How to tell a great story

We all like stories. We were born for this. Stories affirm who we are. We all want confirmation that our lives have meaning. And nothing gives us more validation than when we connect through stories. They can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and with others, real and imagined.
Andrew Stanton, TED 2012

Andrew Stanton , is an American director, screenwriter, film producer and voice actor, best known for his collaboration with Pixar since its inception. He received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay for the first three-dimensional animated film « Toy Story » and two Oscars for best animated film for « Finding Nemo » and « WALL•E ».

The quote is taken from his 2012 TED Talk, when Stanton had just finished shooting the film John Carter , based on the novel Under the Moons of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (best known for being the creator of Tarzan, with a cycle of ben twenty-eight jungle adventure books). Since this speech, Stanton has done much more, as director or executive producer: Monsters University , Inside Out , Finding Dory , Rebel – The Brave , Toy Story 4 .

Reading his biography, one cannot but think that his is the most beautiful job in the world! He writes stories. Beautiful stories!
Of course, perhaps telling stories with images is a little simpler: with words there is the risk of not applying Show don't tell well, of using terms that do not reach the reader, of focus on one aspect, leaving out something else important, while the images are immediate, they start right from the Show (show) and then add the Tell (tell), so they reach the viewer directly without generating confusion.
Or More simply, they are so good that we don't notice the difficulties that can be hidden in a screenplay...

In the TED Talk, Andrew Stanton shares everything he's learned about storytelling throughout his career, insights into how to build a great story, hints at what it takes to craft a story that excites our audience.
They could be just ideas, but given the success of Stanton they are to be printed and stuck in front of the desk.

The video starts with a joke. Because storytelling, according to Andrew Stanton, “is like telling jokes. It's knowing the punchline, the ending, knowing that everything you say, from first sentence to last, leads to one goal, and ideally to confirming a truth that deepens our understanding of who we are, as human beings." Indeed, a joke makes a huge promise to the listener: I will amuse you. Shouldn't all stories do this too?
The joke is set in Scotland, right in the Highlands! And Stanton tells it with a pinch of Scottish accent, making it even more spectacular…

A tourist is hiking in the Scottish Highlands, and stops at a pub for a drink. The only people inside are the bartender and an older man sipping a beer. Order a pint and they sit there for a while. Suddenly the old man turns to him and says, “See this bar? I built this bar with my bare hands out of the finest wood in the county. I gave him more love and affection than my children. And they call me MacGregor the bar builder? NO." He points out the window. “See that stone wall over there? I built that wall with my bare hands. I found every single stone, I fixed it in the cold and rain. And they call me MacGregor the wall builder? NO." He points out the window. “See that dock on the lake over there? I built that dock with my bare hands. I raised the stilt houses against the tide, plank by plank. And they call me MacGregor the dock builder? NO. But you fuck a goat…”

The first commandment of storytelling: Engage me

Andrew Stanton begins by recalling a quote from Fred Rogers , the famous American television host for children, a phrase borrowed by Rogers himself from a social worker:

"Frankly, there's no one you can't learn to love after hearing his story."

According to Stanton, this concept leads to the first commandment of storytelling: make me care, involve me.
Emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, but please involve me. Let me enter your story, let me worry about its protagonists, make me part of their adventure, let me feel their every breath and let me rejoice in their every smile.

“We all know what it's like to be selfless,” Stanton says. “You go through hundreds of television channels jumping from one channel to another, and suddenly you stop on one. It's already halfway through, but something has captured you and pulls you in, involves you. It's not by chance, it's intentional."

So Stanton in TED Talk wants to involve us in his personal story, which is a story in all respects (and we'll even find a piece of Finding Nemo ), explain how he was born to do this, just to tell stories, and how he perfected this discipline. But to make this story even more interesting, it will start from the end and go back to the beginning. The ending of this story would go something like this: "And that's what ultimately led me to talk to you here at TED about stories." It will indeed be the last sentence he will pronounce for this speech. Oh yeah, he's really good at engaging the viewer, they don't pick up two Oscars like his at random.

