In the opening 10 minutes of Peaky Blinders there are 12 scenes.
Let’s break them down into scene length:
In this series of posts we’re going to analyze Steven Knight’s superb historical crime drama Peaky Blinders.
To begin, we’re going to explore the first 10 minutes.
How often do you hear the first 10 pages are the most important?
If you don’t grab ’em in the first 10 pages, you lose ’em.
Well, let’s see how what a master of his craft does with his first 10 minutes.
First question: How many scenes are there?
Answer: 12.
Click here for Question 2. How long are the scenes?
127 Hours (screenplay by Danny Boyle + Simon Beaufoy) is about a man who endures the extreme depths of psychological and physical suffering but who learns through the experience, grows and changes – a heavy price to pay for character growth, especially as the story’s true.
Delve deeper and we see the movie’s major theme is connected to the protagonist’s psychological self-revelation. Before his journey into hell Aron Ralston’s a self-proclaimed ‘big fucking hard Superhero‘ who can do everything on his own. But by the end of the movie he’s screaming for help from strangers. That’s a changed man. But what a journey it takes to get him there. His revelation and the major theme of this movie is that we need others. We cannot go it alone in this world. No man is an island.
This theme is brilliantly captured in the movie’s set-up with the eye contact between Aron and a cyclist. Aron is on a solo adventure. The cyclist is with a bunch of others. The big question the movie asks is: should we do things alone or together?
Are you as a writer going it alone? If you’re a novelist do you use an editor? If you’re at marketing stage do you use a PR strategist? If you’re a screenwriter do you use a script consultant? Or are you, like Aron, suffering alone ?
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