Twenty-five years ago, the moviegoing audience didn’t live in a world of comic book heroes and massive special effects spectacles all year round. The summer blockbuster season started Memorial Day weekend and the tentpole films released through the beginning of August had major stars who commanded large salaries.

Con Air was released on June 6, 1997, and had a massive cast of excellent actors including Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, John Cusack, Steve Buscemi, M.C. Gainey, Dave Chappelle, and Monica Potter. The film was written by Scott Rosenberg and directed by Simon West.

Face/Off was released on June 27, 1997, and starred Nicolas Cage, John Travolta and Joan Allen. The film was written by Mike Werb and Mike Colleary and directed by John Woo.

Although it has been a quarter-century, are there screenwriting lessons from the highly entertaining, high-concept films Con Air and Face/Off? Yes! Here are just a handful of screenwriting takeaways for you to consider.

High concept, far-fetched

How far is an audience willing to go along before they simply find the story too unbelievable? Pretty far!

Far-fetched ideas are nothing new. In a world where a bus can maintain a speed in excess of 50mph  (Speed) on a weekday morning in Los Angeles, the suspension of disbelief can be powerful so long as the filmmaker sets up the right stakes and creates compelling characters.

What do we mean by "high concept?" It's a term used to describe a movie that basically anyone understands and would be interested in if you told the story in a few words, not sentences. Words.

For example:

Con Air: Dangerous criminals headed to a maximum-security prison take over the plane.

Face/Off: A criminal mastermind steals the face and identity of his FBI agent nemesis.

There isn’t much more of an explanation needed beyond those few words and yet it sounds original, intriguing and action-packed. Not all movies are this simple, but you can analyze some of your favorite movies and try to break them down in as few words as possible, then do the same for your own work.

Following the protagonist

First, what makes us care about Cameron Poe in Con Air? When we first meet Poe, he’s just off a tour of duty as a U.S. Ranger and dances with his pregnant wife at the bar where she works. When they make their way to the parking lot, two drunk guys pick a fight with Poe. He ends up killing one.

Poe is a sweet guy who talks like the loveable Forrest Gump and is convicted of manslaughter for defending himself and his wife. He spends years in prison working out and writing letters to the daughter he has yet to meet. Now he finds himself as the only good guy on a plane full of the worst criminals in the United States.

Poe is not a complicated character but the audience likes him and wants to see how he will save the day. He doesn’t even have a character arc, he’s the same person at the beginning as he is at the end. The movie is driven by plot with a lead character that only Cage could bring to life.

Face/Off is a bit different because Cage, at different points, plays both the protagonist and the antagonist. Sean Archer starts off as John Travolta but after the surgery, the character is taken over by Cage. This creates an interesting dynamic for you if you're eager to find a lesson in character creation. In 1997, the main selling point was Travolta and Cage leading the movie and switching roles part way through. Therefore, you would have to stick to who these characters are in your writing, regardless of their face.

Sean Archer is the protagonist. It’s his movie. We know from the first scene that Castor Troy, the antagonist, murdered his child (sort of by accident) and so Archer spends the next six years tracking him down. It’s his sole mission to avenge the death of his son. The face thing is a gimmick. The writers, Mike Werb and Mike Colleary, had to keep both Archer and Troy true to their real identities on the page, regardless of the actor playing the role.

Impossible situations

As a screenwriter, you love your characters. You want your good guys to be good people and often struggle to put these characters through hell. But putting heroes into impossible situations is what makes for good drama.

Take Archer in Face/Off. He’s tasked with entering a prison facility to convince Troy’s brother to give up the location of a bomb. All goes well until Troy shows up (now played by Travolta) and shares that he murdered everyone who knows about the identity switch and will leave Archer to rot in the torturous hellhole that is the prison. How will he escape an inescapable prison? How will he stop Troy, who is now the hero of the city? How can he get his face back?

These impossible situations keep the audience engaged which makes your job extra hard to find a way to make their escape out of these scenarios intriguing and believable.

Roll call

Con Air introduces a large number of characters in a matter of minutes. If you stop to look at how they accomplish this, it’s pretty fascinating. On top of that, each character is distinctive in comparison to the others.

The filmmakers accomplish this by breaking up the characters into categories. There are the agents, two Marshalls and a DEA agent. This is one group. Via this trio, we learn about the second category: the criminals. Larkin (Cusack) reads off a list of the major players and the audience gets a slow-motion introduction to each one.

Then there are the guards, whose business is transporting and guarding the criminals on the plane. Who these characters are is largely defined by how they treat the prisoners. Con Air teaches you how to create and introduce unique characters in a large ensemble, within a short amount of screen time. 

There’s no doubt that Nicolas Cage is one of the most unique and prolific actors of the last 40 years. A generation of moviegoers in the 90s became his loyal fans partly because of the likable and rewatchable components of both Face/Off and Con Air. It’s impossible to see any other actor fill these roles, it’s even harder to think these movies would have even been made without him.

Storytellers, when you face the harsh realities of writer’s block and struggle with where to take your story next, it’s worth glancing back at these two wonderfully fun films and asking yourself, ‘What would Nicolas Cage do?’