Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

Several times in Save the Cat, Snyder refers to Joseph Campbell, a writer and literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College widely known for his work in comparative mythology and religions. Campbell received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Columbia University in 1925 and went on to earn a master’s degree in medieval literature in 1927. On a sabbatical from Sarah Lawrence in the mid-1950s, Campbell traveled to Asia, largely India and Japan, which informed his thinking about Asian religions and instilled in him a desire to bring comparative mythologies to a wider audience. The work for which he is best known came out in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which explores how many mythological stories around the world share a common narrative structure, or monomyth. Campbell, who was inspired by the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, writes the following of the hero’s journey:

The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula and let it then assist him past his restricting walls (Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. United States, New World Library, 2008).

The general pattern that Campbell cites makes it possible to interpret many different types of stories through a lens of the psychological development of the protagonists. Campbell delineates 17 stages of the archetypal hero’s journey from the ordinary world to a realm where the hero faces challenges that they must overcome in order to return home as a changed, transformed person. While not every hero’s journey story contains all 17 stages, the ebbs and flows of the hero’s fate and fortune can be found in many seemingly dissimilar stories. The journey need not always be an actual physical journey, either; the psychological stages are the key factors. Campbell’s narrative structures have three parts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. These three parts are reflected in Snyder’s three-act screenplay structure. Snyder’s beats mimic stages of the traditional hero’s journey, too. For instance, what Campbell refers to as the “Call to Adventure” is the “Catalyst” in Save the Cat. “Refusal of the Call” falls into Snyder’s “Debate” stage, and Campbell’s “Road of Trials” involves similar issues as Snyder’s “Fun and Games.”

Snyder is not the only screenwriter to be influenced by Joseph Campbell. Most famously, George Lucas drew upon The Hero with a Thousand Faces for his Star Wars saga. Stanley Kubrick, an award-winning director, producer, and screenwriter, was also influenced by Campbell and gave author Arthur C. Clarke a copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces as he was writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film of which Kubrick directed. Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood screenwriter, advised Disney Studios on using Campbell’s narrative structure for several productions. Like Snyder, Vogler turned his understanding of mythological archetypes in stories into a book for fiction writers, titled The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2007).