How to Write a Time Travel Screenplay

Time Travel movies have long been a small but profitable subgenre of science fiction movies. They can take on a number of forms, from time travelers to people misplaced in time. They almost always involve the interplay of what was with what could have been. If you want to tackle your own time travel screenplay, keep a few things in mind.

Instructions

1

Create a credible method of time travel. Science fiction fans are very unforgiving about scientific facts, and more so with time travel movies. You can no longer plop your heroes in a machine and send them to distant times, you must have a plausible explanation for how this is possible (which means you need to be able to talk about wormholes, tachyon particles, digital cell reproduction and the time travel paradox). You don't necessarily have to send people through time; you can send messages, devices or DNA samples.

2

Motivate your characters. You need to create a compelling case for why they would travel backward or forward in time. They might want to change the past to stop something terrible from happening; they might want to find future cure for a devastating disease; they may discover time travelers interfering with their own timeline or they may want to prevent other time travelers from changing the past.

3

Distill your idea to a single sentence synopsis: "Businessman accidentally sent to future in corporate time travel experiment," "Space explorers discover alien time travel device," "Time travel researchers accidentally send deadly plague into American Revolution." Beginning writers often think this is a waste of time, but it actually focuses your thinking. You may change your synopsis to something better as you write, but you have a road map to begin your journey.

4

Develop your characters. Time travel movies are populated with two types of characters, the travelers and the natives in the time period(s) they travel to. Your hero and/or heroine will almost always be scientists, but you can also build your movie around an ordinary person accidentally catapulted into time. Your natives can be anything: cave people, knights, cowboys, evolved sentient future beings who look nothing like us or totally devolved creatures who can't wait to eat your hero.

5

Outline your movie. The more you work out in advance, the fewer revisions you will need to make to your script. Movies tend to follow three acts; in act one the heroes discover they can travel through time, in act two they discover they have damaged the past or future just by being there and in act three they resolve the problem and return. Time travel movies often have a brief coda where they discover the residual effects of their trip (a child that had died the first time, a message from another time traveler they left behind).

6

Write your script in screenplay format, which will include transitions and camera directions as well as dialogue. Screenplay formatting usually produces a minute of film per page. Time travel movies don't have a fixed screen time, but you should try to keep your script under 120 pages (120 minutes).