If you have a problem with the third act...

In confidence, screenwriter to screenwriter, writing a satisfying ending for a feature screenplay is hard isn’t it? 

Your audience won’t know how or why -that’s your job- but they definitely know when you’ve let them down at the end of the film.

A few years back I watched an indie feature written and directed by a friend -names have been removed to protect the innocent- and though in many ways it was very accomplished, throughout the film I remember repeatedly asking myself the same question. What kind of a film is this? 

At times it appeared to be about the dangers of getting involved with drugs and had gritty thriller elements, at others it appeared to have ‘coming of age’ elements and yet at others it appeared to be about a central friendship. This identity crisis pulled me in different directions which in turn pulled me out of the reality of the film. 

In the final instance there was -what should have been- a wonderful ending that revealed it had been about this central friendship. As I’d been pulled in so many directions prior, the ending did not achieve the desired emotional punch. In short the ending wasn’t properly earned by what preceded it. 

My hunch is that the said writer-director was struggling for an ending and then found this wonderful way to close the film off. This however should have been the beginning of a re-drafting process rather than what I suspect happened, which was the signing-off on the script as production-ready. Everything prior to this ending needed to be re-worked to ensure that all scenes would point to the possibility of this wonderful ending. 

To write a successful ending we really need to get to grips with what an ending is and isn’t. Above all things, it is not just a neat or clever way of drawing the film to a close. Like every element of the screenplay it has a job to do, above all things it needs to be meaningful. If it’s meaningful it will feel earned as opposed to unearned. In some way or other the ending needs to fulfil or confound audience expectations based on what they have learned up to that point in the story.

Story -as we understand it in film- is a relatively prescribed pattern, and the ending is where we the audience come to an understanding about why we’ve been on this experiential journey. It’s where we see the pattern in its entirety.

In short we screenwriters have to reconcile arguably the two most important questions in screenwriting to deliver on the ending; 

‘What happens?’ 

‘What is the story about?’

What happens needs to correspond with and lead the audience to an understanding of what the story is about.

The set-up and inciting incident at the end of the first act sets the theme and poses the question that starts the trail of narrative breadcrumbs that should feel like it leads inevitably to the resolution in the final instance. 

So as Billy Wilder said ‘If you have a problem with the third act…’

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