Scriptwriting: challenging the default - an unconscious bias test

I've grown up aware of gender inequality. I've heard about how difficult it is for female directors and writers to get work. I’ve heard trolls moan about the 'feminazis' pushing their agenda down people's throats every time someone has the audacity to put a female in a lead role in film or TV.

But it wasn't until I started scriptwriting myself that I became fascinated by the process that leads up to these stories and how they're told – and the almost ridiculous things we must add to the script in order to improve things. The TV script I've written is full of diversity and has many female roles. The main character is (shock horror!) a woman. Yet I didn’t set out to write a diverse story – it's just the story I wanted to write. It's essential that the cast is a mixed one.

When I started to investigate scriptwriting in all its glory, I found advice saying that if you're writing a crowd scene, you should specify that half of the crowd are female and that you should specify that there are numerous ethnicities. Don’t just say 'A soldier enters' or 'A police officer enters'. Purposely make them female and non-white from time to time. Because if you don't then the default of White male is likely to appear in the end product, whether that's how you saw it or not.

And it got me thinking about the unconscious rather than the conscious bias. That if you start talking about a doctor, many people might just assume said doctor is a man. Or if you talk about a primary school teacher, the assumption is that she’s cute and wears flowery dresses and glasses. Because people are going to go to their default, whether they mean to or not.

But the fun really begins when you go against your default!

[In the interest of full disclosure, I am White, female, middle-class, London-born and raised. I have also spent time living in Baltimore, Southern Spain and Buenos Aires. That is my bias.]

I opened up this concept to Twitter, beginning with a simple Tweet about what I wanted people to do: 'Right, here goes: I'm going to describe a character. You get a picture of that person in your mind. Then answer questions on next Tweet...'

Before I’d even begun, I realised that telling people you’re doing an unconscious bias test sort of defeats the point a little bit but for me it was more important to make people think about their own default and to question it. And knowing what I was doing forced me to change my own defaults, just to try and make a more interesting story.

I started off with my first character: Show: family drama, small, intimate, psychological. Character: creepy neighbour, introvert, no friends, spying on neighbouring children.

From that one brief Tweet, the character the voters came up with was: male (88%), 30-50 years' old (50%) and White (a whopping 97%!). And what were the people like on this street? Middle class, according to 79% of the people who responded.

Was the neighbour character...

— Amanda (@filmvsbook) July 27, 2016

I had not said a thing about the street. It could have been a very poor, working class one and there could still have been a creepy neighbour. It could have been the richest street in England and it could still have worked. But middle-class, White and male just seemed to be the go-to.

Not a single person thought the neighbour could be Black. And only 3% considered that they'd be Asian.

Was the neighbour character...

— Amanda (@filmvsbook) July 27, 2016

So let's mix things up a bit. Let's imagine that story again. How about we make the neighbour a woman. Imagine that she is perceived as creepy rather than is simply because she doesn't talk to people, when actually she's just very sad. Make her misunderstood, not sinister. She's looking at the children because her own child died, perhaps. She's introverted because she's too sad to go out and talk to people. Or, alternatively, make her elderly! She just looks at the children because she's longing to go back to her misspent youth and hates that she's old. She has no friends because they've all died, and she knows her turn is coming soon and nobody will mourn her.

Or maybe she's elderly but still really, really creepy!

Let's move the street. Set it in Birmingham, or Leicester, or so many parts of London where 'White' is not the default, where there is a high Asian population, for example. Or make the whole street Asian characters who live in constant fear of the creepy White neighbour who never speaks to any of them.

The possibilities are endless. But the point, of course, is that there are possibilities that don't involve a White, middle-class male.

And so we move on to the second character I described, in a place a little further afield...

Story: action film set in space. Character: a leader, freakishly strong, crass, of few words. Can you picture them? #unconsciousbias

— Amanda (@filmvsbook) July 27, 2016

You say the story is set in space so where does your head go? Alien? Star Wars? You're probably already imagining your favourite space-age hero/heroine. A leader, possibly a female (thank you, Ripley!). But they're 'freakishly strong' which may suggest that they're male. Because there are strong women but can there be 'freakishly' strong ones? (Of course there can be!) But this 'leader' is crass and of few words. Does this suggest male more than female?

So, who did we come up with? Well, despite the first responses leaning heavily towards this character being a female (thanks, possibly, to the Katniss/Rey-effect!), the final tally made them male (61%), White (50%), with dark hair (53%), ragged/messy in appearance (70%).

