The simpler your character’s motivation, the more complex the plot around them can be. That’s the storytelling philosophy that helped legendary screenwriter Eric Roth pen, by his own admission, the best-loved movie in his extensive filmography full of critical and commercial smashes, Forrest Gump.
Released 30 years ago this summer, the film was a hilarious, heartbreaking romp that saw Tom Hanks’s title character accidentally end up at the epicenter of some of the biggest moments in modern American history: Civil Rights; the rise of Elvis; the fall of Nixon; t he fight back against the Vietnam War; Hurricane Carmen… the list goes on.
On paper, no film ought to have been able to contain so many mad tangents (Forrest Gump is simultaneously a war movie, an AIDs drama, a disaster movie, and a sports movie if you count the portion of its runtime spent following Forrest’s adventures running around America). How did Roth make it all coherent? One word: “Jenny.”
In the latest episode of Script Apart, my podcast in which beloved screenwriters discuss their first drafts of great films and TV pilots, Roth explained how he made Forrest’s romance with childhood friend Jenny Curran (Robin Wright) the anchor of his tale.
How Eric Roth Motivates the World in Forrest Gump
As the entire world changed around our protagonist, one thing stayed the same: his love for the estranged girl of his dreams, played by Robin Wright.
“She’s all he really wants. It’s quite simple that way,” Roth explains, going on to reveal that he based their relationship on the way he felt (and continues to feel to this day) about his wife, respected endocrinologist Anne L. Peters. “It allowed the story to be a little crazy, the purity of his motivation. He loves his mother. He loves his country. But mostly, he wants to be with Jenny, to do right by Jenny,” Roth said.
This is the sort of great storytelling advice you’d expect from the writer behind films like Munich, Dune, A Star Is Born, and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Having a screenplay that burns through plot and story events is fine, as long as there’s a trackable “want” at the heart of it that threads the whole story together. In Forrest Gump, that’s a romance, but it can be anything as long—a father’s respect, a promotion at work, anything—as it’s communicated to the audience effectively, Roth suggests.
Give it a try in your own work—write a post-it note with your character’s goal, distilled into one simple sentence, and place it above your workspace. It might make all the difference in making your story land with the sort of emotional punch that, for thirty years, has been Forrest Gump’s trademark.
Listen to the full episode of Script Apart, supported by ScreenCraft, WeScreenplay, and Final Draft, above.
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Author: Al Horner
