“They never would have given up so easily…”

Note: This post is the fifty-third installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 52. You can read the previous installments here.

I frequently discuss action sequences on this blog, both because I enjoy thinking about them and because they’re a place in which all the familiar challenges of good writing rise to an unusual pitch of intensity. This might not seem like the case, when we look at how most action scenes in movies are made: many are all but outsourced to the stunt team and second unit crew, and your typical screenplay will often just state that a fight or a car chase ensues without attempting to block out the individual beats. Yet this is almost always a mistake. As I’ve noted here before, my favorite action scenes of recent years—notably the ones in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, The International, and Drive—all have one thing in common: they seem to have been worked out in detail on the page. An action sequence isn’t a good place for the screenwriter to abdicate responsibility; if anything, it’s the opposite. When I talk about the importance of structuring a plot as a series of clear objectives, the primary reason is to keep the reader or viewer oriented while we focus on the dialogue and the characters and the atmosphere and everything else that made us want to write the story in the first place. A sequence of objectives is the backbone that, paradoxically, gives the writer the freedom to indulge himself. And if that’s true of writing in general, it especially applies to action, in which narrative clarity is all too vulnerable to being swallowed up by sound and fury.

In fact, when we talk about great action scenes, we’re usually talking about the clarity of their writing, often without even knowing it. By now, it’s a critical cliché to complain about the visual grammar of modern action movies, in which an otherwise straightforward sequence is cut into countless tiny pieces of film shot using a shaky camera. (The classic example has quickly become the moment in Taken 3 that uses fifteen cuts to show Liam Neeson jumping over a fence.) In almost the same breath, we usually add that one of the few directors who can do it properly is Paul Greengrass, and that his use of the technique in the Bourne movies has inspired countless imitators to do the same thing less well. This is true enough—but it misses the real point, which is that these scenes work mostly because we know what Bourne is doing and why. This isn’t to understate the sheer technical facility required to take all those brief flashes of the action and assemble them into something coherent in the editing room. But it’s the script, which lays out the situation and the big blocks of the scene in a logical sequence of decisions, that allows for so much visual chaos and excitement. If anything, the editing style obscures the clean lines of the story, which are more obvious in a scene like the lovely opera house set piece in Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, a gorgeous example of an action sequence that unfolds almost novelistically in its series of logical complications.    

I can’t help but think of this when I go back to look at Chapter 52 of Eternal Empire, which is one of the few sequences anywhere in my work that I can enjoy without reliving the act of writing it. In part, this is because it’s been long enough since I wrote it that the details have started to blur—although I do remember being nervous about it. I knew from the start that this would be the action centerpiece of the entire novel, if not the whole trilogy, that it would have to cover a lot of plot points in a limited space, and that it hinged on the accurate depiction of a complicated event, in this case an attack on a megayacht by a drone. (I faced a similar challenge in City of Exiles, when it came to describing the sabotage of a private plane and its subsequent crash.) As usual, I started by gathering up all the information I could find on the subject, with the assumption that I could structure the ensuing scene around whatever facts I had available. In the end, many of the beats and much of the language in this chapter came from a little book I found called Megayacht: True Stories of Adventure, Drama, and Tragedy at Sea. None of the incidents it described exactly matched the situation I was writing, but I was able to cobble together enough in the way of persuasive color to construct what I thought would be a convincing naval disaster. And one story in particular caught my eye: the account of a yacht caught in a storm that had to push the helicopter off its upper deck to avoid being tangled up in the wreckage.

When I first read it, I made a note of that idea for a number of reasons. First, it was an exciting sequence, and the book told it with enough circumstantial detail that I knew I could put a version of it into my novel without having to invent too much else. (The rest was filled in with manuals and technical specifications, and I learned more than I ever wanted about tiedown straps and lashing points.) Second, it gave me a few nice images, my favorite of which is the sight of the helicopter sinking into the water, its navigational lights all going up at once as the circuits shorted out, so that it glowed like a ghost in the sea—an image taken directly from the account in Megayacht. Third, and most important, it gave me a sequence of objectives around which I could build the rest of the chapter. What matters, after all, isn’t the helicopter, but what Ilya is thinking and feeling at the time, and by giving him a concrete task to accomplish, I established a clear direction for a chapter that might otherwise have degenerated into a mishmash of furious action. The attempt to push off the helicopter goes badly, of course, and in my original outline, I had Laszlo, the bosun, simply caught in the wreck as it fell overboard. That didn’t seem all that satisfying, especially since it depended on a moment of uncharacteristic incompetence, and as I was working on the chapter, it occurred to me that the drone should turn back and smash itself like a kamikaze into the yacht. That’s what finally happens, and I still love it. But it wouldn’t have occurred to me at all if I hadn’t put together the other pieces first…

“He entered the club, leaving the door open…”

(Note: This post is the forty-fifth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 44. You can read the earlier installments here.)

