WRITING THE HEIST THRILLER
By Ian Long
"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley" *
- Robert Burns
"Of our elaborate plans, the end"
- The Doors
These quotes sum up the basic theme of the Heist or Caper film. In such stories we see a group of people, usually men, creating a meticulous plan to do something, usually violent and criminal, and almost always failing spectacularly.
The Heist movie is one of the most concentrated kinds of thriller, a very pared-down form of film-making, and so a useful one to study.
It anatomises human motives and the problems which can occur when people try to work towards a supposedly common goal. It speaks about the internal frictions and external pressures which thwart such schemes. And it gives us an insight into the skills and personalities involved in criminal activities.
Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino both kicked off their careers with films in this subgenre, which doesn't have to be hugely complex or expensive to make an impact (although it can be elaborate, as in The Usual Suspects). Much of its interest lies in the issues outlined below.
One thing is clear: if you can write a good script in this form, bringing something original to the basic template, there's every chance it would be snapped up by a producer.
* "gang aft agley": Scottish, "often go wrong"
PLOTTING AND CHARACTERISATION
The Heist story is a gift to writers because it's so easy to create subplots: they emerge naturally from the logic of the material. The genre requires a diverse group of people with very different backgrounds, needs and expectations to work together. And the "faultless" plan has a built-in sense of irony: it just has to fail... doesn't it?
Each character has a different agenda. If they are at varying stages of their lives, their motives will differ similarly. They may have a higher good in mind, or something wholly selfish. They may want to pay off gambling debts, raise money for an operation, or impress a demanding wife.
Some participants will be career criminals, committed to violent ways of making a living; others are technical experts who need to enticed, bribed or forced into taking part. Character-types extend from fearless, brutal near-psychopaths to men struggling to hide their shattered self-confidence, their dependence on drink or drugs, from their fair-weather colleagues.
Perhaps someone secretly wants the caper to fail, because they're serving outside interests; maybe they are a police agent, or work for a rival gang.
STRUCTURING THE STORY
The Heist story falls naturally into a number of stages:
Planning & Recruitment - The Job - A Chase - Hiding Out - Investigation - Denouement
Not all of these need to be emphasised, or even present, in every story. You can concentrate on the Planning and Recruitment stage, depicting it all as a "left-handed" version of the corporate world, minimising the actual Job. Or you might make the most of the Job's action potential and the violence of the Chase, paying less attention to characterisation.
Cutting Up the Story
Heist films are particularly suited to playing with time and structure, because the sections are so clearly defined.
You can switch backwards and forwards, confident that the audience will follow the action: each section looks different and is associated with a certain atmosphere and location; the protagonists will probably be clothed differently in each, and by the time of the chase and hide-out sequences they may have picked up injuries or be weighed down by booty.
You can begin with the Job and intercut scenes showing how it has come about, or start when it is over, with the protagonist wounded; or, as in John Boorman's Point Blank, (arguably) dead. The audience must piece together preceding events while simultaneously following the unfolding narrative.
The story becomes a cat-and-mouse game, playing with the audience's hopes and expectations as it comes to identify with or fear and despise certain characters. There's plenty of scope here for betrayal and double-crossing, for the deliberate fostering and breaking of friendships and loyalties, and for the clever dealing-out of information to the audience.
Each character has his own destiny, separate from the fortunes of the group. Who will survive? Who will get the money? And is even this apparent success somehow complicated (the bus teetering on the cliff edge at the end of The Italian Job)?
And Think About This:
How can you run interesting variations on the basic heist template? What "caper" would work in a British context? Does it have to be criminal in nature, or do other endeavours have a similar structure - gathering a disparate team, skating on the edge of the law, crashing and burning in a very final, public way?<br><br>
Sounds a bit like making a film, perhaps?
MORE GENRE WORKSHOPS
This writing tip came out of our Thriller and Film Noir workshop, which took place in June 2011 (it will be scheduled again next year).
Ian Long will be holding a workshop on writing Science Fiction, Speculative and High Concept films in autumn 2011, focusing on stories like Moon, Groundhog Day, Being John Malkovich, Artificial Intelligence etc which twist reality in various ways to create their unusual narratives and make their telling points.
Some of the best recent and classic movies have come from this group of genres - a natural home for "high concept" stories. We'll look at the many utopian, dystopian, satirical and philosophical ideas which these tales can broach, and watch clips from a wide variety of films demonstrating a fascinating range of alternative realities.
Find out more about this by him at ian.long@euroscript.co.uk.
