Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

From the title of the book and the Introduction, the author puts the hero, or protagonist, front and center in his concept of what constitutes a good movie. He asserts that “liking the person we go on a journey with is the single most important element in drawing us into the story” (xv). The hero is the vicarious stand-in for the viewer; it is through the hero’s evolution over the course of the film that the viewer experiences the journey. Though the hero does not have to be similar to the viewers at all—they don’t even have to be human—they do need to possess understandable motivations or reactions to the events that follow in the story in order for the audience to care about what happens to them.

To illustrate his point, Snyder gives the example of Lara Croft 2, which tanked at the box office. Snyder found the title character to be “cold and humorless” (xiv), which left him less than excited to see the movie. He felt that the filmmakers focused on making her “cool” and sexy, with a “new latex body suit” (xv), instead of on revealing relatable emotions. A movie that does follow the rule of “Save the Cat” (i.e., one that shows the good or likeable side of the hero early on) is Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, wherein two hitmen are central characters in the story. By making the two characters funny and a bit “naïve” and “childlike” (121), the film lightens the tone, even in the scenes where they kill people. Snyder states, “Instead of risking the audience’s good will by making them [the characters] existential hard asses without a soul, screenwriter Tarantino, in his own way, makes them sorta huggable” (121). In addition, Tarantino follows another of Snyder’s Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics in the same movie when he makes the hitmen’s boss sound even worse and more violent than they are.

Films about real-life people who may have bad sides or that feature an anti-hero still need to follow the Save the Cat law. Snyder cites figures who had some troubling sides to their stories who nonetheless starred in successful movies—the centuries-old character of Aladdin in Disney’s Aladdin, Alfred Kinsey in the movie Kinsey, and John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. The movies cleaned up some of the messiness of the real people’s lives in order to make them heroes. In the case of Aladdin, for example, there is a “Save the Cat” scene early on where Aladdin, a thief, steals bread but then gives it to a pair of starving children. In Snyder’s view, this scene is an example of how the “hero has to do something when we meet him so that we like him and want him to win” (123).

While “Save the Cat” is not the first of the Immutable Laws or the central concept of the book, it is the law that Snyder feels is most controversial due to the pushback he has received for it. Critics of the rule feel it might mean making the hero always good, which might make the story “cloying and dull” (123). However, Snyder is clear that heroes should not be perfect. Rather, heroes need “tics and flaws,” what he terms “Six Things That Need Fixing” (75), because it is the hero’s growth and emotional evolution that hooks the viewers into the story.