To write is to make a promise

When he attended this TED in 2012, Stanton had just finished production on the film John Carter , based on the novel Under the Moons of Mars written by Edgar Rice Burroughs . In this story the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs has inserted himself as a character and narrator: he is summoned by his rich uncle, John Carter in fact, to his villa via a telegram that says only "Let's meet right away." Once he gets there, however, he discovers that his uncle has mysteriously died and is buried in the garden of the property, in a mausoleum that can only be opened from the inside. And there's this scene where the late uncle's lawyer shows young Burroughs this strange tomb without a lock. No embalming, no funeral home, no funeral, and a sealed tomb from the inside.

The purpose of the scene, as of the novel itself, is to make a promise, Stanton says:

“ He makes you a promise that this story will take you where it's worth. And that's what all good stories should do in the beginning: make you a promise. This can be done in an infinite number of ways. Sometimes it's just “Once upon a time…” These Carter books have always had Edgar Rice Burroughs as the narrator. And I always thought it was a fantastic tool. It's like having someone invite you around a fire, or someone in a bar who says, “Here we are, now I'll tell you a story. It didn't happen to me, it happened to someone else, but it will be time well spent". A promise kept is like loading a slingshot to propel you through history to its end.”

Writing therefore is committing yourself to a promise to the reader, and then of course respecting it.

The unifying theory of “2 + 2”

In 2008 Andrew Stanton conceived and directed the animated film WALL•E , pushing his theories of story creation to the max at the time. The protagonist is the small sweeper robot WALL•E, the only inhabitant of the Earth abandoned by humans due to pollution and the accumulation of waste (more than ever very topical!) One day the reconnaissance robot EVE (a female robot with the name of the first woman in the Bible). WALL•E falls in love with her to the tune of the romantic song from the movie Hello, Dolly! from an old videotape recovered from the waste.

According to Stanton this is the purest form of cinematic storytelling: storytelling without dialogue.

There are only the images, the enchanted WALL•E expressions, the music that contextualizes the romantic scene, the mechanical hand of WALL•E that moves uncertainly towards that of EVE But all the rest, the connection by deduction of the little information towards the complete construction of the narrative is the responsibility of the spectator, fascinated by the absence of dialogue. No Tell , only Show , as I said before.

“It confirms the feeling I had: that the public wants to earn their bread,” says Stanton, where by “bread” he means emotion. “He just doesn't want to know that he's doing it. It's the storyteller's job: to hide from him the fact that he's earning his bread.[…] There's a reason we're all attracted to a child or a puppy. It's not just because they're so cute, it's because they can fully express what they think and what their intentions are. It's like a magnet. We can't stop wanting to finish the sentence and fill in the blanks."

Even before WALL•E, Andrew Stanton understood this mechanism when he was writing with Bob Peterson the screenplay for Finding Nemo , his first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The story follows the journey of Marlin, a clown fish of the coral reef, in search of his son Nemo, the only survivor of the attack of a barracuda that has devoured all the other eggs and the mother Coral. Nemo grows up with an atrophic fin after the accident and his father is worried every time he leaves. One day Nemo is kidnapped by a fisherman and a desperate Marlin sets out to find him, in the company of Dory, a female surgeonfish with continuous short-term memory loss.

It is during this writing that Stanton elaborated on the unifying theory of "2 + 2":

“Let the audience put things together. Don't give it 4, give it "2 + 2". The elements you provide and the order in which you place them are critical to the success or failure of audience engagement. The editors and writers have always known this. It is the invisible application that captures our attention in the story. I don't want it to sound like an exact science, it's not. That's what makes the stories special, they're not a gimmick, they're not perfect. Stories are inevitable, if they are valid, but they are not predictable."

Try rewatching the movie Finding Nemo and try to find the moments when the viewer has to add a 2 to the formula to complete the story puzzle.

The frenzy of the characters

Also in 2012, during a seminar by actress Judith Weston as a teacher, Stanton learned a fundamental idea about characters: a well-constructed character must have character and an internal engine that drives it, an unconscious goal that it aspires to in its life , an irrepressible yearning towards that goal. The example used by Judith Weston is Michael Corleone from the novel "The Godfather", a character played by Al Pacino in the film version: the young Corleone's desire is to please his father and this desire guides him in all his choices, good or bad that they are. Even after his father's death, that craving doesn't stop.

