Bridge Entertainment Labs at Sundance Collab
Sundance Collab invited us to bring our Storytelling Principles for Creating New American Stories of Us, and the 4 Cs they’re based on (Curiosity, Complexity, Contact, and (Good) Conflict,) to a panel: “Bridging Divides Through Storytelling.” Hundreds of storytellers from across the country and globe registered for this event.
We offered a free, live online masterclass on how the stories we tell have the power to either entrench our biases or illuminate our shared humanity, with the goal of tackling the question: “(How) can storytellers move beyond ‘us vs. them’ tropes to reflect nuance and build empathy?”
Our CEO Steven Olikara led a practical, tactical discussion with two accomplished creators from the BEL network:
- Dave Caplan, Ph.D. (Writer/producer, The Conners, George Lopez, The Drew Carey Show).
- Valerie Weiss, Ph.D. (Director, Suits, Scandal, Star Trek).
They shared concrete, evidence-based techniques for character development and structural plotting that break out of online echo chambers. The event culminated in a live, interactive listening exercise from our friends at Living Room Conversations, helping attendees to cultivate a knack for bridge-building and viewpoint diversity.
Here are some of our favorite moments.
What If Everywhere in the World Was a Warm Room?
Valerie talked about what drives her curiosity as an artist.
“I remember when I was 3, 4, or 5 years old, my parents would always take me somewhere like the pool or the beach. And within five minutes, I’d bring seven kids back and say, ‘These are my new friends.’ And so I think I’ve always just loved that idea of gathering people together and feeling like, ‘How nice would it be if everywhere in the world was a warm room?’ It’d be so nice to feel connected.”
Living In the Space Between Characters or Perspectives
Valerie spoke about the storytelling philosophy that helps her to find the nuance and complexity in stories of deep conflict. She described directing A Light Beneath Their Feet, which centers around a mom with bipolar disorder and her 17-year-old daughter who wants to go off to college.
“What’s really interesting here is the space between these two characters …. [I chose] not to take sides, but to show what each character’s going through, because that’s ultimately how we can understand each other and grow, in relationships and in community.”
Capturing the Emotional Truth of Different Perspectives
Dave peeled back the curtain on his inter-party marriage and on how that informed the curiosity that drives his storytelling.
“I was a Democrat who married a Republican. I realized it was kind of Romeo and Juliet, and I was trying to figure out how to avoid the tragic ending. So my home became a little bit of an incubator for saying, ‘Wow, your emotional truth is different than my emotional truth. How do we talk about that?’ …. my screenwriting became a natural outgrowth of my curiosity to say, ‘How do people from different worlds of various kinds, be they political, social, economic, whatever, how do they talk to each other?'”
The 4 Cs Make for Great Storytelling
Dave (whose work helped inform the 4 C’s) spoke about how Curiosity, Contact, Complexity, and (Good) Conflict are at the heart of good storytelling.
Curiosity
“As a writer, are you curious about characters that you don’t know intimately? Are you curious enough to say, ‘Let me dive deeper into into these characters?’ …. And then what you get to, is complexity, right? Complexity makes great characters, and if you’re curious enough about people, you find out that people and characters can be more complex than you think they are.
Complexity
“One of the cultural norms we’ve been taught by these news organizations and other kinds of digital media and even legacy media is that people are one-dimensional. They’re one thing or another. And that can’t be farther from the truth. If you want to write a crappy story, make people one-dimensional.”
Contact
“We meet people and characters that we didn’t know before that are complex, that have a truth that might be empathetic to us now because we didn’t realize they were that complex, right? And if we’re curious, which we all are, I think naturally we’re going to start to come into contact with the kinds of characters we didn’t know before, which is great for empathy.”
(Good) Conflict
“There’s nothing worse than one-dimensional conflict. Complex characters lead to great conflict. And in the white paper, we talk about high conflict versus good conflict. You can also think about lazy conflict versus rich conflict, right? And lazy conflict is non-dimensional characters. Great conflict, which makes writing so much easier … is rich conflict where two people have an interesting point of view here.”
Good Leadership Is About Listening
Valerie showed a clip from a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode she directed, in which an early Captain Kirk struggles as a leader, to highlight the importance of listening.
“Instead of listening, asking for advice and trusting that he still gets to make the decision as a leader, he [Kirk] felt threatened and needed to just shut them [his advisors] down and make them feel smaller, and then left the conversation. So that, I think, is very illustrative of what we want to fight, in a polarized society.”
The Importance of Multi-Dimensional Characters
As Captain Kirk falters as a leader, his advisors struggle with how to respond.
One advisor recommends removing Kirk from power, but the wisest voice in the room advocates for giving him the benefit of the doubt. As Valerie summarizes: “We should try to rescue what we know is good about him and reach him.”
How Can Storytellers Create Genuine Empathy Without “Both-Sidesing” or Excusing Bad Behavior?
This is a common question that we get asked. Dave’s answer boils down to seeing peoples’ emotional truth and the universality of their pain.
“You don’t have to give up your principles. All you have to do is listen and try to get past your first perception of somebody’s character …. Suspend judgment for a second and listen for an emotional truth, because if somebody lashed out or somebody has been aggressive … there’s something underneath that which is probably more universal than you think it is.”
Avoid Lecturing the Audience
Both guests stressed that good stories don’t try and lecture the audience.
Valerie suggests writing from a theme, not from an agenda. “It’s really important to write from ‘What’s the question?’ Not ‘What’s the answer?'”
Dave argued that audiences are often allergic to lecturing stories.
“If you have an agenda, the audience is going to smell that. And boy, if you want to get them to disconnect, that’s a good way.”
Instead, he suggests, write from curiosity.
“Write about what you’re curious about. And yes, we all have a point of view. Your point of view should be in your writing. But write from curiosity about that thing that you want to talk about, don’t write from trying to convince.”
Writing From the 4 C’s Can Help Reach Untapped Audiences
Steven spoke about the power of these principles to help stories to break through bubbles and reach new audiences.
“The goal for so many storytellers is to impact people or impact narratives. And I think if you implement these forces, it just gives you a greater chance of impacting people beyond the choir. If you’re going in with an agenda and lecturing, that’s going to be a very small universe, and you’re not going to really expand the number of people who are different than you … And so I really think the best content, whether it’s fictional or documentary, really embodies these principles and has villains that are multi-dimensional.”
Want to watch the conversation? https://collab.sundance.org/catalog/Bridging-Divides-Through-Storytelling-Video (must register for Sundance Collab)
