The Heart of the Film

Chapter 7

The Emotional Crack

One of the simplest openings to create is emotional. If someone is grieving, our natural empathy is readily engaged.

Emma Thompson won the Oscar for her screenplay adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and she did a beautiful job. One of Emma’s challenges was that in the book the two main characters, Elinor Dashwood (played by Thompson herself) and Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), don’t see each other or communicate with each other for the whole middle of the novel. They may have readily accepted in the early 1800s that a woman could love a man and pine for him for years when they had only spent a handful of hours together. Today it takes a bit more convincing. And so Thompson (the writer) gets to work putting ...