Where Do Story Ideas Come From?

Hint: It's magic

There’s a wonderful scene in HEAT… hold the phone, there are a TON of wonderful scenes in the film HEAT, as most of us are aware of, but some of the greatest ones have little to no action involved whatsoever. They’re acting showcases. The script created some wonderful characters and Mann let them breathe.

But the scene in particular that I want to highlight is the following one:

Neil meets with Kelso, who has tracked down a huge bank score, and outlines it for Neil. He does this for a finder’s fee, this is his role in this world. He identifies scores and sells them. This leads to the tragic finale wherein a bank robbery goes wrong.

But Kelso (played by Tom Noonan) was NOT wrong about the score. He was right in terms of the security, how much money was there that day, all of it.

He pulls it out of the air, out of the ether. You just gotta know how to grab it.

Such a great scene and, in 1995, way ahead of its time. He was surfing information waves that we now take for granted. But then, it was like magic.

And it still kinda is like magic.

STORY IDEAS work the exact same way. Let me explain.

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Story ideas are everywhere. I get them all the time. I have several notebooks and files upon files of ideas. They’re floating in the wind, waiting for us.

The idea for my film POUND OF FLESH floated to me in a very similar fashion.

I am a big fan of action movies (duh) and have watched film after film of a hero who is in hard pursuit of a kidnapped person who matters very much to the hero.

I directly recall two around the time period where I got the idea for Pound Of Flesh, Mamet’s under-appreciated SPARTAN, starring Val Kilmer, and Scott’s MAN ON FIRE, starring Denzel Washington (which was itself a remake).

Both are great, but they are also stories about professional men trying to rescue a young girl who’s been taken (and this was a couple of years before Liam made this trope into a franchise) and they have to get her back.

I love those movies, all of them, but I had in my head a story about two brothers (which is the heart of POUND OF FLESH) who are estranged and the daughter who brings them together… with much in the way of family secrets. Originally she was to be kidnapped and the good brother reached out to the bad one for help.

And I realized I didn’t need to write that movie. I’ve seen it already, hundreds of times. But what I hadn’t seen, I realized in a flash, was a man chasing down his own body part. I’d never seen that before.

Thus, an idea was born. Instead of catching the man who stole his niece, my hero has to catch the man who stole his kidney… the one that my hero PROMISED TO GIVE TO HIS NIECE to save her life.

It floated before me in the air, until I grabbed it and put it to paper. Electric paper, but you get the idea. And another ten years before the film was finally made.

Not all ideas are equal. You have to spend enough time to recognize the ones that are meaningful and original and doable. But if you do it enough, you begin to recognize.

Which brings us back to my novel SOME ANIMALS.

(BTW, if you already have read & enjoyed it, do me a solid and leave a review on Amazon, if you please, find it here at SOME ANIMALS, thank you so much)

I remember the day, the moment I had the idea for SOME ANIMALS. It was while watching a completely different type of story in a film. I sat and watched PROMETHEUS, directed by Ridley Scott and starring a bunch of very talented actors.

I am not one to dump on a film, and will not. I know people have their issues with it. I enjoyed it but I’d agree that it had problems in terms of story.

But the thing that I remember the most was being utterly fascinated by Michael Fassbender as the android David. Fascinated. I cared more about him than the others in the story and my urge was to see HIM in another setting. I wanted to know what he did when he WASN’T on space missions, how he fit into society as an android.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and him, for days. And it was when I was doing some research on another project that led me to old episodes of KUNG FU (Carradine as Caine) that it hit me how to make it work.

He’s accused of a crime that not only did he not do, but he’s also incapable of doing. He knows he’s innocent, so he’s forced to go on the run to find justice.

And though inhuman, he has to learn how to be human to pass and, as such, become a champion of humanity (which too many humans seem to avoid embracing).

And the idea was borne from there. Pulled right out of the air. The best ideas are like those old Reeses peanut butter cups commercials from back in the day.

The best ideas are like that, two separate ideas (in the case of SOME ANIMALS, a sci-fi character combined with a Kung Fu western) to create something wholly new.

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MANY great ideas were like this. STAR WARS was a cross between WWI fighter plane movies, Flash Gordon, and pirate movies (no lie, the smuggling, the sabers, I mean, come on) that Lucas loved as a kid. He combined them together for something new and exciting. He put all the things he loved and wanted to see in the same movie.

There are COUNTLESS examples of this (Lucas would do the same thing with Spielberg when they brainstormed an ode to the serial adventure movies they had loved as kids… treasure hunters seeking gold, which turned into RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK) and the nice thing is, you can do it, too.

Bob Gale, a screenwriter of renown excellence, went back home on a vacation from writing movies and dug out his father’s old school yearbook. He saw a picture of his dad, as a teen, and wondered… “Gee, would I have even been friends with him, if we were in high school together?” and thus, BACK TO THE FUTURE was born.

The ideas were just out there, in the air. Like magic.

You just have to know how to grab them. Which means…

Any one of you can be a magician, too.

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