USING -- AND AVOIDING -- FLASHBACKS

For all the years I’ve been doing screenwriting seminars around the country, one of the most frequent questions I hear is, “How do I write flashbacks?” I’m always a bit surprised when I’m asked this, because flashbacks are actually pretty rare in Hollywood movies (as they should be – see below). So I decided it might be a good idea to discuss exactly when this device IS most appropriate for your screenplay.

TYPES OF FLASHBACKS

Flashbacks can assume several basic forms in a screenplay, each with its own style and purpose:

THE SINGLE PAST INCIDENT is the most basic form of this device. A particular event from the past is portrayed on the screen, in order to reveal necessary information about a character’s background. For example, in Zombieland, we flash back to see Columbus’ first encounter with a zombie – the cute neighbor who spends the night in his apartment. It adds an effective sequence to the film because it’s funny, scary, reveals the character’s longing when it comes to women, reveals something about how the zombies came to exist, and foreshadows a similar moment later in the story when Columbus is with Wichita.

But such “stand alone” flashbacks are rarely seen in successful films because they can break the flow of the story. I mention it first primarily because I have seen it used repeatedly in screenplays I am asked to critique, invariably to the detriment of the script. Often such scenes unnecessarily REPEAT an event we already know about through dialogue. These writers are resorting to the most obvious way of revealing the past, rather than employing one of the far more effective methods outlined below.

THE EXPLANATION is used at the end of a mystery to show the murder being committed as the detective’s voice over explains how he figured it out. This connect-the-dots-for-the-audience approach is pretty close to the single incident flashback described above, which is why it is relegated primarily to TV mysteries like The Mentalist. But if the solution to the mystery you’ve written is quite complex, as in The Bourne Supremacy, this may be an effective choice.

THE GRADUAL REVEAL is a series of flashbacks, with each successive scene from the past revealing additional information about some event. In I Am Legend, we gradually learn the cause of the epidemic, as well as what happened to the hero’s family. This is a favorite device in amnesia stories such as The Long Kiss Goodnight, or in mystery/thrillers and courtroom dramas like Duplicity or A Few Good Men, where the pieces of a puzzle are gradually put together. Even in dramas like Ordinary People and Seven Pounds, the revelations gradually explain those heroes’ guilt and subsequent actions.

This approach is far more effective than the previous methods, because it teases the reader with small bits of information throughout the course of your screenplay, rather than revealing everything at once. This not only provides the necessary exposition, it creates a great deal of curiosity and anticipation.

BOOKENDS are used when an entire movie is told in flashback. The film opens with a character (almost always the hero) as an older person, then flashes back as she becomes the narrator for the film, which usually ends with the hero back once again in “present” time.

Titanic, Slumdog Millionaire, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button all employ this structure very effectively. It’s especially useful when writing period pieces, as it allows the audience to be drawn into the past with a “once upon a time” introduction.
        
Ghandi and Lawrence of Arabia take a similar approach, but instead of the hero narrating his own story, each movie opens with the hero’s death, and then segues into the past with comments by those who knew him.

THE BIG ACTION TEASER occurs when a script opens with some high conflict/high emotion scene from the middle of the story, then flashes back to tell everything that occurred until we reach that big action moment. The scene is then repeated, and the story continues on to the end of the movie. The Hangover opens with three guys looking like they’ve been through a war, standing in the desert next to what seems to be a broken-down car, and one of them trying to explain how they lost their friend who’s supposed to be getting married hundreds of miles away.

The same device is used to open Mission Impossible 3 and Michael Clayton. It allows the screenwriter to grab the reader with big action or emotion, and create immediate curiosity and anticipation.

THE PROLOGUE is an event from the past, which begins the screenplay, followed by the story itself, which takes place in the present. Up, He’s Just Not That Into You, Star Trek, and The Departed all open in this way. This approach can be a very effective way of creating curiosity and anticipation in your reader, and of foreshadowing your hero’s behavior to give it credibility later in the story. If we didn’t see the young William Wallace witness the murder of his father and the other Scots at the opening of Braveheart, his passion for freedom from England would be harder to believe.

PARALLEL PLOTS are the most complex use of flashbacks in film. In such movies as Fried Green Tomatoes, The English Patient and The Usual Suspects, two fully realized stories, usually connected by at least one common character, are intertwined, both structurally and thematically. Such a juggling act is extremely difficult, since the screenwriter must maintain the audience’s emotional involvement in both stories concurrently, despite necessarily long periods while either set of characters disappears from the screen.

If attempting to write such a script, you should structure each story independently, with its own separate hero, motivation and resolution. Then intertwine the two so that each flashback, or flash forward, leaves the audience hanging – compelled to stick around to see the outcome of whatever conflict the “abandoned” hero was left confronting.

Then make certain that the story occurring in the past is connected in every way possible to the one in the present. In each of the examples above, a character in the later plot line is telling someone else the story of what happened in the earlier story.

ALTERNATIVES TO FLASHBACKS

Now that I’ve told you when and how to use flashbacks in your screenplay, my best advice is DON’T DO IT. While the examples I’ve given use this device very effectively, in most screenplays flashbacks simply indicate that the writer has taken the easy way out. By resorting to the most obvious and hackneyed method of revealing the past, the screenwriter has failed to create a cleverer, more interesting, and more emotionally involving way to incorporate a character’s background into the story.

It’s the desires and conflicts of the present that will keep your story moving and will hold your audience. Most of the time, well written dialogue is your best tool for revealing the minimal information necessary to justify your characters’ current behavior.

And very often, having one of your characters TELL a story to the audience is actually more powerful than flashing back to show the actual event. The emotionally gripping scenes where we hear about the murders of the two cops’ parents in L.A. Confidential, the shark attack on the U.S.S. Indianapolis in Jaws, or the final time the title character saw his brothers in Saving Private Ryan, carry far more power than seeing these events played out on the screen would.

My best advice is to explore other ways of incorporating the past into your story before resorting to flashbacks. Then, if you still feel it is the best possible way of keeping the reader emotionally involved in your script, use one of the approaches outlined above.

- Michael Hauge