“I am wallowing in this principle,” explains Andrew Stanton. Indeed, the WALL•E robot seeks beauty in the midst of waste. Marlin fish, the father of Finding Nemo , tries to keep evil and danger away from his only son Nemo. “And these cravings don't always lead to the best choices. Sometimes you can make horrible choices.”

According to Stanton, based on his son's observation, we are born with a certain temperament, we are made a certain way, and that basis can hardly be changed. But we can learn to recognize our character, accept it, mitigate its defects, enhance its qualities. In fact, some have a positive character, others a negative one. We become adults when we grow old enough to recognize what drives us in our temperament and learn to take the wheel to steer. “We are all learning all the time. That's why change in a story is crucial. If things are static, stories die, because life is never static."

The eagerness of the characters is what makes them grow, learn, change. And what viewers get hooked on.

Waiting mixed with uncertainty

The drama is waiting mixed with uncertainty.
William Archer, British playwright

In 1998 Andrew Stanton had just finished writing the screenplays for “Toy Story” and “A Bug's Life – Megaminimondo”. He was obsessed with writing a good screenplay and put a lot of time into study and research. So he discovered the above quote from William Archer , playwright and theater critic of the last century: drama is expectation mixed with uncertainty, a sagacious definition.

Stanton continues:

“When you tell a story, have you built anticipation? In the short term, have you made me want to know what happens next? More importantly, have you made me want to know how this all plays out, long term? Have you built sincere conflicts, with truths that create doubts, about what could be the outcome? An example could be found in "Finding Nemo", in the short-term tension, you always feel worried: will Dory's short-term memory make her forget everything Marlin told her? But at the bottom is the general tension: will we ever be able to find Nemo in this vast, immense ocean?”

If the ending can be glimpsed too confidently, there is no emotion despite the wait. It is the uncertainty of how the story will end that keeps the viewer in front of the screen and the reader on those pages.

Guidelines, not hard and fast rules

This is a really fun part about how Pixar, which Andrew Stanton still works for today, upset the Disney house rules early on. In the early days, Stanton and his colleagues were simply a bunch of guys working on instinct, believing in stories, even before they had a clear idea of the mechanisms by which to construct them. It was 1993 and you probably also remember (no, there could be someone young here, but maybe you still saw them on television) Disney's successful animated films were "The Little Mermaid", "Beauty and the Beast", “Aladdin,” “The Lion King,” all of which had a pretty precise format. But Pixar wanted to prove that you could tell animated stories in a completely different way.

“We didn't have any influence at the time, so we had a secret list of rules that we kept to ourselves. And they were:
No songs.
No “I wish” moments.
No happy village.
No romance.
No villains.
And the irony is, the first year, our story didn't work at all and Disney was terrified. So they went privately to a famous lyricist, whom I won't name, who faxed them some suggestions. We got our hands on that fax, and the fax said:
there should be songs,
there should be a song like "I wish",
there should be a song about a happy village,
there should be a romance and
there should be a villain.
But thank goodness we were too young and rebellious and maverick at the time, and we gained more determination to prove that a better story could be made. And a year later, we made it. We have shown that storytelling has guidelines, not easy and stringent rules.”

Two years later Pixar's first film Toy Story was released, made entirely in three-dimensional computer graphics. The story is that of a toy, the puppet of a cowboy Woody, the child's favorite Andy Davis, who sees his existence and that of the other toys, the puppet in the shape of a potato Mr. Potato, the piggy bank Hamm, the dog spring Slinky, the ceramic shepherdess Bo Peep and the plastic dinosaur Rex, threatened by the arrival of a new toy for the child's birthday, Buzz Lightyear, a super-equipped astronaut. There are no songs, there are no moments of longing, there is no happy village but animated toys when the child is away, there are no love stories and no, there is no villain indeed, not like we meant it before.

Love the protagonist

Just from the experience of Toy Story , Stanton and his group have learned another fundamental concept: to love the main character.

