“The Lion King is basically Bambi with Hamlet.” - Christopher Vogler

Spiderman, Batman, Brave – as the Hollywood summer blockbuster season is upon us, perhaps it’s a good time to revisit an interview with Hollywood story consultant Christopher Vogler. He has worked for Walt Disney Pictures, Fox 2000 and Warner Brothers and has contributed to The Lion King, Fight Club, I Am Legend, The Spiderwick Chronicles and The Wrestler, among many others. But he’s best known for his workshops and book, The Writer’s Journey, which identifies the mythic structures behind stories.

Our 2003 interview was broadly about how a Hollywood mind might help the British film industry.

So what advice does he have for the British film industry? “The question is,” he says, “what drives the writers in the UK? Is it art or commerce? Because in the States people are more nakedly interested in making a hit.”

Let’s decide we want to make a hit, how do we go about it?

“Well,” he says, “you have to come up with a big initial idea that has its arms open wide to the audience. In the States they start from the concept and then go back to put in the characters and the heart. In the UK writers seem to build from the characters or some personal experience.”

Of course, he admits, depth of character can pay a price in this concept-led Hollywood approach: “The complexity of British writers is beyond Hollywood. They just blow us away with their understanding of human nature.”

Vogler also believes, however, that a greater emphasis on script development could well make success in Britain a little less haphazard. It all goes back to identifying the basic elements in storytelling, he explains. While reading numerous scripts at Disney in the late 1980s he began to include in his reports comments as simple as “each character should have an inner problem [such as emotional growth] and an outer problem [such as defeating the villain]” or “every story must have a theme”. This might seem obvious, but it’s surprising how frequently the obvious can be overlooked.

The head of animation at Disney at the time, Jeffrey Katzenberg, snapped his ideas up, insisting that the title page of every project should state the theme as either an old wives’ tale or an aphorism. For instance, the title page of Beauty And The Beast read: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” This practice continues today as a simple method to keep the 350 people involved in making an animated movie thinking the same way.

The longer Vogler worked, the more he began to recognise certain archetypes and patterns in stories, such as mentor figures, and what mythologists call “threshold guardians” and “shapeshifters”. Ultimately he wrote these down in what has become in Hollywood a legendary seven page memo, which, when sent to some colleagues to generate a discourse, was soon being plagiarised. “That was a great compliment, and I decided it was worth pumping more thought into it.” The memo went round Disney “like a virus”, and for a while everyone in Hollywood was reading it.

Katzenberg put Vogler to work on The Lion King. And, although Vogler doesn’t claim credit, around that time Disney’s moribund animation department began its resurgence with hits such as Beauty And The Beast and Aladdin.

So what can the British learn from this memo? Its content, which now forms the basis for his book and Writer’s Journey workshops, was highly influenced by Vogler’s reading of anthropologist Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, a synthesis of the world’s myths into fundamental archetypes and structures. Vogler himself settled on 12 steps. They go something like this.

In an ordinary world (step 1) a hero is called to adventure (step 2), which he initially refuses (step 3). He then meets a mentor (step 4), accepts the call and crosses a threshold into a special world (step 5). There he is tested, having to discover whom his friends and enemies are (step 6). After a period of preparation called the approach (step 7), he has to survive the ordeal (step 8), which is a moment of almost physical or spiritual death for the hero. This is followed by a celebration in the reward (step 9), before he embarks on the road back towards the ordinary world (step 10). In the final showdown of the resurrection (step 11), the skills the hero learnt in the special world are tested. And, finally, successful, the hero returns with the elixir, a balm for the ordinary world (step 12).

In one way or another, Vogler believes, pretty much every story from all around the world, from Jesus Christ to Shane and Lord Of The Rings can be broken down into most of these steps. As can the story in The Odyssey, Star Wars, The Matrix and even My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Pulp Fiction.

However, too close an adherence to the hero’s journey by aspiring screenwriters can cause problems, too. “It’s a pattern, that’s all, not a formula,” insists Vogler, encouraging flexibility with the form, “but some people just can’t escape their own psychology. You can tell them to be poetic all day but if they’re literal minded they’re just not going to get it.”

And that’s a trap even successful filmmakers can fall into. George Lucas has acknowledged that Campbell’s book was hugely helpful in clarifying his ideas while writing the original Star Wars film. But when he followed those ideas too self-consciously in Willow the audience sensed his method and the film disappointed. Vogler likens his Writer’s Journey to a roadmap. “It’s good for plotting your journey out in advance. If you get lost, you can check it. But you don’t paste it to the windshield.”

The application of Vogler’s ideas, whether deliberate or not, is clear to see in adventure and fantasy films, but are there genres where the hero’s journey just doesn’t work? He answers carefully. “I think it does work, but it takes more imagination to project it into other genres. And comedy does seem to have its own principles.”

Not to worry, comedy is one of British cinema’s more successful genres and can survive very well without Vogler’s ideas. But then we seldom try fantasy and adventure on our own, so is the Writer’s Journey going to be any use to the British film industry at all? Well, maybe. American romance and thriller novelists have acknowledged Vogler’s ideas, so perhaps there’s hope for British romantic films and thrillers.

And if we really want to make movies with a more universal appeal, Vogler has a few more suggestions. Firstly, he says, try raising the stakes in your story so that the protagonist is really in, if not physically, then spiritually, a life and death situation. That usually helps.

Then one of Katzenberg’s principles was to combine two stories to make a meatier hybrid. Thus, says Vogler: “The Lion King is basically Bambi with Hamlet.” When the film was released it had such universal qualities that people in various cultures claimed it was based on one of their own folk tales.

However, as always in movies, there are no certainties. “We did some horrible Frankenstein experiments where we combined Rumpelstiltskin with Rapunzel and Top Gun, coming up with something like Rumpelpunzel, where the princess was a jouster,” he admits. Mercifully that was never filmed.

But should we embrace this idea of reworking old stories in the UK? “I always say go back to the sources, because there’s nothing new under the sun. But there are new combinations,” comments Vogler, citing the successful updates of The Taming Of The Shrew in the high school romantic comedy Ten Things I Hate About You and Jane Austen’s Emma in Clueless. “Reworking stories is a really profitable area.”

And so, by building bigger ideas behind our movies, reworking older stories, raising the stakes, pushing our development departments to nurture screenplays which consider possible mythic ideas behind the hero’s journey, might British films reach a larger audience? Vogler thinks it has to be worth a try.

“When I was reading the world’s fairy tales at Disney it felt as if they’d sent me down to the cellar with a torch and that I’d opened this old musty chest and had pulled out these manuscripts and found myself saying: ‘This is great!’ Then I trudged back up the stairs and they turned them into something successful and commercial.

“In the UK you have the world’s biggest cellar of musty chests. Why not make something out of it?”

You can read the original seven-page memo and more about Christopher Vogler's work at http://www.thewritersjourney.com