is very thematic it's about something i thought they did a good job

And that movie is sort of a good case in point of if you can figure out why Mama is so violent and evil, then you might have a shot at getting rid of Mama. So you build a mystery in and the mystery is why is this bad person doing these bad things?

Our main topic today, this all comes out of Chris Song, who does the interesting newsletter, was putting together a bunch of links for people writing about villain motivation and sort of how villains come to be. And when you sort of laid them all out side by side, I realized like, they're really talking about character motivation overall, whether they're heroes or villains. And so often what we think about like, oh, that's the reason why they're the villain. You could just turn around and say, oh, that's the reason why they became the hero. It's basically the reaction to the events that happened or sort of

what's driving them. So I thought we might take a look at villainy overall, look at some villains, and then sort of in the lens of these articles, sort of peel apart what are the choices that characters make that cause us to think of them as being heroes or villains and how we use that in our storytelling. Great. I love this topic.

start with, there's an article by Daniel Efron here, we'll put in the link to the show notes, about why good people do bad things. And he's an ethicist and he's really talking about, you know, we think that people will make a logical decision about the costs and benefits of breaking some rule, transgressing in some way, but they really don't. Mostly, that's not about the act itself, it's really, they're doing things or not doing things based on how they're going to be perceived by others. It's that the spectator thing is a major

major factor. So if they can do something without feeling like a bad person, they will do it. And so cheating is not just about sort of, you know, whether you can get away with it. It's like, how will you feel if you do this thing? Which is really fascinating when you consider it in the context of a traditional existentialist point of view, which is that we are defined solely by our deeds, the things we do. So it doesn't matter how you feel.

If you do something bad, you are a bad doer. And that is true to an extent, meaning the rest of the world doesn't necessarily care why you killed that person. As long as it wasn't self-defense. Okay, he made you nuts and you couldn't handle it anymore and you killed him and you had perfectly good reasons in your head. The rest of the world doesn't care. You killed him. You're a murderer.

Yeah. We've talked many times about sort of character motivation, villain motivation, and how every villain tends to see themselves as the hero if they even have a sense of a moral compass at all. And we're leaving out of this conversation sort of this supernatural alien creatures. Did you read which we apply motivation to those characters?

characters. In Aliens, we see that it's a mother against a mother. That makes sense. That tracks, we can sort of understand that. In most of these supernatural, demonic things, there's not really a moral choice there. They are actually just

true villains. Even the slasher villains, we might throw some screen time just setting up what their past trauma was that's made them this way. But we don't really believe that they have any fundamental choice. They're not choosing to do these actions. They made a choice. The choice was made. It is now complete. So Freddy Krueger was burnt by a lynch mob.

He made a choice in his supernatural return to come back and kill all the children of the people that killed him. And so he's good. Like, there's no... He doesn't wake up going, what should I do today? He's like, good.

one more day to do the thing I decided to do that I will do every day. Ha ha. Yeah. Uh-huh. It's a wonderful clarity to being that kind of villain, isn't there? It is. And in some ways, you know, you could say that he is cursed. I mean, basically, he's living under this thing. He can't escape this. He can't choose to get out of this. And a curse is sort of like the opposite of a wish. We always talk about like sort of

you know, what are the characters I want, what are they actually going for? The curse is kind of the mirror opposite of that. Like they are bound by fate to do this thing and they sort of can't get away from it. Yeah, yeah. And there's a kind of freedom in that. There is because as a human, you're really more of a shark. There are no more choices to make. There's no questioning of self.

Sharks kill. I mean, when I say shark, I mean like, you know, the fictional shark, not the regular sharks that probably are like, I'm full. I'm not going to do that. But you are a creature that is designed to kill and thus you must kill. You are more like a beast than a person. And those characters often do feel like they become part of nature. So zombies, right?

Whether they're slow or fast, whether it's a virus or it's supernatural, they ultimately are willless. They are compelled to do what they do. They make no choices. Thus, they become a little bit like a storm, flood, lightning, fire, monsters, the devil, these things that just simply do stuff.

And there's a wonderful place for those kinds of things. But I think ultimately, we do want villains that feel like they are reflecting something back at us. That they are dark mirrors that say, hey, you might feel these things. Don't end up like me. They're almost designed to be negative instructors. To make people identify with the villain. To make us understand why the villain's doing what they're doing. To make us think...

I actually have felt the same things. I've wanted to do the same things. But here's what happens if I do, because typically the villain will fail.

Well, let's talk about some villains. I have a list of like 20 villains here for us to go through. And let's talk about what's driving them and sort of what's interesting and what could be applied to other things. So we'll start with Hans Gruber from Die Hard, our special Die Hard episode. And of all the folks in this list, he's maybe come actually closest to seem like the mustache twisting villain because of that amazing performance. But his actual motivations are sort of more calculating and he doesn't seem to be just cruel for the sake of being cruel. No, he's a thief.

