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When I finished The Power of the Dog, or, more accurately, when I thought about the film the next day and how much mental work I had to do to follow along with Jane Campion’s story, but how much I liked the story anyway, I thought as well about my favorite TED talk, from Andrew Stanton. Stanton wrote the Toy Story movies and directed Wall-E, and in his 2012 speech he discussed how exactly he approaches any story he films.
…It confirms something I really had a hunch on: That the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don’t want to know that they’re doing that. That’s your job as a storyteller: To hide the fact that you’re making them work for their meal.
We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and to deduct. Because that’s what we do in real life. It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in. There’s a reason that we’re all attracted to an infant or a puppy. It’s not just that they’re damn cute. It’s because they can’t completely express what they’re thinking and what their intentions are. And it’s like a magnet. We can’t stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in.
I first started really understanding this storytelling device when I was writing with Bob Peterson on Finding Nemo. And we would call this The Unifying Theory of…
