More Character Ideas

As a group, we carefully considered whether our main character should be male or female. Eventually we decided that despite the fact that a female character would go against the conventions of a thriller in a totally original and unique way, it simply wouldn't be believable. We thought that if we used a female, there would be no way that the audience would realistically believe that a female could capture and tie up a large male on her own.

We toyed with the idea of perhaps having men in the background who would have helped capture the person, however we thought that this would spoil the illusion of somebody torturing a person through personal vendetta.

Influenced by the character of Michael Douglas in the film Falling Down (1993, Joel Schumacher), we decided that the character should be an ordinary person, perhaps a businessman. This would be more shocking to the audience to see a regular person - who could represent anybody they may know - living a secret life of sadism, torture and vendetta. The underlying message would be that anybody you may know could be this sick individual.

The most significant thing about the character of Michael Douglas in Falling Down is that he is so ordinary. He's never held a gun in his life, and yet when he is ground down he is driven to a breaking point where he can no longer turn back. Hopefully, we can portray a similar thing in our thriller - the torturer being an ordinary person driven to insanity, using household objects to inflict pain on someone he holds a grudge on.