He wants to steal money, as far as I remember. Is there a greater motivation than that? It just seems like he's a very arrogant man who wants to steal a lot of money and doesn't mind killing a bunch of people to do it. Yeah, and he gets indignant when somebody gets in his way and will sort of, you know, he will lash out when, you know, his plans are thwarted.

But yeah, so we think of him as being sort of, I think it was just because that performance was being sort of like grand and theatrical, but it's actually, he has a purpose and a focus. He also, I think he very brilliantly in the course of the structure of the movie, as we've talked about, the false idea of what the actual motivation is, is great. It seems like they have some sort of noble purpose beyond the money. And of course they don't. It's all just a ruse.

That was a wonderful thing that happened. It was a very meta thing. And for us growing up, that was a startling one because we had become so trained in

to think of these villains as people who were taking hostages. We, you know, terrorists are an easy one. They're always taking hostages and they often in bad movies were taking hostages because they were associated with, you know, like they made fun of in Tropic Thunder, flaming dragons. Some rebel group that was trying to, you know, do a thing. And the fact that Hans Gruber used that against us to make us think that's what he was doing. And then the big surprise was, no, no, no, I'm simply a thief.

That's actually quite clever. But Alan Rickman, I think his performance in no small part elevated what that character was into something that felt a little bit more, you know, wonderfully arch. Yeah. Let's talk about the two villains in Silence of the Lambs. So you have Buffalo Bill, who's the serial killer, who's like, you know, kidnapping people. And you have Hannibal Lecter, who is also a serial killer, but a very different kind of serial killer. They're two monsters, but...

but with very different motivations. They're very different villains in the course of the story. So how do we place them and how do we think about what's driving them? Well, Buffalo Bill to me, because he's portrayed as somebody with a severe mental illness that has led him to do these terrible things, is more in the shark territory. He is beyond choice. He is no longer making choices. He is simply compelled to do what he does and will continue to do it until he's stopped.

So there's nobody who's going to have a sit down with Buffalo Bill and he's going to be like, oh, you know, we're making a really good point. I'm going to stop all these people. He's not going to do that. Hannibal Lecter, you get the sense, absolutely has choices. And what is presented in his character that Thomas Harris created that's so beautiful is

is the notion that he might be some kind of avenging angel, that maybe he only does horrible things to the people that deserve it. But what's interesting about the story is they tease you with that. But then what do they tell you? They tell you that he bit a nurse's face off. We see him killing two police officers that didn't do anything to him.

He kills a guy in an ambulance. He will kill indiscriminately to protect himself. But as Jodie Foster, as Cleary says at the end of the movie, he doesn't think he's going to come and kill her because it would be rude.

So we get fascinated by the notion of the serial killer with a little bit of a conscience. It tempts us to think, well, if we were interesting and good enough and cool enough, he wouldn't want to kill us. Yeah. Damien in The Omen, a terrifying little child. To me, he feels like he's cursed at that. He has not made a single choice. He is who he is.

Yeah, he's bad to the bone. Yep. As opposed to Amy Dunn in Gone Girl, who I think is one of the best, most recent villains. She is aware of what she's doing. She is a sociopath. She has some sort of narcissistic, I don't want to say narcissistic personality disorder, I wouldn't want to diagnose her that specifically, but she has some ability that puts her at the very center of the universe and sees everyone else around her as things to be manipulated. Yeah.

Yeah, and why we are fascinated by Amy Dunn is because her conniving and manipulation and calculations are very well done. So she's formidable. This is something that you'll hear often in Hollywood from executives. They want the villain to be formidable. They want us to feel like it's really hard to win against somebody like that. And I think also there's a little bit of a wish fulfillment there because she is...

Occupying a place in society that typically isn't in charge, isn't the one that comes out on top. So we get to watch the underdog go a little crazy and win, you know, to an extent. Yeah. So that's always fascinating to me.

I think the other brilliant choice Gillian Flynn made in the structure of this is that ultimately she becomes a victim herself in breaking free of all this stuff. In executing her plan, she ends up becoming trapped by someone that she shouldn't have trusted and then has to break herself out. So we see like, you know, you think you caught me, but I've actually caught you. It's ingenious. So smartly done. I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me.

Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. So a whole generation of young men thought that he was the hero of the movie Wall Street. Oh, bros. Yes, bros. I think it comes back down to his idea that greed is good. And so there's more to it than that one speech. But essentially that whatever it takes is what's worth doing. And that is kind of an American value, but it's pushed to an extreme degree.

Which is the point. And so when you mentioned the Daniel Efron article, the average person cares a lot about feeling and appearing virtuous. If they can do bad things without feeling like a bad person, that's when they start doing bad things. And what Gordon Gekko is doing is essentially giving himself license to

to commit crimes and the license is through philosophy. That in fact, he's helping people. If you think about it, really, I'm the hero. So, and somebody naturally is like, you really convinced yourself of this and we always wonder when Gordon Gekko puts his head on the pillow, does he really believe that? Is there some piece of his conscience gnawing at him? We don't know. But that is a great example of somebody who,

articulating a value that we all have ad absurdum to force us to examine ourselves.

Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Denzel Washington's character in Training Day, an amazing performance, an amazing villain, amazing sort of centerpiece role. Here he is in a position of power with inside a structure. But of course, that's not his true source of power. His true source of power and wealth is all the way he's subverting all that and sort of breaking the codes to do this and is now trying to entrap Ethan.

Ethan Hawke's character in what he's doing. Yeah, an excellent film. And I remember feeling when I watched Denzel's portrayal of Alonzo was that he was managing to do two things at once that are very different and difficult to do simultaneously. He was letting us engage in a power fantasy because it's attractive. He made it look sexy and fun and awesome. The idea that if you

Go through life having the upper hand and being able to get over on anyone, it's exciting. On the other hand, he also showed you the terrible cost of it, that in fact...

Like I said, there's no free lunch. That you cannot engage in power like that without it hollowing you out and sort of gnawing at the foundations of who you are as a person until finally you're brought low. It's inevitable. Like you will come down to earth. Gravity applies to you. It's wonderful. And it's a great,

which is why I think Training Day is one of the great titles of all time. It's just such a great lesson. It's like we're all getting trained about the danger of having that kind of power.

Yeah, we should put that on the shortlist for a future Deep Dive because it really is a turn of events. Two more I want to go through. Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Gollum. So I think he's unique on this list because you pity him and yet he's also a villain. He's also dangerous. And there are other examples of that. There are usually sort of like sidekick characters. But here he is in this sort of centerpiece role where he has control over this little section of what the characters need and

And yet he's pathetic and just such an interesting choice. Yeah, Gollum to me is not a villain. Gollum is an addict. He is somebody who is portraying an addiction and he will do bad things to feed his addiction. But where Gollum takes off and becomes somebody really interesting is when he is a split personality, when he's slinker and stinker and you can see him arguing with himself. And that is so human.

It's just so wonderfully, we can identify, we feel bad for him because we know that inside there's somebody who is good, who was a great, perfectly fine guy until he shot up heroin for the first time and then that was it.

He's essentially been enslaved to his own addiction and his own weakness. Yeah. And I think that's the reason why we can relate to him so well is because we can see like, oh, the worry that if I were to do those things, I could be trapped the same way that he is trapped. Yeah. I'll put a link in the show notes to this article about Wile E. Coyote, but it's arguing that essentially Wile E. Coyote is an addict. He's demonstrating all of the addicts, things like he's going to keep trying to do the same thing, even though it's never going to work. It's always going to blow up in his face.

a different form of that thing. Like he's always chasing that high, which is the Roadrunner. And if he didn't get it, he won't get it. It's rough, man. Yeah, he needs a program. He does need a program. 12 steps there. Finally, let's talk about Andy Wilkes in Misery, who I think is just a spectacular character. So you look at

I just, you look at the setup of her in that if she did not kidnap somebody and do the things she does in the movie, she would just be an obsessive fan. She would just be like someone like, you know her, you understand her, she's kind of annoying, but she also probably bakes really well and you get along fine with her. But it's that worry that you push somebody, even the chance, some of these people would go too far and they would, you

you know, Annie Wilkes to you. Yeah. So that's a portrait of obsession and love gone bad. What was so fascinating about Annie Wilkes and Stephen King was so smart to make her a woman is that

In society, we see men doing this all the time. Men become confused by their love for someone or they think they love someone. It becomes an obsession which turns violent and possessive and often deadly. And women are very often the victims. And here, what was so fascinating was to see a woman engaging in that very same power trip and obsession.

I remember at the time thinking that the only thing that kind of held me back from love, love, loving misery was that Annie Wilkes did seem like an impossible person. I just, there was part of me that was like, but no one's really like that. Well, now we have Twitter and we know that there are. Oh, yeah. Stephen King was right. Yeah. He's out there. Oh, my God. She and he, there are many Annie and Andrew Wilkes out there who attach themselves so strongly to,

two characters. And when those characters, like, I mean, the whole thing, the whole thing kicks off when her favorite author dares to kill her favorite character. She reads it in the book and she snaps. And...

We have seen that a lot in popular culture. And that form of love that has gone sour, that is curdled into obsession, is something that's very human. And the story of that villainy is you must get away from that person because they are going to destroy you to essentially mend their own broken heart. And that's terrible.

terrifying. It's fascinating to think of, like, would Annie Wilkes be a villain if she had not stumbled upon that car crash? Like, is this the only bad thing that she's done? I would imagine that she's probably done a few other things, but nothing like that. Yeah. This transduction would not have happened if not for fate sort of putting him right there. And so, if the book had come out and she'd read the book, she would have been upset and she would have, you know,

been angry for weeks, but she probably went up, like, stalked him down at his house and done a thing. But the fact that she could affect a change because she had the book before it came out was the opportunity. Yeah, I mean, the woman was definitely off to begin with. I mean, anybody that says dirty birdie as a phrase, you can imagine people are like, oh, here comes Annie.

