Screenwriting 101: Mark Boal

“It’s [The Hurt Locker] the not the first war movie to be told in chapters. Apocalypse Now is told in chapters, in sort of an episodic way. And I think that war is like that in the sense that war doesn’t have a neat, little through line. I didn’t want to write one of those movies where the whole story revolved around one particular mission because I was trying to capture the daily grind of the job. It would have felt like a distasteful imposition to make it seem like there was one master terrorist and all these guys had to do was diffuse this one masterful bomb and everything would be okay. It’s not like that. It’s a tidal wave of bombs. So the structure came about in an attempt to be faithful to the reality of the situation, more than any preconceived notion that it should be three acts or four acts or episodic or something else. I think there’s nothing wrong with those kinds of [three act] movies, but there are enough of them out there, so why not try something different?

By the way, ironically, the character stuff does kind of break down into three acts. In some ways it’s hard to get around.”

— Mark Boal, screenwriter for The Hurt Locker

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