by Meghna Haldar and Annie Reid

Film director Meghna Haldar and writer Annie Reid are both narrative filmmakers who created the film Revival together.

Meghna and Annie: Fancying ourselves as storytellers, we both are continually asking: what makes a good story? And as we continue to look for good stories while reading screenplays or watching films, we often notice that screenwriters and filmmakers employ a three-act structure as a skeleton for telling their stories. We see this type of structure used in nearly all of the films that we watch. Yet, as artists, we find something slightly, well, repellent that a single structural concept should govern an entire discipline. Does structure, specifically the three-act film variety of Hollywood and, incidentally, most Independents, limit the imagination? Or, does it liberate by simply formalizing some fundamental -- even primal -- notion of story?

AR: For me the question of quality is totally wedded to that of structure. We go to see a movie and we say, that was good. Why? Because it was moving or clever or exciting or challenged our ethical standards. Or we say the movie was bad. Why? Because it was sentimental, boring, predictable, plotless, too violent. The moment you talk about good and bad, you imply standards, criteria, aesthetic principals -- which is a good thing. Isn't that what helps us recognize quality, help those of us who aspire to create something that might one day be called art figure out how to attain excellence?

MH: I agree with you about what might make a bad film. But to wed quality only to the skeleton of structure is to say that the basis of a good story is a good structure. Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Hiroshima Mon Amour, I agree. But have you seen a totally inane Hindi film with no idea of structure which is entirely satisfying? I have.

AR: The simplest way to begin a story is this: get your main character into trouble. Make him or her want something. Make that something be very hard to get: money, love, power, revenge, justice, solitude, to know God, to remain married, to have sex without consequences, to make a monster, to kill without conscience, to revel in the blood of innocents, to get sober, to have a good time, to become whole again, to just get Dorothy the hell home. The character has lots of problems getting it. Things don't go as he or she expect or want. And then either they get it, or it becomes very clear that he or she will never get it. The story is over. And that's also a simple way of describing the three-act structure. Some Hindi -- and plenty of American -- films might not make logical sense, but they still follow that basic story pattern. Sense is not the same as structure. And don't we impose this structure on our own lives?

MH: Life imitates the movies and television, I imagine. It's almost like the reality we live in is so dull that we have to manufacture a reality, which is really all learned behavior from the movies and television. But romances really end after that walk into the sunset. No one stops to wonder what it would mean to wake up and make coffee everyday for Julia Roberts. And yet, lives are narratives, just a million narratives simultaneously unfolding. Our lives are the sum total of our histories: past, present, future, imagined, real and beyond, right? It's like Bakhtin's heteroglossia, a babble of voices clamoring to be heard. So life in some sense lacks the structure we seek from the movies. Would you agree?

AR: I think you just said that so you could say "heteroglossia." Imposing stories on the random nature of reality is how we discover -- some would say manufacture -- meaning. Isn't that why we tell stories? And we look for that in narrative film, as artists and viewers. We don't like stories from which we cannot discern a meaning or a pattern. We feel misused by the filmmakers. We feel they are being self-indulgent or condescending. So, yes, we have standards -- and structure. But sometimes I wonder if my own idea of standards can potentially compromise my imagination. What if I see something so outside of my ideas of what a film should be that I can't even recognize something new?

MH: That's the crux of the issue, isn't it? In art, imagination needs to be unfettered. And yet, we all adhere to standards so that our imaginations can be better understood by others. All of us are playing to a gallery. Where else would we get the money to pursue our art? Somewhere there has to be a middle line. Like it or not, there is always a compromise.