I’ve been asking myself a question lately that I can’t stop thinking about.
What does it take to make an audience trust a story that refuses to comfort them?
Learn with me.
The scripts I’m writing don’t offer easy resolutions. They don’t tie things off cleanly.
The characters don’t arrive at redemption on schedule. Some of them don’t arrive there at all.
And I think that’s honest. I think that’s true to the kind of human experience I’m trying to capture.
But an audience has to trust you before they’ll follow you into that kind of darkness.
You have to earn the right to leave things unresolved.
You have to build enough emotional investment in the first act that by the time you refuse to give them the ending they want they feel the weight of that refusal instead of just feeling cheated.
That’s the tightrope I’m walking right now in my scripts.
How do you build that trust with an audience? How do you make them stay with a story that won’t give them what they came for?
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This really resonates with me.
I’m drawn to stories that don’t aim to comfort the audience, but instead reveal truth through emotional tension and moral conflict.
It’s a powerful reminder that sometimes uncertainty is exactly what makes a story feel honest.
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You know, first of all, I really support you in being honest on your pages. I’m all for truth as well. I believe the audience has to believe in what you write above anything else.
And secondly, they need to understand that if the main character does something truly bad at the beginning, it’s not going to end well. I’ve even had some producers tell me that my endings were “bad” just because there was no happy ending. And I would respond: in this situation, a happy ending simply isn’t possible. The character has already done things that make it impossible for them to reach one.
Sometimes the only way out for that character—even if it includes death—is the natural consequence of their actions. And by the end of the film, the audience should understand that if someone makes those kinds of choices, a happy ending is not what awaits them.
That’s how I see it.
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YES Ana Rodrigues Glad to find someone who shares the same view
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that's just the thing Aleksandr Rozhnov not every ending has to have a happy ending. there's just some things you can't come back from. I wish more people understood that