David Mamet's First Rule of Writing: Urgent Need

How many films, books or plays have you encountered where the momentum of the piece suddenly flags, your eyes glaze and you start plucking the strands of dog hair off your sweater and wondering if you left the hamburger in the fridge too long?

My mentor, Sterling Anderson, was a writer on the T.V. series, ‘The Unit’, created by legendary Pulitzer Prize winning playwright/screenwriter/novelist/director David Mamet.

Stering said to me that the most important thing David Mamet taught him was ‘Urgent Need’. It was his Number One Rule.

In every scene, unless there is a major surprise, a character must have an urgent need. And, it doesn’t need to be as dramatic as a guy racing to stop a bomb going off at the White House.

It can be the urgent need of a little girl on her way to buy the New Years’ Eve gold fish for her family when she drops her ten dollars down a grate. That is the premise of the wonderful Iranian film, ‘The White Balloon’. That movie is so focused on this tiny child’s perspective as she moves through bustling Tehran looking to solve her very urgent need that it is a thousand times more riveting than a hundred million dollar space battle movie. Not that I don’t like a good space battle, however when they go on ad infinitum it becomes the law of diminishing returns. Show it once; cool. Show it twice; okay. Three times; alright. Four times; yyaawwnnnn.

But, back to Urgent Need. Many writers, for some reason, write scenes in a screenplay that are empty filler. A character shuts down their computer at work, now they’re driving home, pull into the driveway, taking their house keys out as they walk up the drive, get to the door, put the key in the lock and zzzzzzzzz.

The only reason for a scene like that is an Urgent Need already expressed and seething under the surface of the routine commute, which makes wonderful sub-textual tension.

They shut down their computer and sit staring at the black screen. We see their Apple watch face: 7:20. A close-up on their blank staring face. Back to the watch: 7:35. Now the audience knows there is something going on here. A blink and a big inhale.

Now they are behind the wheel, eyes blank and staring. Shot of the car: Porsche 911 Dakar. Speeding. Rapid blinking. Through the windshield: they are barrelling down on cars stopped at a red light. Feet slammed onto clutch and brake. Screeching tires. They swallow, raise a shaking hand to their brow. The nose of their car is inches from the back of a big yellow school bus. Kids look out the back window at them.

Now parked in the driveway. We don’t see the house yet. They get out of the Porsche, close the door and stand staring at this luxury symbol of their life. Contempt on their face. Now we see the magnificent home.

Walking to the house, they fumble with their keys. Drop them. They stare at them on the ground. In sudden fury, kick at them.

Chest is heaving with fast breaths. They blow out a long exhale, shake their head, walk to the keys, bend down and pick them up. They straighten and look at their beautiful modern home. It earns even more contempt than the Porsche.

They open the door. From inside, kids yell, “MOMMY!” or “DADDY!”

So, what is this person’s urgent need? We don’t know yet. But we know SOMETHING is wrong.

In this case you could continue with routine scenes of dinner, banter between the spouses and bedtime rituals for the kids because there is an urgent need in the subtext that pulls everything taut with tension.

It is easy to spot the urgent need in action films. It’s part of the genre. And every scene works its way through new urgent needs as one problem after another is solved and new, bigger problems, crop up.

It is more difficult to make sure urgent need is satisfied, in EVERY scene, in dramatic relationship films. One film that does this exceptionally well is Carol.

It is a romantic period drama starring Cate Blanchette and Rooney Mara. Directed with exquisite tension by Todd Haynes, the screenplay by Phyllis Nagy is based on the 1952 romance novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith.

There is not one moment in Carol that can be called ‘filler’. The urgent need of these two women, in love, in a time and place where their love was unacceptable is a tight bow string that doesn’t let up from the opening to the closing credits.

Ask yourself if the scene you are writing could be cut from your script or book. If it can, you must excise it. It will only leave your audience or your reader suddenly adrift, wondering where the thread of the story went.

Urgent need. Your story needs it. Urgently.

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