I don't have Final Draft on my laptop, so I won't be working much on CK, but that may be good. I need to sort some things out about it. See how dangerous I want to go. Should CK be amoral as regards Carli? Is everything she does okay because she's out for justice? I dunno, yet.
Funny thing is, Is don't like amoral movies...but that seems to be the direction most are going. Even Martin Scorsese is caught in it -- he made a movie about a sociopathic beast who ripped people off in order to finance a fabulously rich lifestyle, but wound up being a love letter to self-indulgence. Swordfish, made 12-14 years ago, was even worse in how casually it treated the deaths of innocent people. Same for Boiler Room and its shrug on selling junk bonds to unsuspecting buyers in order to bail out another unsuspecting buyer who'd been defrauded by the guy who did the selling. Money's all that counts, not human suffering.
I think of Speed and how everyone on that bus was made into a human being by Joss Whedon. Then the death of a woman passenger became traumatic for everyone. That's the gold standard for thrillers, so far as I'm concerned -- when you worry about everyone involved and don't have the anonymous background players who can be killed off without much sorrow.
Agatha Christie set up And Then There Were None in a way that emphasized guilt, as 10 people summoned to an isolated island are killed off one by one. Each, it turned out, had committed a crime or brutality against another human being, and those who felt the least guilty about it were killed first, leaving those who felt the most guilty to suffer until they, too, died. It was written in her usual dry style, but the implications of the setup marked me, deep. Maybe I'll incorporate some of that into CK...
Hmm...that'd mean the worst guy would have to go first, and if that happens, the story's over...so maybe not.
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