“Although there is no substitute for merit in writing,” E.B. White notes in The Elements of Style, “clarity comes closest to being one.” This is true of all aspects of fiction, from character to dialogue, and it’s especially true of action scenes. An action sequence in a novel is a kind of musical number in which all the basic notes of storytelling are hit with extraordinary focus and concentration, and there’s little room for error. It’s a war between the two central aspects of reading: the impulse to linger and the need to keep going. Most good fiction is written on the premise that the reader will occasionally pause to reflect on a complex sentence, read a paragraph over again, or even turn back a few pages for clarification or context. An action scene, by contrast, is one that begs to unfold in real time, with the act of reading coinciding as much as possible with the rhythm of the action itself. Writing a scene that satisfies these requirements while remaining stylistically consistent with the rest of the novel is a real challenge, and the key, as White points out, is clarity—although I doubt he was thinking of chase scenes or gunfights when he wrote those words.

A novel isn’t a movie, of course, and it can be dangerous to look to film for examples of how to stage action: movies have tools at their disposal, like montage and intercutting, that don’t come easily to fiction. But film still provides some useful illustrations. I’ve noted before that my favorite action scenes of recent years—the Guggenheim shootout in The International, the Burj Khalifa climb in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, and the opening chase in Drive—were all worked out on the page, rather than in the editing room. They unfold in real time and proceed from one logical beat to the next, and there’s rarely any doubt about what the characters are thinking, although the full meaning of the scene in Drive isn’t revealed until the very end of the sequence. They’re cleanly photographed and cut together in a way that isn’t afraid to hold on a shot, and each depends intimately on spatial relationships, both in the physical geography of the set and within the frame itself. All these decisions have their common origin in a concern for clarity. The audience is grounded at every moment, and we’re never confused, as we often are by Michael Bay, about what is happening on the screen.

In short, a good action scene, either in fiction or in film, serves as an intense microcosm of the virtues of good storytelling itself. Like the story as a whole, it’s best when it’s built on a sequence of clear problems, which the protagonist succeeds or fails at solving in some logical order. Clarity is always important, but never more so than when the action needs to move at a fast pace, and the use of clean, vivid prose is the literary equivalent of the composed shot and spatially coherent editing. Each sequence has a clear beginning, middle, and end: it’s no accident that the three scenes I’ve mentioned above could be taken out of their surrounding movies and enjoyed in their own right, as many of us tend to do when we’re watching them at home. And just as finding the right rhythm for an action scene in a movie can come down to the addition or removal of a few frames, the action in a novel needs to be written and revised with particular care, long after the author’s own excitement has begun to fade, until the logic is crystal clear in the moment to a reader encountering it for the first time.

When I wrote The Icon Thief, I was still figuring most of this out, and although it took me a long time to formulate these rules, I managed to follow them intuitively, at least most of the time. Chapter 44, for instance, is as close to a conventional action scene as you’ll find in the book, and it’s only in retrospect that I can see how the objectives follow logically one after the other, as determined by the geography of the setting at the Club Marat. Ilya emerges from the darkness under the boardwalk behind the club, takes out the busboy, slips through the back door, makes his way up the corridor to the downstairs office, incapacitates the restaurant manager, arms himself, and places a call to Sharkovsky for a meeting, knowing that he’ll come to the office first. The only bloodshed comes a few pages later, when Ilya shoots Misha, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s only a coda to the real source of interest, as we follow Ilya’s thoughts and decisions from one point of cover to the next. There’s no question that I was inspired by the movies I loved, especially the final confrontation in Michael Mann’s Thief, and the action here unfolds in the novelistic equivalent of one continuous shot. And it isn’t over yet. As Ilya and Sharkovsky are about to discover, they aren’t alone…

What makes a great action scene?

For most of this week, anyone passing by my house would have seen a bright rectangular glow in the living room window, as the new Blu-ray of Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol played in a nonstop loop. While it doesn’t have the same visceral power as it did in IMAX, this is still a fun, expertly assembled action movie, the perfect sort of thing to have playing in the background while I’m working on other projects. Even after seeing it three or four times, however, I still have to drop everything and watch whenever the big scene in the Burj Khalifa comes up. I may not get as dizzy as I did when I first saw it, but even on the small screen, it’s still wonderfully exciting—and all the more terrifying when you know how it was actually filmed. (Incidentally, as much as I hate this sort of corporate extortion, it’s worth shelling out the extra money for the Best Buy exclusive edition, which contains some great bonus features that aren’t included in the version available on Amazon.)

In fact, I’d say that the Burj Khalifa climb in Ghost Protocol is my favorite action sequence of the past five years, on a short list that includes the Guggenheim shootout in The International and the opening chase scene in Drive. At first glance, these three scenes might not seem to have much in common—one is a death-defying ballet staged one hundred and thirty stories above the ground; one is lunatic, extended gunplay; and the last is the car chase as chess game—but they’re all executed with something of the same spirit, and it’s worth drilling down to figure out why they affect us so deeply. There’s something hugely pleasurable about these scenes that goes beyond their immediate impact, and which sets them apart, in my mind, even from such landmark sequences as the hallway fight in Inception, which I love, but find somewhat less interesting from a writer’s point of view. Because what the three scenes I’ve mentioned have in common is that they were all written first.

