In assessing a script, how do you know what criteria to apply? Obviously a comedy should make you laugh, a thriller get the pulse racing, and a horror make you unwilling to put the lights out. But beyond that, what do you look for?

Some people will answer ’structure’ at that point, but I believe that’s a question of mistaken priorities. Thing being, that a satisfying structure is one that delivers a sequence of emotions in an effective manner. It follows then, that it might be more useful to concentrate on your emotional response to a script than trace its resemblance to a particular structural template.

OK, so emotions count. They’re what draws an audience into a cinema, after all. And the effective control of emotions within the film will determine how successful it is — it’s no accident that people have tears in their eyes in the climactic scenes of many movies. So, tracking your emotional response to a script can prove very useful — I’d say more so than picking up on McKeeisms like ‘the reversal of the reversal’ or whatnot.

Emotions come in a variety of flavours, and it can help to have some way of knowing what you’re looking for when you seek to pay attention to them in a script. At which point an ancient tool has new utility. Way back when, some people believed there were four elements rather than the hundred-odd found in the modern Periodic Table. Comparing them isn’t fair in fact: the latter is very much a function of a scientific worldview, whereas the classical take on elements is far removed from test tubes and microscopes.

As it goes, the elemental perspective isn’t limited to emotions. That’s within its remit, but so are other ways of understanding and interacting with the world. Air is associated with the intellect, with concepts and ideas. Any screenplay needs to be well aspected in air since a large part of the pull of a film is the idea behind it. The business of straplines is very much to do with air.

Earth is to do with practicalities, making things happen effectively. Which could be one way to describe the need for a script to be plotted well. More, it’s to do with the story — however unlikely — being grounded in some emotionally credible reality. The stuff that George Lucas got right in the first Star Wars trilogy, but messed up with the second.

Fire is connected with the intuitive aspects of storytelling. It’s there in symbol systems that work their way through a film that bring out aspects of its meaning without being so crass as to describe them. It’s to do with what drives characters when they’re facing overwhelming odds, just as caterpillars must be traumatised midway through their transition to being a butterfly.

Water is all about emotions. They have depth, can be reflected on, or splashed about in for the sheer thrill of it. It’s an element that’s represented literally in many films: John Boorman loves his waterfalls, and the Bourne series is not unique in having characters reborn in water — it happens in The Descent too, to name but one example.

All this has been going through my mind since it came to my attention that the script I’m writing at the moment lacks earthy aspects. And now I’ll be incorporating them, to ensure that the film ends on a note of emotional and practical credibility rather than whizzbang symbolism. The latter is necessary to provide a platform for the former.Without it, there’s a danger that the film could culminate in fireworks that don’t have an impact on the protagonist. That follow through is vital, ensures the whole functions as a mandala, a visual meditation tool which itself is a demonstration of elemental balance.