5. Make Your Hero Responsible For Your Villain
One of the best plot points in
Iron Man 3 concerns the fact that Tony Stark is essentially the guy responsible for making Aldrich Killian into the Mandarin in the first place. In the movie's opening flashback, we see that Stark, still in full-on playboy mode in 1999, tells a younger, nerdier Killian to meet him up on the roof of their hotel so they can discuss the idea Killian approaches him with. Stark's just palming him off, of course, because he's about to get down and dirty with Maya Hansen. Still, Killian waits in vein in the freezing cold for 20 minutes. It's at this moment - as he's staring out over the city from high above - that Killan is inspired to carry out the evil plans that witness over the course of
Iron Man 3. This adds a nice weight to the story, given that we know it was actually Stark's fault that Killian chose to go down an evil path (one that he probably wouldn't have, had Tony just took the time to listen to what he had to say back in '99). If you're writing a screenplay, it's not a bad idea to link your hero and villain in a way that gives them a sense of past history, or having previously associated. Better yet, make your hero directly responsible for why the villain of your movie has become the way he is and you open up a whole realm of creative possibilites. It's an old screenwriting trick, but it pays off in droves if you can get it right and make it work for the story at hand. And it works particularly well here because we've seen how Tony's old ways have come back to haunt him.