Here’s what I mean. Many action scenes, particularly car chases, come off as assemblages of second unit footage that have been pieced together in the editing room, and as a result, there’s something monotonous about the relentless similarity of action—just see any Michael Bay movie for an example. The action sequences in these three films, by contrast, were conceived on the printed page. They have a clear beginning, middle, and end. They make memorable use of their locations. They have small setups, payoffs, and surprises along the way, as when Ethan Hunt throws away his malfunctioning glove and finds it adhering to the side of the building a few stories later. Each is centered on the personality of the characters involved—indeed, each scene unfolds as a sequence of logical choices, which is something you’ll never hear said of Transformers. And these are all things that can only be planned at the screenplay stage.

And while this may seem obvious, it’s worth remembering in light of a movie like The Hunger Games, which has its good points, but to my eyes, despite the strength of its material, doesn’t know how to plan and carry out action. Instead, it relies on editing and camerawork to create the illusion of momentum, when all of this should have been laid out in the script. (Note that none of the three films I’ve mentioned ever use anything resembling a shakycam.) Full credit, then, to writers Eric Singer, Hossein Amini, and the platoon that worked on Ghost Protocol for giving us action scenes we’ll remember, which is something that ought to be celebrated. Because it appeals so shamelessly to our reptile brain, the ability to write a great action scene may never get the respect it deserves, but like any other narrative skill, it benefits from intelligence, ingenuity, and clarity of thought—and all of the editing tricks in the world won’t make up for their absence.

Ghost in the machine

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Mission: Impossible franchise, which feels less like a coherent series of feature films than a sandbox for a succession of gifted directors to play with the idea of the spy movie itself. Aside from the title and Lalo Schifrin’s indispensable theme, the movies have little in common with the show of the same name, but these elements, along with a star who seems admirably willing to try variations on his screen persona, have allowed for a wide range of approaches, from impersonal puzzle box to fiery action extravaganza to TV-inspired ensemble piece. And while Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol has the least personal stamp of any movie in the series, it’s perhaps the most culturally significant: along with something of a personal triumph for Tom Cruise, it’s the opening salvo from a generation of Pixar directors who seem destined to shake up the world of live-action film.

To take the most obvious example: the massively hyped action scene at the Burj Khalifa isn’t merely as good as they say, it’s the best use of IMAX I’ve ever seen. As far as I’m concerned, it definitively establishes the supremacy of IMAX over 3D as a medium for generating thrills: the entire sequence, with its crystalline cinematography and breathtaking stunts, is as close to an out-of-body experience as I’ve had at the movies. Like Christopher Nolan, Bird knows how to ground sensational action in what feels like reality—there are only a handful of obvious special effects shots in the entire film. And throughout, he shows a preternatural gift for staging and executing the best kind of action scene: one conceived at the script and storyboard stage, with cleanly defined beats and a real beginning, middle, and end, rather than a Michael Bay-style nightmare of second-unit footage assembled after the fact in the editing room. (In recent years, only the Guggenheim shootout in The International comes close to what Bird offers here in terms of inventiveness and excitement.)

If Ghost Protocol has a flaw, it’s that it never manages to come up with an overarching narrative of the same fluency as its individual parts. It’s true that story has never been this franchise’s strong point—the first installment, in particular, plays like an attempt to spin a feature film from the most gossamer of plot threads. But I’ve always thought that the script for Mission: Impossible II, still my favorite, was surprisingly engaging and self-aware, with a central love triangle profitably copied from Notorious and a lot of witty details. Mission: Impossible III, in turn, was a calculated attempt to humanize the franchise, as well as the only time that J.J. Abrams, as a feature director or producer, has bothered to deliver on the twists that he constantly promises. Ghost Protocol has a lot of cute touches, but it lacks that kind of surprise, and the basic elements have been even more casually assembled than usual, with a vaguely deployed threat of nuclear annihilation and an off-the-shelf bad guy. (The absence of a great villain from Bird, who gave us the hateful Syndrome in The Incredibles, is perhaps the film’s only real disappointment.)

In the end, then, Ghost Protocol comes off as the world’s greatest demo reel, a chance for Bird to demonstrate that he has the willingness and technical ability to do almost anything, as if the real drama here was being played out in the context of the director’s résumé. As I watched it, my mind was curiously divided: while my lower brain was tingling with adrenaline, my higher functions remained relatively detached. For all the film’s excitement, its sense of risk is more visceral than narrative: despite an appealing cast—and this is by far the best team that Ethan Hunt has ever had—the movie never really creates any possibility of danger toward the characters themselves. Still, it’s a movie that I’d happily see again and again, and I doubt that many viewers will complain. As Walter Kerr might have said, this is a machine for exciting the audience, a watch that thrills. And it makes me all the more curious to see the next movie from Brad Bird, who emerges here as a director of great skill and assurance. Once he gets a real story, he’ll be unstoppable.