[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] INSIDE OUT: Character, Archetypes and The Psychology of Revision By Jacob Krueger [/spb_text_block] [divider type="thin" text="Go to top" full_width="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [blank_spacer height="30px" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [spb_text_block title="TRANSCRIPTION" pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] Hello! I'm Jacob Krueger and this is the Write Your Screenplay podcast. As you know, on this podcast, rather than looking at movies in terms of two thumbs up, two thumbs down, loved it or hated it, we look at movies in terms of what we can learn from them as screenwriters. We look at good movies, we look at bad movies, we look at movies we loved and movies that we hated. Today we're going to be looking at Inside Out. One of the exciting things about Inside Out is that the main character actually isn’t the eleven year old girl, Riley, at the center of the movie. Instead, the main character is actually an archetype inside of her head: the emotion of Joy, played by Amy Poehler. And Joy is joined by four other archetypes: Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness.   One of the most interesting things about this movie is that it's actually based on real psychological research. In fact, they even brought in two professors of psychology (Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman) to consult on the project. These psychologists wanted Pixar to have a character for every emotion in the vast array of emotions that human beings experience. And Pixar made an interesting decision, which, if you're a screenwriter, is a decision that you may want to think about as well. Instead of heeding the researchers’ advice, Inside Out writer/director Pete Docter boiled down the multitude of emotions into these five primary characters. The reason for this was simple: the story, like most screenplays, could basically only handle five or six characters. In 105 pages, you've got time to take care of five to six characters really well. You don't have time to take care of 20 characters. So, what Docter did was boil down this myriad of emotions to five primary emotions: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, and our main character, Joy.   As we watch Inside Out, what we're primarily doing is not just watching the story of the little girl, we’re watching the story of the archetypes inside of the little girl's head. Now, let's talk about what this term “archetypes” means. This is a term that is thrown around all the time in screenwriting. Oftentimes, in practice, these archetypes descend into becoming stereotypes. But an archetype is different from a stereotype. The term “archetype” doesn't come from screenwriting. It actually comes from a psychologist that many of you have heard of: Carl Jung. Jung believed in this idea called The Collective Unconscious. The idea of The Collective Unconscious is that we are all part of a shared fabric. And though we may not be consciously aware of it, through our subconscious mind, our dreams and our fantasies, we can tap into this shared consciousness. And through that shared consciousness we can connect to symbology and types of characters and events that may transcend our own experience but that every single person in the universe can relate to. Jung called these experiences, people, and events "archetypes." After Jung, a guy named Joseph Campbell came along. Campbell is the guy who came up with the idea of The Hero's Journey, which you’ve likely heard about if you’ve studied screenwriting. Campbell basically said: if there's such a thing as a Collective Unconscious, then there must also be such a thing as a Collective Story: a story that would contain all stories that we can all share and connect to. And if there was a Collective Story, then there would also be characters that we could all connect to.