You know, she's gotten into some pretty nasty fights at the post office, but nothing like this. All right, so let's try to wrap this up with some takeaways here. I mean, as we're talking about these villains, I think it's important for us to stress that we're looking at what's motivating these sort of iconic villains in these stories. These iconic villains are great, but they wouldn't exist if you didn't find them.

a hero to put opposite them if you didn't find a context for which to see them in because they can't just float by themselves. You can't have a Hannibal Lecter in a story or Buffalo Bill in a story without a clearly starling to be the connective tissue, to be the person who's letting us into their world. And so I see so often people try to create like, oh, this iconic villain who has this grand motivation, terrific,

Who are we following into the story? How are we getting there? How are we exploring this? And how are we hopefully defeating the villain at the end of this? Yeah, we need somebody to identify with. We don't want to identify with villains, but I will suggest that if you can find moments where people are challenged to identify with the villains, that's when things get really interesting to me. Because there is a kind of story where we just give up

on the whole hero-villain thing entirely. And we ask ourselves, in these situations, what would you do? And...

When people start to drift away from the hero and towards the villain, that's when their relationship with the material becomes a little more complex. It doesn't mean it's better. No. Sometimes I like nice, simple relationships with the things I watch and read, but sometimes I do like a messy. I like a messy relationship sometimes as well. Yeah. I thought Black Panther, the Killmonger character, was a great messy relationship with Black Panther because they both had strong points. And while it's...

While we want him to come on the defeated, we also say like, yeah, you know what? He's making some logical points there. Yeah, he's a good example of gone too far.

The inspiration behind this is this book I'm reading based on a blog by Keith Allman called The Monsters Know What They're Doing. So I'll put a link in the show notes to that. It is a book that is really intended for people playing the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. So it's not a general interest book for everyone out there. It's an interest to me and to Craig. Yeah, it's great. Great blog. I love that blog.

So why I thought that this could be generalized into a topic for discussion overall is one of the things I liked so much about Keith's book is that he talks about the monsters that you're fighting and how they would actually think and how they would strategize in combat. And one of the points he really makes very clearly is that they have a self-preservation instinct. They're going to do things to, they will fight, but then they will run away and they will flee when it makes sense for them to run away and flee because they exist in this world, they've evolved to survive,

And so that survival instinct is very, very important. It got me thinking about movies I've seen. I rewatched Inception recently, which is great. It holds up really well. The third section of Inception, or the fourth or the fifth, however many levels deep we are in Inception, there's a sequence which very much feels like a James Bond movie where there's this mountain... Raid on it. Outline sequence. And just in there, there are a bunch of just faceless lackeys who just sort of keep getting killed and offed. And...

It struck me like, wait, no one is acting, like, why are they doing what they're doing? And you can see this in a lot of movies, a lot of action movies, but also I think a lot of comedies you see them in, where the people who are not the hero, not the villain, but are working for the villain, do things that don't actually make any sense. And they will fight to the death for no good reason. They don't seem to exist in any sort of normal universal world. And so I want to talk through this. I don't necessarily have great

for this, but I think we need to sort of point it out and maybe nudge people to be thinking more fully about

the choices they're making with these henchmen characters. That's probably the best we can do is just be aware of it because it's more than a trope. It is bizarre. All right, so here's a movie that did it fairly well. And for a reason. In Die Hard, there are all sorts of lackeys. There are some like, you know, lackeys that are front and forward. And then there's some lackeys that are in the back. But one of the things you understand from this whole thing is that this organization is

a worker owned business. So they're all going to split the money. Yeah, sure. Maybe Hans Gruber gets a little bit extra because he masterminded it, but they're all splitting it. So they're all the heroes of this job. If if John McClane gets away with his shenanigans, they're not going to get their money. So I understand why they fight. And then if someone's brother happens to be killed, oh, well, now it's personal. Yeah.

But when it is not a worker-owned collective, but rather a standard boss and employee's

It is odd that they seemingly fight as if they were trying to protect their own dad or something. Yeah. And so they'll fight and fight and they'll get thrown over the edge and get the Wilhelm scream as they fall. And they'll move on. They're basically just cannon fodder there to be shot at, to be taken down. So you see this most obviously in Bond movies. The Spy Who Loved Me has the whole crew of that tanker at the end, the Leprous.

