What Kate Mercer teaches us about reaching, and failing.

I come from a long line of engineers. Both my parents, their parents, my brothers and sisters, my uncles and aunts and their kids, almost everyone is involved somehow in figuring out what makes things work. Whether it’s windmills, classic cars, microchips or the human brain, my family likes to analyze and optimize. For a long time, I thought I would follow in my parent’s footsteps and attend the Technical University in my hometown of Delft, the Netherlands. In high school I excelled at math, physics and science. However, I liked art class the most and I fell in love with stories very early. The more fantastic and spectacular the better. I read the Lord of the Rings at least a dozen times in middle school, my mom took me to see West Side Story for my eighth birthday and my dad let me stay up and watch The Longest Day and You Only Live Twice way too early in my life. As a result, when it came time to go to college, I picked Art School. Ten years and three Academies later, I found myself working in Hollywood with a Bachelor’s degree in Animation and a Master’s in Motion Picture and Television Directing. But, like with the protagonist in any good film, you can’t run away from your true calling forever. As much as I like what I do for a living, I am rarely happier than when I am figuring out what makes stories work. 

I have been trying to write movies for years but somehow, I was never happy with any of the results. Something was always missing. This was especially frustrating, because every screenwriting book tells you just how easy screenplays are. A hundred pages properly formatted in Final Draft is barely thirty pages of prose. How hard could it be? You can write that in a day! Studios spend millions of dollars on making these things, so they must know what they are doing, right? There has to be a working formula, right? And there are numerous books out there that tell you all about this (often secret) recipe for your next blockbuster hit. Complete with the page numbers where your villain has to die, or your buddy has to save their pet. And they work…. Kinda. You can recognize the structure in some of your favorite, most brilliant, award winning movies, so it must be correct. Except correlation isn’t causation, and in some movies, you start seeing this structure shine brighter than the characters that make up the story. It feels formulaic. Because it is! The pattern is there in both; the movies that hit every plot point at the exact right time yet still fail to take off and the ones that are so well written that they just blast into space and make you forget all about structure and plot points. The ones that just… work. I wanted to be able to pinpoint the difference between the two and so I started approaching stories as an engineering problem. 
There is a ton of scientific evidence that proves that we humans only really remember the end of a story. And to make matters even more bleak, our brains have so many expectations that we mostly hear what we want to hear. We rarely fully trust any source of information outside of our own experience. I am sure most of us have experienced this phenomenon at the dinner table during the Holidays, in a discussion with a family member with an opposing political view. The “truth” is not the same for two different people and it is nearly impossible to change someone’s mind by confronting them with facts that don’t apply to their day to day reality. The same applies to watching a movie; as an audience, we want it to enforce our worldview.