If you’re going to live a lie, you better do it well. This applies as much to your characters as they do to real life, as one inept conman found.
As I’ve said before, writing is a form of lying and as such you need to maintain the suspension of disbelief, the big lie, or else people will see through it.
This means that if you create a character, all their actions have to be believeable – from their mannerisms, reactions, actions and speech. As Allan Debenham found to his cost.
Screenwriters can fall into a jealous love with their protagonist, wanting their beau’s life to be as simple and worry-free as possible, leaping in to push aside obstacles and tribulations.
And like many a relationship, the rest of the world doesn’t see things through gooey eyes and instead are sickened, or bored by the company of turgid, lacklustre secondary characters and pedestrian stories.
So it is to Stanley Kubrick I give thanks for Dr Strangelove and showing that proper love for a protagonist is to surround them with the worst kind of people – people who don’t want to do as their told, or what you want, but what they want.