Jumping around in time with flashbacks can be confusing in a script, and can make it hard for a reader to get oriented and settle into one particular story, in a specific time frame. And this is what tends to really grab readers — a discrete challenge for a main character they care about, which that character will grapple with over time. Whenever you change the time frame, you’re obviously leaving that situation for something else.
When you’re leaving it for something that happened in the past, you lose the most important elements that keep an audience engaged in scenes: big stakes, and unknown results. A story is most compelling when the main character has something significant at stake, and is engaged in a struggle whose outcome is still in question. Whenever you cut to something from a previous time period, you’re essentially dramatizing something that is already OVER, meaning its outcome isn’t a question anymore. And there isn’t the same sense of stakes, because no matter how the flashback ends, we know the character is going to end up in the present day situation that we previously saw, with some new and present problem — which it usually would have been better to have just stayed with, and developed further, rather than bringing its dramatic momentum to a full stop with a flashback.
I’m not talking here about “quick flashes” that visualize something in a character’s memory, but don’t really take us out of the present day scene. I’m also not talking about a movie like Forrest Gump, where essentially everything in the first two acts is a flashback from the bus bench where he’s telling his story to people. In that movie, these “flashbacks” essentially function AS the present, and the bus bench is just a “framing device.”
I’m talking about a story that is playing out in the present, and then suddenly stops to give us a scene or more from the past.
Sometimes writers try this because they feel the audience needs to know things about the character’s past that, for whatever reason, didn’t fit into opening ten pages, or “Set-up” section — maybe because they started the script with the character already in the middle of something, and didn’t really take the time to get the audience up to speed with them first. I think this is usually a mistake. Writers tend to underestimate how hard and yet crucial it is to get an audience emotionally invested in a main character, and thus fully engaged in the script.
A related issue I see are scripts where the Set-up consists of a variety of scenes from different time periods in the main character’s past, and we don’t really get to the “present” until right before the main story Catalyst (which the Save the Cat books say should happen right about p. 12). This approach tends to limit the audience’s ability to get invested in the character pre-Catalyst, because no matter how dramatic or sympathetic these events are, they’re still past events. They don’t immerse us in the character’s current status quo life, which is rocked by the Catalyst — and we need to be, if we are going to really feel the impact of that event on this person. Which usually requires a full ten pages (or close to it) of us experiencing and feeling what their circumstances, relationships, situations and concerns are right before the Catalyst occurs.
So what I usually recommend, if there’s some really pivotal defining event from their past that must be there, is that it takes no more than the first 2-3 pages of the script — more of a brief prologue — and then we cut to the present day, for the rest of the Set-up.
Which brings me to the normal remedy for flashbacks: the time cut. More often than not, if I see something really important in a script that is presented as a flashback, I suggest putting it earlier in the movie instead, so that things happen in chronological order. You can always “time cut” from a past event to later, and most of the time, that will be more dramatically effective (and easier for an audience to follow) than using that same event as a flashback. You just have to be careful not to use a string of such events in different time periods. It’s usually better to just have one, at most, and have the rest of the movie take place in what seems like continuous present time.
Thank you for sharing this information, I really enjoyed your storytelling fashion.
As a practicing author, I have always adopted an intuitive logic it felt natural to focus on the topic -> come up with ideas/answers ->
put it . However, nothing can save me when I was writing about thermodynamics, by way of instance, which, as you can imagine, is not my main field of expertise.
Anyway, I took some Terrific tips in the writing style, thanks for that:slightly_smiling_face:
Wow. Thanks so much Erik Bork and FD for your points. I’m just about to start work on a book adaptation for a TV series and the story is surely going to require some flashback scenes. I guess getting the right balance between what works and what doesn’t is the key to using flashbacks. This definitely helps. Thanks again.
Thanks for an excellent summary on flashbacks, Erik. It was a pleasure to read. I couldn’t agree more with your comments about Forrest Gump-style flashbacks. They don’t affect the audience’s emotional investment the way other types of flashback do and yet that distinction isn’t always made. And imagine Forrest Gump without the scenes on the bench and the voice over – the movie would certainly lose some of its beautiful quirkiness and emotional depth.
As far as flashbacks, I feel like it follows many of the “rules” of screenwriting. Don’t have a sit down eat at a table scene. Keep dialogue under three lines. Keep scenes under three pages/minutes. Don’t interrupt the story with flashbacks. Make sure your protagonist has a clear goal. Etc. These are all well and good, and I often try to follow them, or at the very least keep them in mind, but there have been countless great movies that don’t follow many of these so called “rules.” So to me, there is nothing inherently wrong with flashbacks, they’re simply hard to write well and weave into a story well. Most people are bad at writing flashbacks, but most people are also bad at writing screenplays. Take “the dinner scene” for example. I’ve heard countless times that when you simply have characters sit down and talk (usually over a meal), it is boring. And for people who read everyone and their mother’s scripts, these scenes are probably awful. But many many movies have scenes like this and I hardly ever watch the movie and think, “oh, dinner scene. This is boring.” I agree with FD. I almost always love flashbacks in movies. I think they get a bad rap because people tend to only use them to dole out exposition. This exposition dump would be boring in any scene, which is why the best writers find ways to hide it or dramatize it, flashback or not.
