TODAY'S NUGGET: Fearless (1993) - A Broken Script; Flashbacks Used to Show Present Emotional State

[Quick Summary: After surviving a plane crash, Max no longer wants to live with fear, disrupting his entire life.]

Writer-director Peter Weir was unhappy with the A-list scripts he was getting.

"Give me things that are unusual or difficult," he asked, i.e., "broken scripts."

Q: What was "broken" about it? 

A: It was good writing, daring writing. But I thought it was two movies. The first 25 pages were a film about how you'd cope with the knowledge that you were going to die, taking the point of view of a man who knew about aircraft and knew that the hydraulics were gone and so there was no steering and no braking even if the plane got on the ground. Then there was the second film, which was about how you live once you survive. I couldn't see a way to do it as one film.

And how did he fix it?

A: I was just driving around listening to music, and I realized I could do anything I liked, as long as the story remained about life and death, or rather, love and fear, which was more to the point - you can't say anything about death because you don't know about death. You could certainly talk about fear. I used parts of the crash as flashbacks to show what the characters were still working out, the way one does after any kind of trauma. (my emphasis)

But what was Max working out?

A: ...[the crash] erases his fear of death. That may be an enviable state, but it’s also a state that separates you from other people because it can take you into the realm of having no feelings at all—and this too is something he has to deal with. Having no fear of death, he has to consciously choose to be in life, and we see him struggling with this choice.

I like this flashback is NOT used as an information dump, but is used to show us Max's present state of mind and what he is struggling with now:

INT. DAY - STAIRCASE

Max runs up a flight of institutional firestairs frantically.

EXT. DAY - ROOFTOP

Max appears out of a door from the stairs. He's breathless. We are forty-seven stories up. There's a sweeping, scary view of the East River.

C.U. MAX -- The strain goes away and his face relaxes...

FLASHBACK - INT. DAY - TRANSCON PLANE

MAX AND JEFF --

The plane is falling, out of control. The noise is deafening. They are rigid, heads pressed back into the seats. The plane is tilted to Max's left. 

MAX (angry): We're going down!

JEFF (pure terror): Oh God...

Max fights the gravity to look at his partner .When he manages to catch Jeff's horrified eye:

MAX: I told you so!

WHAT I'VE LEARNED: The flashbacks were the easiest element to spot, but this script also had a strong grip on theme, voice, and foreshadowing unease that Max is not as ok as he claims to be.

Fearless (1993)
by Rafael Yglesias
Based on the novel by Rafael Yglesias