How to Keep Up the Lie in Your Screenplay

In the event you’d like to write a screenplay where one of your characters lies about who they are or the state of something, you should employ certain steps to do so effectively. A lot of times, this kind of deception happens in comedy screenplays like Wedding Crashers, Ferris Buller’s Day Off, and Weekend at Bernie’s. But it can happen in dramatic screenplays where an officer is undercover, like in The Departed. Kindergarten Cop interestingly is a cop comedy, a sort of hybrid.

When attempting to write a screenplay where things and people aren’t what they appear to be, follow these steps to help keep the lie alive.

First, you have to set up the situation. As with any other screenplay you have to introduce the main players we’ll follow and their story world. The audience must see what an average day is for them and see why the lie will help the character we’ll follow chase their goal or why they feel they must keep the deception going. Then, when the inciting incident happens, the deception can be set into motion. The inciting incident can be the beginning of the lie, but I wouldn’t suggest that. It would be more interesting to watch a character fabricate and maintain a lie in response to an inciting incident (lying about their identity after another character is killed in order to get close to the killer, for example) than it would be to see a person lie to change things in their story world.

You can make the beginning of the lie also serve as the inciting incident, but I wouldn’t. Rather than tackle it that way, I suggest even starting the screenplay with your main character already in a lie and their lie is their story world. It could be interesting that way, and would lead to the next step in writing such a screenplay:

Have the protagonist lie to chase their goals, and have them work hard to maintain it. In the film examples I gave earlier, the characters living lies had to first tell their lie in order to get what they wanted. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s characters in Wedding Crashers lie about who they are so that Owen Wilson can spend more time with Rachel McAdams’ character and her nutty family. The family assumes the two protagonists are familiar because they’ve been a welcome hit at the wedding reception, so they invite them home for the weekend. But Rachel McAdams’ family wouldn’t have done so if Owen Wilson’s character didn’t tell the initial lie, setting the deception into motion.

Once at the family’s house, our Wedding Crashers protagonists keep the lie going. If they slip up and use their real names or say something inconsistent with the lies they’ve been telling all weekend, they’ll get thrown out or, as it almost happens later in the movie, shot by the offensive grandmother. Your protagonist living the lie has to do everything he or she can to keep it going. It’s a great conflict and constant tension to have the threat of your protagonist’s lie being discovered looming over their head. And it’s great to see how they talk their way out of situations where they are almost discovered.

The stakes for your protagonists keeping up the lie have to be life or death for them. They should not want to be found out and it must be conveyed that way in the screenplay. It can literally be life or death in dramatic scripts similar to The Departed, or it can be life or death in the fun sense – like in Ferris Buller’s Day Off. Whatever the stakes are, make them clear and ever-present.

Another way to raise the stakes and to ratchet up the tension is to make other characters come close to finding the lying protagonist out, but having them do whatever is necessary to keep the lie going. Make the protagonist tell absurd lies, have them do unethical things to continue to fit in, have them do fun family things to fit in, and etc. Make it fit for the type of screenplay you’re writing but have it be uncomfortable for the protagonist. Just enough so that the audience knows they’re not used to doing things like that, but enough so that the audience is convinced.

Writing a screenplay where a lie needs to be kept up can be challenging, but make sure to have fun writing it. There are lies you need to clearly establish for yourself before you write them in the script, but when you get that plotted out, you’ll have a good time keeping your lies straight. 

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