Story Trick #2: Michael Clayton

So here we are with Story Trick #2. This time the trick comes from Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton.

Gilroy both wrote and directed this film, which marks his debut as a director, but certainly not as screenwriter. Some of his other credits include the Bourne Trilogy, as well as Armageddon, and Dolores Claiborne.

In short, Tilda Swinton plays Karen Crowder, the top legal adviser to U/North a gigantic chemical fertilizing company.

Just before act two starts she’s about the give an interview on camera to be used in some internal marketing.

We start of by seeing her sitting in front of the camera crew and the interviewer with one of the senior partners at her side. She delivers a very thoughtful and serious answer to the interviewer’s first question and seems extremely confident and on top of the situation.

But after the first question is answered, we start to cut back and forth between the ongoing interview and her rehearsing in her room 30 minutes or so before. In the comfort of her private space she just the opposite; she’s nervous and fumbles with the words while she’s trying to find the right answers to the prepared questions.

The trick is that not only do we get a lot of exposition details about Karen Crowder, about her being a work alcoholic and very much theyoung rising star as the in-house legal adviser, but we also see her as a fragile and somewhat emotional unstable woman that is working very hard to keep her facade intact.

It’s a superb trick by Gilroy. In just over two pages, Gilroy manages not only to introduce Karen and sketch out her background, but also to show both her personalities; her calm collected professional one and her fragile and unstable personal one. Something that proves to be a vital clue for events later in the story.

You can read Tony Gilroy’s excellent script in its entirety here. The sequence mentioned herein starts at page 27.