Film Courage: Is it possible to have a tragedy or a sad ending that is also satisfying to the audience?
Jill Chamberlain, Script Consultant/Author/Writer: It is, it’s tricky though. What a lot of people get wrong is that a tragedy is not like the colloquial usage of the word tragic. We’re not just pummeling someone down and down and down for a tragedy to be satisfying. They’re actually going up, up, up before they come down and so that’s what a lot of people miss. It’s not satisfying to see someone just pummeled to death. It is satisfying to see someone whose flaw is greed, get richer and richer and richer as they go up, and then get pulled down by that own flaw.
Also related to that is that their downfall should be primarily about their flaw, it should not be about external things. I mean their external things will contribute to it but we don’t want characters that are merely victims that are just victims of bad things happening to them.
A protagonist is a character that isn’t just a victim. There may also be a victim in some senses of the word but there’s a reason why we’re putting them on this journey and there’s something in them that needs to be tested. There’s some ways they asked for this journey, they’re not just a victim of it. I think people sometimes when writing tragedies they just think Oh this is a sad ending story and so I’m going to make it a tragedy. You have to have an up, up, up. We also have to see that with the choice they make at the climax that it’s a bad choice…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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