Moonraker, Drax Industries has all these people who are doing these space shuttles and like...

who are they? Like, why are they doing this? Are they zealots? Are they science zealots? Like, you just don't know. And this is really very well parodied, of course, in The Simpsons. There's a whole episode with Hank Scorpio where he recruits Homer. And you see sort of like why these people are working there because it's a really good boss. Right. It's really, really caring and considerate. So I would just say, pay special attention to those minor characters, those guards, those watchmen. And really be thinking about like,

Why are they doing what they're doing? And you don't necessarily, you may not be able to give dialogue or even a lot more time to those characters, but do think about what their motivations are. And sometimes if you do that, you can come upon some surprising choices, which is if Iron Man 3, like one of the henchmen just says like, oh no, I'm not paying paid enough and just like walks away or just runs. And those can be surprises that,

you know, let the audience and the reader know that you're really paying attention. And that could be great. There's a really funny parody of the henchman syndrome in Austin Powers. I want to say, is it in the first one? Yeah, I think it's the first one. So everybody remembers, I think most people remember the scene where Austin Powers is driving a steamroller very slowly at a henchman who doesn't seem to be able to get out of the way.

And then he rolls him over. There's a deleted scene. I think you can watch it on, I think it's on YouTube, where they actually go to that henchman's home and you see his wife and child mourning the loss of that henchman. It's like, he was a person. It's true. One of the things that that stuff does

is both limit our interest and also in and the capacity or the impact of death in a movie or a television show. And it also, I think, makes the world seem less real and therefore the stakes less important. Yeah.

I agree. Because, look, if everybody's dying that easily, it's the stormtrooper problem, right? Like who's afraid of stormtroopers anymore? If you make a Star Wars movie now, I think, you know, like just your hero being actually killed by a rando stormtrooper like in scene one would be amazing. That's it. We got to find a new hero because, yeah, one of those randos, they can't all miss all the time.

Well, I think one of the good choices that Force Awakens made was to have one of the heroes be a stormtrooper who takes off his helmet and you're like, oh, there's an actual person there. John Boyega's, you know, is an actual person. The only one. Yep. And he's special, but he's also, I think the point is that he's not special. Actually, all those people you've seen die in all these movies were actually people as well. In The Mandalorian, there's a, in a later episode, there's just a long conversation happening between two stormtroopers and they're just talking

talking and it's recognizing like oh they are there for not just the plot reasons they actually were doing something before the camera turned on sort of like so it's the red versus blue you know the halo it's like generally speaking when we do see henchmen talking to each other

They're talking about henchmen stuff. So it's like purposefully pointless and banal. And then they die. They die. They don't go on. They do not live on. So yeah, just be aware of it, I guess, right? Yeah.

Yeah, so the henchman's problem is really a variety of the red shirt problem, which we'll also link to there. John Scalzi's book, Red Shirts, talks about sort of the, in the Star Trek series, notoriously the people with the red uniforms who'd be in kind of the alien planet are the first ones to die. There's actually statistics about sort of how often they die versus people in other color uniforms.

I think we're all a lot more mindful of that now with sort of the good guys. And I think we see a lot less redshirting happening. You still see some of it. I just rewatched Aliens and like, there's a little bit of redshirting there, but not as bad as, you know, the classic. I would just urge us to be thinking the same way on the villain side and always ask ourselves, is there a smarter choice we can make about it?

those people who would otherwise just be faceless to death. Yeah, and that's why the Bill Paxton character was so great in Aliens because it was an acknowledgement that not everybody is brave in a psychotic way. I mean, some of those characters are nuts for engaging the way they do with this incredibly scary thing. They don't seem to have fear. They don't seem to be thinking ahead like,

I had plans for my life, investments, a girlfriend, a boyfriend. I got things I want to do. They're just like, screw it. If I die, I die.

Well, that's crazy. That's just a dangerous way of thinking. Bill Paxton was like, no way, man. He was the only person who was sane. And he was correct. They should have gotten the hell out of there. And Nuka from space. Yeah, Nuka from orbit, man. There is nothing wrong with being afraid and rational because that is, in fact, how people are. And as we...

It's not that every... Look, a lot of it's tonal. So some things are going to have henchmen. That's just the way it is because the show or the movie is pushed a little bit. So for instance, Snowpiercer, which I love, they're a henchman. They don't have faces. I don't know what the arrangement is exactly. I assume they get a slightly better car maybe. But they're going in there and people are getting shot and they're like, oh...

OK, well, I guess it's our turn to go in there and get into a shooting. I mean, I would be terrified. They never look scared. Yeah. But that that's also a movie about everybody on the planet living on a train that's going around a frozen, you know, Earth. So it's already and they're eating bugs. It's like it's sci fi. It's different. But if you're talking about Breaking Bad, then you're not going to see a ton of henchmen there because people live in the world where they can get scared.