This time around, the percentages weren't as high but we still ended up with a White male. 25% thought he was Black, while 10% opted for our leader to be Asian. When it came to hair choice, my own bias came into the potential answers. Because when I thought of a surly, crass leader I thought of John McClane. So I added 'non-existent' and 27% of voters agreed.

And so to our third and final character test...

 

Film: childhood adventure, set in major city. Character: 12 yrs old, lonely, imaginative, funny, sweet. Brave in made up world, not in life.

— Amanda (@filmvsbook) July 28, 2016

And who did we cast here...? Well our lonely, imaginative, 12-year-old is a girl (91%), White (55%), from a pretty financially stable home (70%) and has dark hair.

Unlike our space leader, 20% saw this girl as having her hair dyed a vivid colour (0% considered this a possibility for the spaceman). 27% considered she'd be Black and 18% saw her as Asian. Was this because I'd purposely noted that it was set in a major city? Who can say?

The most fascinating part of this one (for me, at least!) is that only 9% of people saw her as a he. Why was it so unlikely that an imaginative 12-year-old would be a boy? Well, one voter had a suggestion. He explained that it was the use of the word 'lonely' that made him choose a girl over a boy because:

Another voter had her own idea of why this character was lonely:

@filmvsbook odd-one-out, no siblings, sees the world differently than anyone else,... She is sincere and real in a "fake" world

— la vie est belle ☆ (@sanfafazey) July 28, 2016

What do you make of these results? Did anything surprise you?

The full Tweet threads for all three character tests can be found here:

https://twitter.com/filmvsbook/status/758285239999459328 https://twitter.com/filmvsbook/status/758337396916228097 https://twitter.com/filmvsbook/status/758636161690664960

(Also, for more on how women are written in ACTUAL scripts, check out @femscriptintros!)

Exclusive Interview with HUMANS writers Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley

(Originally posted at Filmoria about series one)

With the exciting series one finale of Humans due on Channel 4 this weekend and the series well underway on AMC in the US, the synths and their human friends and foes have found a place in homes across the globe. We chatted with the show’s writers, Sam Vincent andJonathan Brackley, to discuss what went into writing the show, their favourite moments and the power of Ivanno Jeremiah‘s smile. We also did our best to get a hint of what fans can expect from the newly commissioned series two, which they are now working on.

Sam and Jonathan had already worked together on the last two series of Spooks with Kudos, along with the recent film, so they were already known to the company. When the rights to the original Swedish show, on which Humans is based, were obtained, the pair were asked if they wanted to get involved. Thankfully for us, they accepted!

Here’s what they had to say.

How similar is your version of the show compared to the original?

J: We took our cues from the first couple of episodes so most of our characters are based on a counterpart in the original Swedish series or amalgums thereof. Some of the storylines are inspired by the original but we ended up taking our characters on completely different journeys by the end of the series. It happened very organically. It wasn’t a conscious decision to do that it’s just that these were the areas that we were interested in that we wanted to follow.

What have been your favourite characters to write for?

J: That’s always a tough one to ask a writer. We’ve loved writing them all. I don’t know. I’m not sure I could pick one. Sam, have you got one?

S: The thing is, with this show, the characters are so radically different. You have synths: you have ordinary synths, you have the synths that are very different and more human-like. And then you have a whole bunch of very, very human characters. In terms of dialogue, it was a lot of fun writing for Rebecca Front‘s character, Vera, and also, Gemma Chan – as Anita, rather than as Mia – because then you’re writing the extremely codified, formal, language that an ordinary synth uses. That’s quite good fun to come up with. It was fun writing for Max (Ivanno Jeremiah) as well because we always saw him as the innocent. You could write a character who was highly intelligent and, of course, not human – in the way we understand it – and yet completely innocent and full of wide-eyed wonder. So that was always a lovely character to write. Really, the format gives us such a broad range of characters – that is, you can’t really pick a firm favourite, they’re all so different. I mean, the family talk in this very naturalistic, slang-y, jokey way. Yeah, I think it’s particularly fun writing some of that formal, synth language – that was something you don’t get to do in any other script.

How much of the synths’ mannerisms and behaviours were scripted vs. the actors being able to influence their specific characters?

S: In the script and in our discussions early on with the producers about how we saw it, we gave some broad strokes really. We said that their movement was not be stiff and jerky and robotic and it was more about graceful, flowing movement of economy. When we sat down to really think it through, we thought, well, if a synth makes a movement, they’re going to use the least amount of power to conserve energy and they’ll also make their movements slowly – as slowly as they can, in a sense, because that will conserve power. There won’t be any wasted movement at all because they plan their movements perfectly. They don’t shoot out an arm before they know what mug they’re picking up off the shelf, like us. They have this incredible precision and also this calm, flowing, economical movement. A thing we compared it to was a Japanese tea ritual. That kind of incredibly serene, measured, like flowing water – not a single wasted movement.

