Reel Expression

Ok.. so your main character has a goal and during Act II we need to throw obstacles at them in interesting ways in order to create conflict. If nothing stands in the character’s way then you have no story.

The antagonist isn’t just a speed bump but a towering brick wall between your protagonist and his/her goal. They don’t have to be evil and planning to destroy something, they just have to be a barrier of some sort.

The conflict must escalate. Things have to get worse or else people will get bored. Story is change and if nothing has changed then there is no story. That means the antagonist must be raising the ante, or the protagonist must be doing things to avoid the conflict, which makes things worse.

Things must always get worse before they get better. That means your antagonist must be active rather than passive. They have a goal too and its the protagonist that prevents them from achieving their goal. That means the motivation must make sense to the audience. A good villain is smart, clever and cunning. They do everything for a reason and don’t make silly mistakes.

In a thriller the most important part is the Villain’s Plan and the most important character is the villain.

Now there doesn’t have to be a HUMAN antagonist, but it needs to be some tangible obstacle. There are 3 kinds of conflict: Man vs Man, Man vs Nature, and Man against Himself. The first 2 are common in film because we can see the conflict.

The conflict has to be something that is visually expressed since you need to record it on film. That leaves out some moral and ethical conflicts because they are about how people think. However, you can make some moral and ethical conflicts visual through symbols. You can also make choices visual by creating situations where physical actions show moral decisions. If you can’t find a way to SHOW the internal conflict, the audience has no way of knowing it exists.

No matter what genre you are writing, you’ll need an antagonist to stand between the hero and his goal. They can be the nicest character in the film, the hero’s mom, best friend, and even the love of his life. But they must be something we can see. If you can’t see a conflict on film, it doesn’t exist. That’s why we have villains.