Yeah. And so in television, obviously, you have more time to build out universes and scenarios, so it'd be more likely to be able to understand the supporting characters on Sopranos. You have a good sense of who they are, and so that's all built out. In feature films, it's tough because you cannot divide focus so much. In a Robert Altman movie, you really could see everyone's point of view, but you're not going to encounter that in a more traditional feature. That's just not sort of how it works. So I guess I'm just asking you to

be mindful of it. If you're writing, you know, in a pushed universe in science fiction or fantasy or an action movie, yes, some stuff is going to be a little bit more common. But I also see this in comedies, especially high concept comedies, where everyone just seems to be there to service this plot, this sort of high concept plot. And I don't see a lot of attention being paid to like, wait, how would a real person in the real world respond to this? And is there anything useful to be taken from that? Because people just accept the premise a little too easily. Yeah.

I mean, it's kind of amusing. They're like, this job is so good, I need to die. It's not that great if you're dead. No, no. Defend your own interests first. Everyone is selfish enough and wants to survive enough that they're going to pull back and defend themselves when they need to. So just be thinking about that for your characters. Yeah, probably if you're writing guard three and next guard and tall guard and yeah, there's trouble.

So a lot of times in features...

And TV as well. You'll see sort of functional villains like, well, that villain got the job done, basically served as a good obstacle for your hero, kept the plot moving. But a week later, I couldn't tell you anything about who that villain was. And so I wanted to look at sort of in the movies that I love and the movies that had villains that I loved, what were some of those characteristics of those villains that I loved? And so I boil it down to seven things. And then Chris wrote a nice long blog post that sort of talked through in more detail and gave more examples of what those kind of villains were.

were and how they functioned. So I thought we'd take a few minutes to look at this list of unforgivable villains and sort of how you can implement them. Great. Cool.

So my first tip for unforgettable villains is something I've said a lot on the show, is that the best villains think that they're the hero. They are the protagonists of their own stories. They have their own inner life. They have hopes. They have joys. They might seek revenge or power, but they believe they have a reason why they deserve it. They can...

reframe all of the events of the story where they are the good guy in the story. Yeah, nobody does bad things just because. Even when we have nihilistic villains, they're trying to make a point. But the Joker is trying to make a point, you know? There's always a purpose. And so, yes, of course, they think they're the hero. They have, you know that thing where you look at somebody on TV, maybe in the middle of a political season, and you think, how is that guy so happy about all these terrible things he's saying?

Well, because he believes in part that he's the right one and that his purity is in fact why he's the hero. Just as a character says, I won't kill is being pure. You know, Luke at the end of Return of the Jedi is being pure. I'm not going to kill you. I'm not going to kill you because I'm a good guy. Right? That's my purity. Well, on the other side,

The villains are heroes with the same purity towards their goal. And other people are these wish-washy, mush-mouthy heroes in name only. They're Hino's. Yeah.

So I think it's absolutely crucial is that they are seeing all the events of the story from their own point of view, and they can defend the actions that they're taking because they are heroes. Our favorite show, Game of Thrones, does that so well where you see characters who are on one hand despicable, but on the other hand are heroic because you see why they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. So Daenerys completely be the villain of that story. It's very easy to frame her as the villain in that story, and yet

We don't because of how we've been introduced to her. Yeah, for sure. And then look back to the very first episode. It's maybe the last line of the first episode, I think. Jaime Lannister pushes Bran out the window, sends him theoretically to his death, although it turns out to just paralyze him. And then he turns back to his sister and he says, the things we do for love. And he's doing it because he's protecting her because they're in love.

Now I go, okay, I don't like you and I don't like what you did, but I recognize a human motivation in you. Now, some movies are really bad at shoving this in. You never get to the end of a movie where you're like, why the hell was this guy doing all this bananas stuff? And then as he's being arrested, he goes, don't you understand?

Blah, blah, blah. Yeah. It's like, it's already done. It's already over. Or that bit of explanation comes like right before they're about to, you know, before I kill you, let me tell you why I'm doing what I'm doing. And it's like a weird position paper. It doesn't, it's not felt. Whereas at the end of Speaking of Sorkin, A Few Good Men, when Jack Nicholson says, you've weakened a country, right?

I believe he believes that. 100%. I believe that he instructed people to hurt other people because he's doing the right thing. He's pure and they're not. So let me get to my next point, which is unforgettable villains, they take things way too far. So whereas hopefully all villains see themselves as the hero, the ones who stick with you are the ones who just go just fine.

too far. It's simple villains who just have sort of simple aims like, I'm going to rob this bank. Well, you're not going to remember that one. The one who's like, I'm going to blow up the city block in order to get into this bank. That's the villain you remember. And so you have to look at for ways in which you can take your villain and push them just too far so that they cross, they transgress something that no one is ever supposed to transgress.