“And we naively thought, that Woody in “Toy Story” should become selfless at the end, so you had to start somewhere. So let's make it selfish. […] How do you make a selfish character likeable? We understood it: he can be made kind, generous, funny, thoughtful, as long as one condition is maintained, that is, that he remains the protagonist toy.”

And that's just what Woody is in Toy Story. As long as it's the child's favorite toy, we can't find fault with it. Only when he sees his role threatened by Buzz Lightyear does he show himself to be selfish and a little mean.

“We all live lives with reservations. We are all willing to follow the rules, but only under certain conditions ”concludes Stanton.

The theme of the story

Before even deciding to make storytelling his profession, there were key episodes in Andrew Stanton's youth that enlightened him on some salient ingredients of storytelling.

In 1986, on the occasion of the restoration and the new release of the film Lawrence of Arabia , winner of seven Academy Awards, Stanton understood well the concept that history must have a theme :

“I saw him seven times in one month. I could never get enough. I could only tell that he had great engineering behind him, in every shot, every scene, every line. Yet, on the surface it seemed to represent the historical course of what was happening. But he also said something else. What was it exactly? And it was only after seeing him several times that the curtain lifted on a scene where he crosses the Sinai Desert to get to the Suez Canal, and I finally got there.”

A motorcyclist comes from far away, kicking up a cloud of sand, then stops and calls out, facing Lawrence of Arabia across the channel: Who are you?

“Here is the theme: Who are you? Where seemingly heterogeneous events and dialogues chronologically told his story, below there was a constant, a guideline, a map. Everything Lawrence did in that film was an attempt to discover his place in the world. A strong theme always runs through a well-told story.”

In some stories, the theme may relate to the protagonist's eagerness, just as in Lawrence of Arabia.

Instill the wonder

“When I was five years old, I was introduced to what is probably the most important ingredient a story should have, but which is rarely evoked. And that's where my mom took me when I was five."

Andrew Stanton shows us one of the most famous scenes from the 1942 film Bambi , when the little deer tries to go ice skating in the company of the Thumper bunny.

“I walked out with eyes shining with wonder. And I think this is the magic ingredient, the secret ingredient: to evoke wonder. Marvel is honest and totally innocent. Cannot be artificially summoned. In my opinion, there is no greater ability than the gift of another human being who gives you that feeling: to hold even for just a moment and let yourself fall into wonder. When it is done, the confirmation that you are alive, it pervades you into every single cell. And when an artist does it to another artist, one is forced to take a step forward. It's like a silent command suddenly activated, like the call of the Devil's Tower. Do to others what was done to you. The best stories instill wonder.”

Andrew Stanton had probably already understood at the age of five that this should be his job.

Use what you know

And here we are at the focal point, get your tissues ready because after the wait, Andrew Stanton also prepares us for the grand finale.

“When I was four, I have a very vivid memory of finding two tiny scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were. He told me that I had two identical ones on my head, but that I couldn't see them because of the hair. He explained to me that when I was born, I was born premature, I came out way too early, I wasn't cooked to perfection, I was very, very sick. And when the doctor took one look at this yellow baby with black teeth, he looked my mother right in the eye: "He won't live." I stayed in the hospital for months. And after many transfusions, I made it, and that made me special.

I don't know if I really believe it. I don't know if my parents believe it, but I didn't want them to think they were wrong. Whatever I've gotten good at, I'll never stop being worthy of the second chance I've been given."

It doesn't take a wizard to understand that this scene of Marlin, the dad from Finding Nemo, whispering to the only surviving egg “It's all right, dad's here, dad got you. I promise, I will never let anything happen to you, Nemo” came from Andrew Stanton's personal life, from what had touched him deeply.

“And this is the first story lesson I've learned: use what you know, create from what you know. It doesn't always mean a plot or a fact. It means capturing a truth from your own experience, expressing values that you personally feel deep in your heart.”

So we're back to the beginning. “And that's what brought me to talk to you here at TED today.”
As he promised, this is the ending to his story.

I leave you the video of the conference with Italian subtitles, because they are 19 precious minutes, to be seen and reviewed.