Make Us Lean In Within Ten Minutes: How Udaan Opens
If you are working out how to start a screenplay, start with this: the audience gives you the first ten minutes. They don't promise to like your hero.
That second line is the one new writers forget. They assume that because Rohan is the hero, we will care about him. We won't, not automatically. We care about people who do something.
What should happen in the first 10 pages of a screenplay?
Most screenwriting guides say the first ten pages must set up your hero and the problem. True. But I tell my students something simpler.
The first ten minutes are a free sample. People have bought the ticket, or pressed play, and they will sit quietly while you set things up. That patience has an expiry date. By the time it runs out, they need a reason to stay that has nothing to do with politeness.
In advertising, we had a single page or a few seconds of a TV spot to make someone stop. Nobody was obliged to look. A screenplay is luckier: you get ten minutes of goodwill. Spend them on making us lean in, not on explaining the family tree.
How Udaan wins us over to Rohan
Udaan (2010) was written by Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap. It was Motwane's first film as director, it was selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2010, and it won Filmfare awards for Best Story and Best Screenplay.
Look at how it opens. Rohan and three friends sneak out of their boarding school in Shimla at night to watch a film. They get caught. They are expelled. And Rohan is sent home to Jamshedpur, to a father he hasn't seen in years.
Notice what the writers did not do. They did not open with Rohan sitting alone, thinking about how lonely he is. They did not give him a speech about freedom. They put him outside the school wall at night, breaking a rule with his friends. We are smiling with him before we know anything about him.
Then the film adds two more things, quickly.
He wants something. Rohan wants to be a writer. It is a soft, private wish, and the kind of wish that makes us protective of a character.
Someone is waiting to stop him. His father is not interested in poems. He has plans for Rohan, and the plans do not include writing.
Ghar pe koi wait kar raha hai, aur woh khush nahi hai. Every Indian viewer knows that feeling in the stomach. By the time Rohan reaches home, we are on his side, and the real story has only just begun.
How do you make the audience care about a character?
Here is the myth I hear most: "Make the hero likeable." Writers then give the hero a sick mother or a habit of helping old ladies cross the road. That is sympathy by decoration, and audiences see through it.
What actually works is action plus want plus pressure.
Action comes first because it shows us who someone is without telling us. Rohan's night out tells us he is restless and a little reckless. One scene does the work of a page of description.
Want comes next because a person who wants something becomes someone we watch. Rohan's wish to write is small and clear. We understand it in one line.
Pressure comes last, and it is what turns watching into worrying. The father makes the want expensive. The moment we sense that this boy's wish is about to collide with that man, we lean forward.
If you want to go deeper on building the person before you build the plot, read how to create a character. And if your opening has no pressure in it, understanding conflict in fiction will help you find it.
A small test for your own opening
Read your first ten pages and ask yourself honestly: if someone watched only this much, would they want to know what happens to this person? Not to the plot. To this person.
If the answer is no, the problem is usually one of the three pieces missing. Often the hero is only reacting, or only thinking. Give them a decision to make in the first scene, a wall to climb or a rule to break, and let us see them choose.
Try this
Take the screenplay or story you are working on and answer these three questions in one line each:
What does my hero do in the first ten minutes?
What does my hero want that they aren't allowed to have?
Who is waiting at home to stop them?
If your first answer is "thinks" or "remembers", rewrite the opening so the hero acts. If your second answer is vague, make the want smaller and sharper. If you have no answer to the third, your story hasn't started yet. Find the person who stands in the doorway.
Then write only the opening scene, two pages at most, with all three answers visible on the page.
Quick answers
How do you start a screenplay? Start with your hero doing something that shows who they are, then reveal what they want and who stands in the way. Save the backstory for later.
What should happen in the first 10 pages of a screenplay? We should meet the hero in action, understand their want, and sense the pressure that will test it. By page ten, the audience should be on someone's side.
How do you make the audience care about a character? Not by making them nice. Show them acting on a clear desire while someone or something makes that desire costly.
Openings, character and conflict are at the heart of The Foundation of Storytelling, my live online course in Hindi and English.
Send me your three answers on WhatsApp. I'll tell you if I'd lean in.
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