And the ones that really stick, the Hannibal Lecters, the Buffalo Bills, the Alan Rickman and Diehard, they are just willing to go just as far as they need to go in order to get the job done. And actually too far to get the job done. Correct. And in their demonstration of their willingness to go to any length to achieve their goal, you realize that if they get away with it,

this will not be the last time they do it. That this person actually needs to die because they are a virus that has been released into the world. And if we don't stop them, they're going to keep doing it forever until the world is consumed in their insanity. And then you have this desire in the audience to,

for your hero to stop the villain. We rarely root for a hero to stop the villain because we want the hero to feel good. We root for it because that person has to go, you know? Absolutely. We don't root for the hero as much if it's like a mild villain. It has to be the villain who is absolutely hell-bent on destruction. And it doesn't have to be destroying the world, but like destruction of what is important to us as the audience. Yeah, it could be somebody who just wants to take your kid from you. Yep, that's a good enough villain. And then you're like, and you just realize you won't...

Stop, you'll ruin the rest of my kid's life and you might do this to somebody else's kid. You just feel like you should be stopped in order to return the world to its proper state of being a just world, which as we know, realistically, it's not.

never going to happen. No. Third point about unforgivable villains is that they live at the edges of society. So sometimes they are literally out in the forest or they're a creepy old monster in the cave. But sometimes they are at the edges of sort of moral society. So they place themselves outside the normal rules of law or the normal rules of acceptable behavior. And so even if they are the insiders, even if they are the mayor of the town, they don't function within the prescribed boundaries of like what the

the mayor of the town can do. So you always have to look at them. They perceive themselves as outsiders, even if they are already in positions of power. They certainly perceive themselves to be special. Yes. You know, there were a lot of people, speaking of the Soviet Union, in the 30s and 40s, a lot of people who were Soviet officials who did terrible things. But frequently they were tools, or sometimes Stalin would go so far as to call them useful idiots.

Stalin was special. Yeah. He considered himself special and special people are different than people who do bad things. So when you're thinking about your villain, you know, it may not be one of those movies where the villain actually has henchmen per se, but special people do have their own versions of henchmen. Yeah. People who believe them at all costs, uh,

You know, the poor, the albino guy in the Da Vinci Code. You know, he's a villain, kind of, but he's not the villain. He's a tool. Yeah, so even if the villain has prophets or a society around him, he perceives himself as being outside that society as well. He can go ahead and bend the rules because he knows, once again, he knows what's better. He is different and above everybody else. That's why we're fascinated by a good one, you know?

Also, because they hold up a mirror to the reader. That's my fourth point is that a good hero sort of represents what the audience aspires to be, what we hope we could be. The unforgettable villain is the one who you sort of fear you might be. It's like sort of all your sort of darkest impulses. It's like, what if I actually did that terrible thing? That's that villain. It's that person you worry deep down you really are.

Which goes to motivations, universally recognizable motivations. And this is something that comes up constantly when you're talking about villains. The first thing people will ask is, what do they want? Right? Just like a hero, because they are the hero of the story. What do they want? What are they motivated by? What's driving them to do these crazy, crazy things?

And it's never, oh, it's just random because again, that's not. So for instance, you can look at Buffalo Bill, the character in Silence of the Lambs is really more of like an animal. Yeah. Right. We can talk about his motivations and they do, but those motivations are foreign to all of us. Yeah. It's a rare, rare person who is sociopathic and also violent and also attempting to convince himself that he will be better if he's transgender, which he's really not.

That's not any of us. But Hannibal Lecter is. Hannibal Lecter has these things in him that we recognize in ourselves. And in fact...

It's very easy to fantasize that you are Hannibal Lecter. Yeah. It's kind of sexy. It's fascinating. A good villain is somebody that you kind of guiltily imagine being. Who hasn't imagined being Darth Vader? He's the coolest. Yeah, you imagine having that kind of power, either the power to manipulate, the power to literally control things with your mind. That's a seductive thing, and I think that the best villains can tap into that part of the reader or the audience. Also, I would say that the great...

The great villains, they let us know what they want. And we sort of hit on it earlier. It's like sometimes you'll get to the end of a story and then the villain will reveal what the plan was all along. That's never satisfying. The really great villains that stick with you, you're clear on what they're going after from the start. And even if it's Jaws, I mean, you understand what is driving them and you understand at every moment what their next aim is. And sort of they're not just there to be an obstacle to the hero. They have their own agenda. Yeah.

Yeah, a good villain, a good movie villain will sometimes hide what they're after and you have to kind of figure it out or tease it out. For instance, you mentioned Seven. You don't quite get what Kevin Spacey's up to. In fact, it seems just random, like so a bad villain, random acts of senseless violence, you know, kind of connected together by this interesting motif until the end when you realize, oh, there's some sort of larger purpose here.

They often tell us what they want because they have clarity. Good heroes don't have clarity. The protagonist shouldn't have too much clarity. Otherwise, they're boring as hell, right? They should be conflicted inside about what's right and what's wrong. They make choices. Villains are not conflicted at all. So, of course, they're going to be able to say, what do I want? I want this because of this. That's it. I figured it out already. I don't have any of your hand wringing or sweating. I know what I'm going to do and I know why and I believe it's correct. That's it.

