A Matter of Tone
The 1996 screenplay for Ray Gunn, an unproduced film written by Brad Bird and Matthew Robbins, opens with a letter to the reader signed by Bird. It speaks of a futuristic art deco city, Buck Rogers and hardboiled detectives in the pre-war era. “I wanted to do a detective story set in the future, but I wanted that future to be seen from the same time period during which the detective story was at its peak,” wrote Bird. “I wanted to combine two worlds: the squeaky clean look of Buck Rogers and the gritty, been-around character from pulp novels. Picture that look, that world, with all its visual splendor, when you read this script.” What that letter was meant to do was set up a tone, a feel for the story that otherwise may have been lost to the executives reading the script.
Maintaining a balanced tone through the length of a movie is one of those things that can be deceptively hard to achieve. If done correctly, the overall effect will be imperceptible to the audience, but any miscalculation has the potential to be as disruptive as a hammer blow to the forehead. Bird’s concern with Ray Gunn probably had to do with the fact that the film was supposed to be animated, and the Western animation industry is not particularly well known for producing a lot of retrofuturistic noir thrillers targeted to young adults. Chances are he worried that people were going to read the story with the tone of a small kids’ movie in mind, and the resulting picture was going to be a terribly distorted version of his original vision. Hitting the right tone, as it happens, is an essential part of constructing a specific experience.
For me, the first time tone popped up in a discussion for a project was after I had moved to the European independent scene, during the making of Wolfwalkers. I had been given a sequence where the film’s protagonist was being told about the arrival of English troops to the Irish countryside, and the effect they were having on the local culture and wildlife. I storyboarded a take on this that included a spectral vision of Oliver Cromwell rising between the trees as they spoke of him, it looked cool and stylish, and it was completely wrong. The mistake informed the next version of the scene, it made us all realize that the action was too static as written, and eventually it evolved into something different. My attempt could have worked for something like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but it felt out of place not only in the type of movie we were making, but also in a moment that was more about two characters bonding with each other and therefore needed a feel-good air to it.
On a separate occasion, I attended a meeting with director Nora Twomey where she talked a few artists through some acting notes. She screened a couple of scenes from the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Are Thou? and the Disney classic Beauty and the Beast. We were supposed to look at the body language on display in each film and take notice of two examples of heightened acting that nevertheless telegraphed pretty different intentions. Characters from O Brother don’t really behave like normal people, but they are portrayed a thousand times more realistically than anyone from Beauty and the Beast. This is because the Disney film is a children’s musical, cartoony and operatic, while the Coens’ movie is a dramedy, far more subtle and unique in its approach. The story was famously based on Homer’s The Odyssey, transporting fantastical characters like a cyclops into a rural United States setting during the Great Depression. It’s playful, surreal, nostalgic and touching. This results in a fable-like atmosphere somewhere between the grounded realism and the showy pantomime. But then again, many of the Coens’ movies could be described that way.
Fargo could illustrate an entire thesis about tone all by itself. A quick look at its screenplay makes one wonder if the Coens didn’t consider at any point prefacing it with a letter like the one Brad Bird wrote. As mere text, the movie reads almost like a regular thriller, each scene playing it completely straight. Taken out of context and without knowing who wrote it, you could forgive anybody for thinking that it’s a chilling crime mystery meant to keep you at the edge of your seat. Yet it was still possible to see through the seams and feel some of its true nature in there:
Roughly twenty minutes into Fargo, two men break into a Minneapolis house with the intention of kidnapping a local housewife. This is the inciting incident of the story, as moments earlier we had just learned that the woman’s husband is really the mastermind behind the kidnapping but had unsuccessfully tried to call it off, getting himself into quite the conundrum. On the page, the thugs come in, and struggle with the woman. She briefly manages to escape into the bathroom after biting one of them; they force their way in after her, find the bathroom empty, and ultimately the guy that got bitten discovers the woman hiding behind the shower curtain as he applies some ointment to his finger. It reads like a fairly standard home invasion scene, except for the finger part. “Unguent,” the kidnapper says, “I need unguent.” It’s an amusing, odd sounding word, and it’s completely bizarre that he would stop to look for medicine in the middle of the crime instead of trying to chase down their victim. But that’s the dynamic the Coens had established for their characters, one played dourly by Peter Stormare and the other neurotically by Steve Buscemi. They make such an awkward pair that just looking at the two standing together, with little else going on, is funny.