We also had the benefit of promising the threat to the viewer, because we have moments where we show that, actually, synths are faster and stronger than we are – and that again comes from the logic that we need them to be faster and stronger than we are because if our five-year-old kid stepped out in the road, you need your synth to be able to do something about it. But they never use that extra strength and speed unless they have to. It’s always there, under the surface. You know that they’re stronger and quicker than you are and in a fight you couldn’t win!

Really, though, we give a lot of credit to Sam Donovan, the director of episodes one and two, who worked with a guy called Dan O’Neill, who’s a choreographer. Sam and Dan worked very closely with the actors playing the synths and set up ‘Synth School’ to explore the physicality of being these creatures. They carried on from there and thought more about it. Gemma Chan, for example, came up with this thing that in order to conserve power, if she was looking at something to her left, she’d look with her eyes first, and then turn her head, and then turn her body. If she didn’t need to fully turn, she wouldn’t. That’s something you see her doing a lot, as Anita, and it’s very effective – it all builds up to this eerie, other-worldly performance. And then all the other synths – they’re all slightly different but they needed to find these points of uniformity where they could create a group performance, because you don’t want them all moving very differently. We had a huge amount of trust in the director and choreographer – and the actors themselves – and we were happy to let them explore that and find that themselves. What they came up with was absolutely brilliant in our eyes.

Do you have a favourite scene?

J: There are so many scenes that were just a joy to write. I think, in more general terms, we really enjoyed putting together episode six because there is so much going on – so many revelations, so many coming togethers of different characters and exciting twists and plot points. That was a real thrill because it was the first moment when all the threads start to converge in the run-up to the end of the series.

S: We were able to actually answer a lot of the mystery that we’d set up and sometimes you expect writers to drag the mysteries out for as many seasons as possible – and possibly never resolve them – but we always thought that we’d surprise people and pull a few curtains back, pull a few rugs (to continue that metaphor!) in episode six. It was very satisfying to do that and know that we’d be revealing some of those mysteries.

One of my favourite moments, actually, is in episode six, and it’s a moment that’s barely scripted. In the scene where Matti [Lucy Carless] and Leo [Colin Morgan] are attempting to bring Mia back, there is this moment where Toby [Theo Stevenson] and Max share a look. Toby looks nervously at Max turns and gives him this lovely big grin that Ivanno does so beautifully. Then Theo, equally beautifully, does this shy, slightly uncertain smile back. That, really, for me, is such a small, fleeting moment – it’s nothing to do with big revelations or plot or story or anything like that – but it is a moment of genuinely human connection where you feel the connection between the synth and the human being, which is what the whole series is about! It gets distilled down to that one moment of a perfectly, brilliantly done look between two actors at the right time. It’s so beautifully acted by both of them.

J: Ivanno’s use of his smile is masterful throughout the whole series. There’s a moment when he gives George a little smile as he’s leaving the house which is superb and the other smile that I love is in episode seven – which was not scripted – when the SWAT team come in at the end of the episode and one of them points a gun in Max’s face and he turns and smiles at him. It just fits so perfectly with where the character is at that time.

So, without giving anything away, what can fans expect from the series finale?

J: Er… Up to this point, we’ve answered most of the questions. There’ll be a [pause] coming together of all our synths and the other characters.

S: [After a long pause, trying to figure out what he can or can’t say] You can expect thrills, spills, tears, laughs, danger, suspense and … I think it’s better to not say any more.

Fair enough! On to series two then – congratulations on getting the second series commissioned this week, by the way!

J: Thank you very much!

S: Thank you!

Did you have something in mind, even before it was commissioned?

S: You can’t help, when you’re right in the middle of the story, to continue telling it to yourself when you’re really involved in a piece of writing so we always had ideas. You just couldn’t shut it off. You couldn’t just get to the end of episode eight and say ‘well, that’s it’. We were wondering what would happen after… Along the way, we had a lot of good ideas that we couldn’t fit into series one and thought maybe this is something we could do if we get to take the story forward. We always had ideas bubbling under. Some of them we told our producing partners at Kudos about, some of them we didn’t, but obviously now that we’ve had the go ahead, we are getting them all down and very much already in the process of collecting them all together and formalising them and beating out a shape for what it’s going to look like.

We loved it too much [to forget about it]. We wanted to return to these people, these characters and this world.