I’m a big proponent of point of view in screenplays. Which character has storytelling ability? I say stay with your main character as much as possible. Keep the story through their eyes.
CinemaStix just posted a video essay about The Bourne Identity, which just might be a better film if we cut out all the Treadwell scenes. This is the single character point of view version:
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I'm a big proponent of point of view in screenplays too, Mike Boas. And POV in scenes. I agree. Keep the story through the main character’s eyes, unlike the story calls for something different.
And I thought about something when I read your post. Sometimes writers pick the wrong character as the main ccharacter. Say a writer wants to pick a businessman as the main character. Maybe the story will be better if the janitor in the businessman's building is the main character.
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The case for Bourne Identity is that if we never leave the character, we are more involved in the mystery, learning as he learns.
In the actual movie, we're ahead of the character, so the tension comes more from “what will he do when he finds out what we know?” A valid way to go, but it’s interesting to me that the story could work the other way with different tensions.
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The best movies in my opinion are deft at shifting the points of view around to capture the story from different angles. A great hyper-focused one track POV can be cool if done well, but most of the time, I find stories benefit from being seen via multiple angles that can help add different textures and perspectives.
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I agree that most films have cutaways to multiple points of view. I had never considered that there would be downward pressure on the writer to give the lead actor fewer shoot days.
Star Wars is an interesting case. If it was all Luke's POV, it would be very different of course. We'd never get any Darth Vader until Luke sees him fight Ben! So I don't advocate that.
But if you ever see segments of the workprint, they originally had scenes with the droids intercut with Luke on the farm watching the space battle through binoculars. Then Luke goes to talk with friends before we go back to the droids in the desert. On the next edit, they threw out the Luke stuff and stayed with the droids. We actually feel for the droids more because we stay with their point-of-view longer. The whole first section of the movie acts as prologue to the Luke story, which I think works well.