The Florida Project: Structure Without Structure

This week we are going to be talking about The Florida Project, by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch.
I am so excited to be talking about this film, especially a week after the Oscars, because this is a film that probably should have been competing for Best Picture. Bria Vinaite probably should have been competing for Best Actress, and Sean Baker probably should have been competing for Best Writer and Best Director.
If you haven't seen The Florida Project yet, I am going to try to avoid spoilers until we get to the end, and I’ll give you some warning first.
What Sean Baker did in this film, like what he did in Tangerine, if you listened to my Tangerine podcast, is really quite inspirational for any writer and quite complex, in its structure and its form. Sean Baker shot Tangerine on about 600 grand. He shot it on an iPhone-- a feature film shot on an iPhone! And he shot this movie in a budget somewhere around 2 million dollars.
So these are extremely low budget films. Beautiful, successful, powerful, low budget films. Which is very exciting if you are an emerging screenwriter.
As an emerging screenwriter, you can take the success of The Florida Project as a sign that you can do this yourself.
You can do this yourself at a very high level, and you don’t need a lot of money.
Here is Willem Dafoe, who has obviously done some huge movies, who isn't doing this film for the money-- who is doing this because someone has written a beautiful role that he just needs to play. And seeing the performances that Sean Baker, second time in a row, has gotten out of these extremely inexperienced actors—Bria Vinaite along with little Brooklynn Prince, who gives one of the finest performances you could ever ask for, and she is seven years old-- shows you just how much you can do with very little if you have the right script and the right actors.
I also want to talk about the form and the structure of The Florida Project. Because The Florida Project is not put together like most movies we see at the theater.
Rather than hurling us into the action, or into the plot of the film, it just kind of drops us into a world. And lets us wander with the characters through that world, watching their lives as if we were living them.
Watching The Florida Project is like watching Beasts of the Southern Wild in pastels.
You might feel like you’re just drifting through a world, but you’re actually being propelled on an extremely powerful journey, into the experience of some extraordinarily compelling characters whose lives are changing forever, and whose journey will change the way we see ourselves and our world.
The Florida Project is an incredibly hopeful film that takes place in a world that should be filled with despair.
It takes place in a rundown motel just outside of Disney World, where a bunch of low income families are attempting to raise their children in these tiny little one bedroom motel rooms.
The movie is primarily seen through the eyes of children, and it centers around a really complicated and beautiful relationship between six year old Moonee, who is played by Brooklynn Prince, and her mother Halley played by Bria Vinaite.
Moonee is not quite old enough to recognize her mother’s problems, her destitution, her desperation, her drug addiction, her violence, her despair. Instead, she sees her mother through the eyes of any child-- through these beautifully idealistic, Disney World, pastel eyes. This child who is having the time of her life, in her own private Disney World with absolutely no supervision, and absolutely no awareness of the danger that is all around her.
And what is gorgeous about this film, what makes us feel connected to these characters, is not that these characters are perfectly good.
Because the characters in The Florida Project are not perfectly good-- not the kids, and not the parents. They’re not all doing all the right things all the time. Sean Baker is not “saving the cat” here at all.
Because what connects us to these characters is not that they’re doing the right thing, but that they’re coming at life with an open heart, from a place of love.
And what is really beautiful about all these characters, no matter what their problems, no matter how misfit they are for being parents, all of these families, all of these people, are coming from a place of love. They all love their children. Some of them are terrible with their children, but they all love their children. They all want them to have better lives.
And Halley, in particular, is as fun of a mom as you could ever want. Halley is open to anything, completely non-judgmental of any behavior that Moonee chooses to engage in. She loves and accepts her child exactly as she is, and all they do together is have fun.
Of course, Halley is also stoned out of her mind all the time, struggling to make ends meet by mooching meals off of her one employed friend, ripping off tourists on fake perfume and worse, and running a lot of other scams that are incredibly unhealthy for both her and the people around her.
But Moonee doesn’t really see any of that. We see it, from a distance, in the same way that Willem Dafoe’s character, Bobby, sees it.
Bobby is the incredibly harried manager of this crappy motel, who is like the father to all these troubled children who live there and to all the parents who live there as well.
We see these fractured family units where there is no one to watch the kid, where it is impossible to watch the kid, have a job, pay your rent. And we follow the kids as they run wild through a summer of fun, in a dilapidated world just a stone’s throw away from Disney World.
And even though The Florida Project appears to have no structure, you are absolutely never bored.
So how do you build structure that doesn’t feel like structure?
Because in 80% of The Florida Project nothing is happening. 80% of the movie we are just watching a bunch of kids play together. And yet, we don’t feel like it is amorphous or structureless. In fact, we feel totally drawn in and compelled.
So what are those techniques that these writers are using and that this director is using to pull us in?
The first technique Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch use in The Florida Project is the power of visual storytelling.
And I am not just talking about the incredibly beautiful shots, and the incredibly beautiful costumes, and the incredibly beautiful mise-en-scène of this piece in the way it is shot. Because that is compelling and powerful, but ultimately, if that is all you have, you end up feeling like you are in an art gallery. It is fine to look around for a little while, but people tend to browse for a few moments and then they tend to lose attention.
What actually roots us in these characters also isn’t just the great performances. And, yes, the performances are fabulous. And, yes, these characters, even these kids, are fully alive on the screen. But guess what? That isn't what roots us into these characters either.
What actually roots us into the characters in The Florida Project is a screenwriting and directorial concept called vignettes.
As I’ve discussed in depth in earlier podcasts, a vignette is a moment of visual action that captures the essence of the character from the very first moment we meet them.
What Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch do such a great job of in The Florida Project is using those vignettes to provide an underlying structure for the character’s journey.
They root each of these characters in action, allowing us to immediately understand who they are and what they want. And then they attack those desires with obstacles, to force the characters to make new choices. No matter how small the choice may be, there is always a goal and there is always an obstacle that leads to it.
As an example of this, we are going to look at the opening sequence of the film, which culminates in a spitting contest.
We are watching a bunch of kids and they have a very clear goal, their super-objective is to have a good time and that is what they do for most of the movie.
 
They do it in a way that we wish we could. I wish my childhood was as much fun as these kids’ childhoods, although I would never trade my childhood for their childhood either.
But, these kids are living in a magic kingdom, in a place where there are no rules and there is no responsibility, and there are no consequences. And, in that beautiful magic kingdom, they start the film. And they are practicing spitting from that balcony of a neighboring motel onto one of the resident’s cars.
Oftentimes we think as we are writing, “if I am going to start my movie I need something really big,” but the truth is you don’t need something really big, you need something really small.
You need something really small that the characters really want to do; in this case the characters really want to spit on that windshield.
And it needs to connect to a super-objective, which is they want to have fun. Then you need an obstacle. In this case the obstacle is the neighbor, who comes out and screams at them and tells them to stop.
And what happens? The kids don’t stop; in fact, the kids don’t care at all. The kids end up cursing her out and spitting all over her car and all over her and all over her kids.
So, in this case we have a bunch of kids, and all they want to do is spit on the car of this resident of the neighboring motel. And they don’t even probably know the resident; they are just enjoying their little spitting game.
They have a want and they are rooted in the action and it is visually fun to watch. And we watch them do a verb. Not sit around in a state of fun, but rather doing the verb, the little goal, the little task that is going to pull us through their story today.
And what happens is, the obstacle of the chastising neighbor forces the kids to reveal their how: how they are different from any other children....