The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations

A hundred years before Christopher Booker told us there were only seven Basic Plots in the world, French writer Georges Polti listed 36 individual dramatic situations that form the smaller building blocks of everything that’s ever been on a stage or a page. Updating Polti’s blueprints for the cinema, director Mike Figgis finds examples from classic movies to show how similar they all are. Good for writer’s block.