If two people always agree, one is unnecessary.
The aphorism that opens this inquiry, “If two people always agree, one is unnecessary” by Bernard Shaw, is not merely a gibe. It is a structural theorem about narrative and dramatic writing: that the existence of a character must be justified by the irreducible difference they introduce. When two minds converge entirely, the audience witnesses not a relationship but a redundancy. Film, as a medium defined by compression and economy, cannot afford redundancy. Every character placed before the camera is a commitment, to screen time, to budget, to the audience’s attention, and that commitment demands return. The question is how does a screenwriter choose and build characters who are genuinely necessary?
The answer lies in understanding character not just as a vessel for personality traits but as a site of productive friction. A character earns their place in a film precisely to the degree that they would be missed, not sentimentally but structurally. Remove them, and the film collapses or simplifies in a way that diminishes its truth. This is the standard to which the aphorism holds every writer, and it is a demanding one.
Before a writer can build a character, they must understand why that character must exist. Character, for Aristotle, is subordinate to plot; but what this subordination means is not that characters are unimportant but that they derive their importance from what they do to the story’s movement. A character who changes nothing, who agrees with everything, who presents no obstacle and offers no revelation, fails this test at the most fundamental level.
In cinematic terms, this Aristotelian principle acquires new urgency. Film is a time-based medium: every scene costs the audience duration, and they subconsciously audit that cost against the value received. A character who merely echoes, who functions as a sounding board for the protagonist’s own conclusions, wastes that duration. Human beings do not attend to information they already possess. Two voices saying the same thing produce not harmony but noise.
Each character in a screenplay must hold a position, a worldview, a desire, a fear, a wound, that is uniquely their own and that comes into meaningful contact with the positions of others. The drama emerges from that contact, from the friction and negotiation of incompatible needs. This is not to say every scene must be a confrontation; disagreement in its fullest dramatic sense encompasses every mode by which one consciousness resists or complicates another.
Choosing Characters
The process of choosing characters for a film begins not with personality but with function, and function, in the sense meant here, is relational. A character is defined by how they differ from every other character in the story. This principle, which screenwriting pedagogue John Truby calls the “web of character,” demands is that the writer must ask of each character: what do you provide that no one else provides? If two characters always agree, in temperament, in perspective, in the challenges they pose; one is redundant, and the film would be leaner and stronger if we take one out.
A case study:
In Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), Professor Isak Borg and his daughter-in-law Marianne occupy the same car, travelling toward the same destination, sharing many of the same facts about their lives — and yet they are constitutionally, philosophically opposed. Borg has achieved everything the culture valorises; Marianne has chosen feeling over achievement and does not respect the cost. Their journey does not resolve this difference; it excavates it, layer by layer, until each character understands themselves more fully through having been truly seen by someone who does not agree. Neither is unnecessary: remove either, and there is no film.
Against the Echo Chamber
Characters assert that the world is genuinely plural, that perspectives other than the protagonist’s are legitimate, that moral and emotional truth is not the exclusive property of the person the audience is asked to identify with. The temptation, in popular filmmaking, is to make every secondary character an extension of the protagonist’s own psychology; to surround the hero with figures who confirm their intuitions, validate their choices, and exist primarily to be impressed by their qualities. Such films do not dramatize a world; they construct a narcissistic mirror. The antagonist is cartoonishly evil; the love interest has no desires of their own; the sidekick functions as audience proxy. Every character, in effect, agrees with the protagonist’s fundamental importance. If every character in a film agrees, agrees that the protagonist is right, deserving, exceptional, then the film has populated itself with necessary redundancies.
“The antagonist is not the villain of your story. The antagonist is the person who is right, from where they stand” John Truby. The practical implication for the screenwriter is this: at every stage of character development, ask not only “who is this person?” but “what does this person prevent the protagonist from ignoring?” A character earns their necessity to the degree that their perspective, desire, or resistance compels the protagonist, and through them, the audience, to encounter something they would otherwise avoid. This is the function of the necessary other: not to agree, not to confirm, but to insist on the reality of a world that extends beyond the protagonist’s own field of vision.
The work of character creation is, ultimately, the work of imagining fully the other, the person who sees differently, wants differently, has been wounded differently. It is, in the deepest sense, an act of moral imagination. Where this imagination fails, where characters collapse into agreement, where the other is merely a shadow of the self, not only the film but the truth it might have told is diminished.
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