Navigating Ensemble Casts: Balancing Multiple Protagonists in Storytelling (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Mr. McKee, I really appreciate your mentoring us and the question I have is, on working with an ensemble cast and working with multiple people and multiple protagonists, what would you suggest or what is the best way to work through that? Or at what point in time do you say, no it shouldn't go multiple but go back to a solo protagonist? And thank you for your answer and thank you for your coaching.

Speaker 2: Working with multiple protagonists is such a tricky business, it's so subjective so often. When you have a single protagonist, it's not easy but it's relatively easy to focus on one human being and their struggle through life and through whatever story you're trying to tell. When you've got six people, each of these stories has to be thematically related, it's got to be all variations on the same fundamental idea such as the famous film Parenthood is eight different stories, all variations on the notion that in the game of Parenthood you cannot win. And so you have to find amongst the various stories that you're trying to tell a theme that actually unifies all these stories. You can't just throw a half a dozen characters with their lives together and call it a movie. The next thing that'll happen is that these stories are not going to be equally important or equally powerful or meaningful, there's going to be a hierarchy. One of these stories you will find somehow as you struggle with all of this material, one of them is going to emerge as the most important, one is the least important and there's going to be a hierarchy. Let's say you've got six stories, you're going to rank them from six to one and therefore the most important story is going to get more screen time and it's going to get more emphasis. It might be the story that you finally end the movie on, who can say, but it's going to be more important so it's going to get more emphasis. And so you've got this juggling act of sorting out six different stories as to their value, as to their meaning, as to their theme and what often happens is that one of these stories starts to take over. It starts to become, that protagonist starts to fascinate the writer, it starts demanding more and more screen time, more and more emphasis and the next thing you know you've got a central plot and five subplots and it's not a multi-protagonist telling anymore, it's a conventional single plot supplemented by subplots. And how you find that balance, if you're determined to make a multi-plot story, how do you keep one of them from overwhelming the others or not, I can't tell you. It is, as I said, it is something that you discover during the writing as you feel the weight of these different stories and your interest in these characters shifts and changes and some of these stories just don't come to anything so you're going to cut them and tossing that salad takes a real story shift.