On screen, the whole scene is elevated by several new elements absent in the script. Right before the break in, the woman can be found knitting while watching some silly morning show. Steve Buscemi walks into view on the balcony and tries to get a look through the window by cupping his hands over his eyes and leaning on the glass. The woman watches him speechless, and doesn’t react until he breaks the window with a crowbar. After running from the bathroom, she tumbles down the stairs wrapped in the shower curtain, and once lying unconscious on the floor, Peter Stormare pokes her once to make sure she’s out. Everything about the scene is ridiculous, but most of it was brought in on set. Writing, casting, blocking, acting and lots of other unseen choices work together to take a sequence from an ordinary kidnapping situation to a great example of dark comedy seasoned with a good dose of deadpan absurdism.
Dry humor is also the specialty of Wes Anderson, who, much like the Coens, doesn’t bother writing scripts that make any particular note of the ludicrous things happening on screen. He is directing them himself, after all. Instead, he centers all comedy almost entirely around images. Actors deliver their lines in the monotone inflection of a notary, moving from one position to the next like wooden figurines in a Swiss clock. But the pastel colors around them suggest that they inhabit a dreamlike reality, and the clinically framed shot compositions can’t help but make everything look hilarious. You can pause a Wes Anderson movie at any point and the still picture you get will be whimsical and charming. And it will tell you all about the kind of the story it is from, without the need of any more context.
Other people prefer to do things a different way. Quentin Tarantino, for instance, is someone that makes markedly clear what his movies are supposed to feel like even as a screenplay. This makes sense, as his style is brash and irreverent without sacrificing an ounce of wit. A few years back, when his script for Hateful Eight leaked online, thousands of fans got to experience what it is like to read a Tarantino movie before watching it. And as it turned out, it’s not really that different.
Tarantino screenplays are page turners. His characters exude personality and every single thing they say is entertaining. You follow the story not so much because you want to see what happens next, but because you just can’t get enough of these people talking. Plot points catch you by surprise as you blissfully enjoy a seemingly random conversation about anything from French hamburgers to Madonna’s discography, like that one time poor Marvin got his head blown off completely out of nowhere as gangsters Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield talked about divine intervention in Pulp Fiction. These are all stylistic choices that contribute to set up a comedic tone, but Tarantino goes as far as to instill that tone into the description paragraphs of his screenplays as well. He embellishes stuff that is never going to make it out of the page and exists only to aid the reader, and he does it so well that reading his scripts is often a complementary experience to watching the movies themselves. Pulp Fiction in particular even got to be featured at a live reading event once where lines such as “Sodomy and the Judds can still be heard going strong behind the closed door” became crowd favorites. Add in some 1960s tunes, Bruce Willis holding a katana and you have a winner.
Mixing genres can be another challenge when it comes to setting up the right tone. Remember when The Martian won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical and that caught everybody off guard? Well, the film certainly isn’t a musical. Nor a comedy exactly. It’s more of a science-fiction adventure. But it uses music really efficiently to shape its tone and align it better with the tongue-in-cheek approach of the book the story is based on. In the movie, Matt Damon plays an astronaut facing the most dreadful situation—being stuck alone on an uninhabitable planet over 50 million kilometers away from Earth—with the most optimistic worldview possible. He jokes and wisecracks, documenting his hardships in little video logs as he listens to disco music left out by his mission commander. The end product is a film which, by sheer force of its lighthearted nature, celebrates the continued triumph of space exploration over adversity. But what if we were to mix comedy… and horror?
Making a film that’s half funny and half scary work always seemed to me like the ultimate triple somersault of audiovisual gymnastics. I mean, we are not talking about your average tragicomedy here, but horror. People are not supposed to feel anxious and amused at the same time, yet there are stories out there that take advantage of the sense of relief that follows every tense situation to create a very specific kind of atmosphere. Army of Darkness, Braindead or Gremlins fit the type. But Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods is perhaps the crowning achievement of the subgenre. In it, a group of college students find themselves cornered in a rural getaway cabin by a host of undead monsters, which in turn are secretly controlled by an organization whose sole purpose is to trigger clichéd mass murder scenarios like the ones we’ve seen in countless movies.