I agree with Derek. Meg Ryan definitely DIDN’T bore me in the Deli scene in “When Harry Meets Sally.” But, then again, I also liked “My Dinner with Andre” in which the whole movie took place over dinner.
The current fashion of structuring a movie so it feels like a downhill ski event rather than the time weaving story created using flashback scenes and sequences is the number one reason I dislike many movies made in the past ten years.
When I watch a movie, I almost always find the flashbacks to be the most interesting scenes. I love films where a character’s backstory is revealed by glimpses of past events like the way Don Draper’s Korean War backstory unfolded over several episodes of Mad Men.
Similarly, in most good mystery films, the detective is investigating an event that has already occurred and flashbacks are used to bring us back to the key events under investigation, which are usually more compelling than the investigation activity unfolding in the present.
Unlike a stage play, motion pictures have the ability to move us back and forth in time, allowing richer storytelling, deeper characterization and more variety of sets, locations and plot points.
Surely, the idea that a character’s past is less interesting than their current situation is not always the case. Surely there is room for both types of movies. Movies that dwell in the present and movies that explore past life experiences where a character’s ghost, wound, want or need originates.
Although a roller coaster ride is thrilling, exploring past events can be more thought provoking and more emotionally rewarding for many adults.
FD thanks so much for the comment. I’d be interested in some examples of movies that do as you describe, that you especially like, which were successful. I think you’re right that there’s the potential for exploring events to be involving and add depth, depending on how they are handled. Sometimes “flashback” material really becomes its own parallel story (with its own unknown and compelling potential outcome), like LOST used to do, and MAD MEN sometimes does. That’s a bit different from using it as back story set-up, which is what I was mostly referring to.
EB: Thanks for your response. I’d be happy to give some examples, although I’m not sure where you want to draw the line restricting the use of flashbacks. Instead, I’ll give you some examples that jump around in time in both directions made by very successful filmmakers who believe the audience is smart enough to keep up with a story that is not stuck in the present.
In addition to blockbuster TV shows like LOST (which moved forward, backward, and sideways in time), and Mad Men (in which many of the most effective scenes were drawn from Don Draper’s suppressed backstory), I’d point to The Affair’s innovative structure, which deliberately repeats the story from both Noah and Alison’s point of view. In addition, The Affair intercuts numerous ambiguous police interrogation scenes held at indistinct times which are not in synch with the story’s present day events. A similar mechanism was used in Season 1 of True Detective. This use of “deliberate ambiguity” (Matthew Weiner’s term) is what helped these shows stand out from the bulk of television programming win their fanatically loyal audiences.
In movies, we can easily find many examples of great directors and screenwriters who play freely with altered time sequences. Christopher Nolan is probably the most unlikely filmmaker to tell a story in a predictable sequence as demonstrated in his triple hit series, Memento, Inception, and Interstellar. Think also of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, which jumps directly from prehistoric Africa to a lunar space station. Titanic, one of the most profitable movies ever made, starts in the present day, moves back to 1912, returns to the present, returns to the past again, regains the present and ends with a ghostly flashback.
My personal favorite example of creating deliberate ambiguity by mixing past, present, and future events appears in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973). Not only does the story use mind-bending forward and backward time flashes to keep the audience off-balance, there is a beautifully shot love scene which is so disjointed, we can’t tell if the couple is getting dressed or undressed at any given point.
Even Hamlet’s statement “the time is out of joint,” deals with a past event, his father’s murder. In order to catch the murderer, Shakespeare allows Hamlet to stage a flashback, a play within a play, wherein Hamlet dramatizes the heinous crime.
These examples are a small tip of the iceberg. I believe the vast majority of popular movies have much of their story hidden below the surface. Using altered time and flashbacks is an effective way to add dimension to the surface level storyline. In the end, the best reason not to leverage flashbacks may be budgetary. But unfortunately, this will generally cheapen the story.
I don’t disagree with any of what you’re saying here, and thanks for raising those points! I think these examples tend to fall into the category of either being actual “stories” in the past, intercut with stories in the present, or they use scenes in the present as merely a framing device for a story that takes place almost entirely in “the past”.
As long as the past contains compelling story it can function as its own compelling “present” and doesn’t suffer from the issues I was talking about, where flashbacks are merely backstory scenes that give information and maybe have some isolated drama, but don’t actually arc as their own stories. These are the kind that I think should be minimized (unless they are just quick flashes).
Good exchange. Any chance you can provide some specific examples of movie flashbacks that don’t work for you. I’m interested in understanding what types of flashbacks you find dull or confusing. And what type you endorse. For instance, how did you feel about the use of flashbacks in “It’s a Wonderful Life?”
Honestly, they usually don’t survive and make it into successful films. It’s more something I see in screenplays by writers trying to break in. But I’ll think about whether I know of some examples…
Very good read. It does get confusing sometimes when too many flashbacks are introduced. Thanks!