Details about Jennifer's TYB Character
Anatomy of an Opening Scene: THE YELLOW BIRDS (R.F.I. Porto)
A woman receives a letter, and is shaken by it.
By R.F.I. Porto
First, let’s be clear: the credit for this page belongs mostly to Kevin Powers, whose novel is the basis for the film, and to David Lowery, who wrote the early drafts of the script. I came to THE YELLOW BIRDS later, and was lucky enough to stay with the project over several drafts and through the production process.
I wrote several versions of this page — refining the character, adjusting the details, trimming the length — but my goal was always to preserve the core of the scene. A woman receives a letter, and is shaken by it.
It’s an unexpected way to start a war film. The moment is quiet, domestic, far from any battlefield. So why begin here, with Maureen?
My work on this page was less important than what it taught me about the rest of the story.
With adaptations, and rewrites too, writers are often more like detectives than storytellers. We sift through someone else’s words, studying the details, searching for the intentions behind those details. We’re looking for the underlying ideas, the thematic through-lines that hold a story together. Once we find those, we’re free to make the story our own.
THE YELLOW BIRDS is built very much as a mystery. The main character, Brandon Bartle, goes off to Iraq, then returns home with a secret that the film only gradually reveals. The story has a nonlinear structure that mirrors the mental state of its hero, jumping back and forth in time through Bartle’s post-traumatic jumble of memories.
This kind of mystery structure demands a character who can push the story forward, toward the truth. That character couldn’t be Bartle; he isn’t searching for the truth, he’s running from it. In many ways, Bartle himself is the mystery, the keeper of the story’s secret. What happened in Iraq? What did he do there, and why?
Maureen Murphy was the perfect character to ask those questions. Her son, Bartle’s friend Murph, has gone missing in Iraq, and she’s looking for answers. From that very first scene, before we even know her situation, we relate to Maureen’s confusion and frustration.
Her role in early drafts was powerful but small, and I saw potential for more. She could be the story’s guide, the one who keeps us oriented in the haze of memories and mystery. The seeker who gradually leads us to the truth.
Taking cues from that simple moment with Maureen and the letter, I built outward with new scenes that explored and expanded Maureen’s character. I treated her as the hero of her own story, allowing her search for answers to carry across the entire film, connecting and strengthening the existing scenes.
The ideas were there already, baked into the foundation of the story, hinted at in the gaps between scenes. It was just a matter of seeing them, and bringing them to the surface.
One final note: in the finished film, this page is no longer the first scene.
We knew that change might happen, and in fact that many scenes might not end up exactly where they started. The film’s fluid, memory-based structure meant that only the rhythm and pacing of the editing would decide the final order of scenes. Director Alexandre Moors and editor Joe Klotz needed the freedom to experiment with different options, and so the script had to be flexible in places.
That doesn’t make the scene any less important, it just demonstrates the organic and collaborative nature of the process. Even for a job as solitary as screenwriting, there are always collaborators. The scene you write today may have been started by someone else, and someone else might finish the scene you start tomorrow.
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