Slashers are a kind of film that became subversive out of necessity. Their formula is so overused, their attempts to remain relevant by turning up the violence so outrageous, that they inevitably ended up morphing into a parody of themselves. This was a blessing, as they now have the unique ability to play with audience expectations and supply us with a never-ending series of inventive takes on the same story. That obnoxious blonde that gets cut in half by zombies early on? Of course she would, she’s the promiscuous dimwit of the ensemble and therefore she goes first. The virginal lead with artistic sensibilities, though? She must survive until the end somehow. The beauty of The Cabin in the Woods is that it took all those preconceptions to the extreme by wrapping them in an acutely self-aware, multi-layered story that made fun of every conceivable genre convention. Some clever parallel editing with contrasting viewpoints, outlandish murder scenes and loads of fake-looking blood did the rest.
Back in the 90s, James Cameron tried to secure the rights to Jurassic Park, but Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures beat him to it at the last minute. He apparently envisioned the film as something darker and nastier than what we eventually got, but upon watching what Spielberg had done, he realized that his sensibilities were not right for the story. Indeed, Spielberg has a special talent for walking the tightrope between adult and children’s entertainment, and with Jurassic Park he managed a mix of adventure and horror that never loses sight of who its intended audience is. During the T-Rex attack sequence, two helpless kids are roared at, crushed, and nearly eaten alive over several grueling minutes that culminate in the demise of Donald Gennaro, the first person to be gobbled down by dinosaurs in the movie. His death could’ve played out in a million different ways, but Spielberg chooses to sit him on a toilet in a manner that looks both somewhat demeaning and surprising for the Tyrannosaur itself, who tilts its head inquisitively a second before lurching toward its prey. The end result is a comic touch within a scary scene, which reminds the audience that this is still the same family adventure they’ve been watching for the past half an hour.
Course-correcting depending on context is one thing, since you still follow a fairly consistent path toward a clear destination. However, there is yet another possibility when it comes to narrative tone that involves the unthinkable: a course change. Based on a controversial book by Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia looks like a trite, seemingly innocuous kids movie at first sight. And that’s kind of what it is for about half of its length. But then something happens. Without getting into details, the story paints itself as escapist entertainment that welcomes the audience into a safe comfort zone, and then suddenly pulls the rug from under their feet by executing a drastic tonal shift. Within a single sequence, what started out as an unassuming children’s fantasy tale reveals itself as a rather different story dealing with subjects like grief and the significance of mourning.
Tonal shifts are high-risk maneuvers because they basically break the implicit contract with the audience that established what exactly is that they were watching to begin with. They’re perhaps more frequent in TV, where creators have the luxury of being able to modify the flavor of their show either gradually between seasons or from one episode to the next. Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad began as a story with strong comedic undertones, chronicling the misfortunes of a meek high school teacher as he bumbled his way into the criminal underworld. However, by the last season, the tone had turned somber and grim to reflect the character’s transformation. Years before Breaking Bad, Gilligan was also behind a far more daring tonal shift when he pushed for the addition of comedy episodes in The X-Files, a show better known for its moody atmosphere and psychological horror leanings. The gamble paid off, and nowadays episodes with funny strokes such as ‘Small Potatoes’ or ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’ are sometimes ranked among the best in the series.
Speaking about tone has a tinge of esotericism that is difficult to brush away. There is not one single factor that can make it work, but rather it stems from a combination of everything that goes into making a movie. Truth is, you either get it right or you don’t. Much of it comes down to personal sensibility, and it develops organically through a shared vision that informs the process. Still, most audiences don’t give it half the importance it deserves. For all the complaints about acting and writing in The Phantom Menace over the years, the real reason people reacted negatively toward that movie and its two sequels was probably just tone. Many films with far more convoluted storylines but a consistent tone regularly get a pass from everyone, however, there’s something about bringing fart jokes, lengthy congressional disputes and space samurai sword fights together into the same story that doesn’t sit right. Sometimes, we might spend hours rationalizing our takes on films around specific performances or cinematography choices, but the real reason they clicked for us may not be that perfectly delivered line or beautiful early morning shot. It could be more about how one thing supports another to bring a specific kind of reality to life. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of tone.
• Header art by Matt Taylor.