And they tell us what that is. And so they may not tell the hero what that is. Often they will. But we as the audience know what they're actually going for. And that's really crucial. And ultimately, whatever the villain is after, the hero is a crucial part of that plan. The great villains make it personal. And so we talked about Seven. You can't get much more personal than sort of what Kevin Spacey does to poor Brad Pitt's wife in Seven. It starts as a story that could be about, you know,

some random killings, but it dials down to something very, very personal. And that's why we are so drawn into how things end. Well, what's interesting is that in the real world, this is another area where narrative drifts so far apart from the real world. In the real world, most villains are defined by people that do bad things and they're repugnant. Mm-hmm.

We like our movie villains to be charismatic. We love it. We like our movie villains to be seductive and interesting and charming. And part of that

is watching them have a relationship with the hero. We want the villain to have a relationship with the hero. It can be a brutal relationship, but a fascinating relationship. And the only way you could have a relationship is if the villain is interested in the hero. And inevitably they are. Sometimes it's the villain's interest in the hero that becomes their undoing. And again, you go to the archetype of Darth Vader and Luke. Yeah. He wants to know his son.

And so ultimately, that's what undoes him. Yeah, you look at the Joker and Batman in Christopher Nolan's version of it is that the Joker could not exist without Batman fundamentally. They are both looking at the same city, the same situation, and without each other, they both wouldn't function really. It's like the Joker could create his chaos. He could sort of try to bring about these acts of chaos to make everyone look at sort of how they are and how the city functions. But without Batman, if you can't corrupt Batman, it's not worth it for him.

Right. Batman is the thing he pushes against. And The Killing Joke, which is maybe the greatest graphic novel of all time, is entirely about that relationship. And there's something at the heart of the Joker-Batman dynamic that's probably at the heart of most hero-villain dynamics in movies, and that is that there is a lot of shared quality that...

There's a similarity. It's why you hear this terrible, terrible line so many times. You and I, we are not so different. Because it's true. Because it's true. It doesn't mean you should say it. That's right. Don't say it. But it is true. You can maybe find a way to visualize that or sort of let your story say that for you, but just don't say that. Just don't say it. Or have them make fun of it. Yeah, have them make fun of it. My final point was that flaws are features and that in general, the...

villains that you remember, there's something very, very distinctive about them, either physically or a vocal trait. There's something that you can sort of hang them on so you can remember what they're like because of that one specific tick or look or thing that they do. And so, you know, obviously Craig is a big fan of hair and makeup and costuming. And I think all those things are crucial, but you have to look at sort of like, what is it about your villain that a person's going to remember a month from now, a year from now, that they can remember that

If they can picture them, they could hear their voice. Hannibal Lecter is so effective because you can hear his voice. Buffalo Bill, we know what he looks like when he's putting on that suit. Find those ways that you can distinguish your villain so that we can remember him a year from now.

It would be nice, I think, for screenwriters to always think about how their villain will first be perceived by the audience because you're exactly right. This is part of what goes to the notion that the villain is the hero of their story, that the villain is a special person. What you're signifying to the audience is this is a person who is more important than everybody else in the movie except our hero.

Right? And just as I made a big deal about the hero, I have to make a big deal about this person because they are special. And if you look at the first time you see Hannibal Lecter, his hair, his first start with the hair is perfect. It's not like, it's not great hair. He's a balding man, but it's perfectly combed back. Then he's wearing his, I guess, his asylum outfit, crisp, clean, and he's wearing a

And he's standing with the most incredible posture. And his hands, the way his hands and his arms are, it's as if he's assembled himself into this perfected mannequin of a person and he does not blink. And that's great. Just from the start, you know, we all get that little hair raising feeling when somebody creepy comes by. Sometimes it's the littlest thing like that.

And sometimes it's a very big thing. So like Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies is one of my favorite arrivals of a villain in the story because she's wearing this pink dress that she's into the whole movie. And from the moment you see here, you know in a general sense what she is, but you just don't know how far she's going to push it. So she seems like this busybody, but then you realize she's actually a monster. She's a monster in a pink house coat. And she's phenomenal. And that's a very distinctive choice of...

sort of the school mom taken way too far and you see it from the very start. And so I can't, I could never see that kind of costuming again without thinking of her. That's a sign of a really good... Yeah, that's an example of taking something that's

amusingly innocuous and not villainous. Like, oh, a sweet old lady who loves cats and collects plates. Yeah. And loves pink and green and pastel colors. And saying, that lady, now, she's a sadist. Ooh, bleh. Great, you know? Just great. And then you get it. You walk into her office and you can smell like that bad rose perfume, you know? Terrific. ♪

And that is our show for this week. Scriptness is produced by Drew Marquardt, with segments produced by Stuart Friedell, Megan Arrau, and Dutroux himself. It is edited by Matthew Cilelli, and our outro this week is also by Matthew Cilelli. It's his homage to Silence of the Lambs. Matthew's so talented. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

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Drew, thanks for putting together this compendium. Thank you, John.