I once saw a film in which the very first thing the audience sees is the main character bruised and hurt.
This is a problem. Think about it.
Let’s say you drive past a collision on the highway. There are ambulances, firetrucks. You even see a person being carted into the back of the ambulance. You will get a reaction, sure. Yes, you will be curious. You will feel sad for the person on a superficial level. And then you will move on. That’s what you would feel if the first thing you knew about a person is that they are hurt.
But let’s say you find out that your best friend, brother, or mother was in a horrific collision on the highway–and let’s say you decide to drive out there to meet them. You will be filled with an entirely different emotion. You will be terrified, scarred, nervous. You will be full of anxiety as you drive along the highway. Each stop in traffic will be filled with tension, suspense. Where is your loved one? Finally you see the firetruck. An ambulance. Finally you see a person being carted off. Is that your friend? You can’t breathe. You get a sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach.
What accounts for the difference in how you react to these two events? They are the same events after all, but with one key difference: in the second scenario, you know the people involved the accident.
You are more emotionally attached to someone’s plight if you knew them before their darkest hour. Only then can you really be with them as they get hurt or die. That’s why starting the movie with someone hurt might be a bad idea–it is only a hook. If the hook is that your main character is hurt or dead, you better go back and explain how it happened that way–as in Double Indemnity or Sunset Boulevard. If you go ahead and do that, then you get to explain why we should care about your hurt/dead character, such that by the end of the movie, we actually do care. It is a way of rewarding the audience for paying attention to your Act 1.
People use catching hooks all the time to start conversations:
“I got fired from work today”.
“My daughter got into Harvard!”
“I think my wife is cheating on me.”
But then the rest of the conversation is usually always the lead-up to the hook–it explains the hook:
“So I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business…”
“Yeah she got her envelope in the mail this past Thursday…”
“So last week I was packing for a business trip and I came across…”
The conversation works backwards. You get the idea.
In the movie I saw, the hurt woman gets taken care of and gets better–but I was never told who she is and why she was hurt in the first place. In other words, I was never told why I should care about the woman.
The movie held my curiosity, but then I moved on.
Make your Act 1 matter. Hook your audience in more than a superficial way.
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