Character Development: What It Is, With 8 Movie Examples

The first time Ted Kramer makes French toast for his son, he cracks the eggs into a coffee mug because he doesn’t know where the bowls are. The pan burns. The breakfast is a disaster. Near the end of Kramer vs. Kramer, father and son make the same breakfast again, and this time they work like a team. Nobody has to explain what changed.

That’s character development at work. It’s how a writer builds a believable person: what they want, what they need, what holds them back and what they do under pressure. This guide covers what character development means, the 8 elements behind it, 8 movie examples, a 6-step method and 20 questions to ask your own character.

What Is Character Development?

Character development is the process a writer uses to build a believable, complex character. It covers what the character wants, what they need, the flaw that holds them back, the past that shaped them and the choices they make under pressure.

People use the term in two ways:

• The craft. The work a writer does before and during the script to build the person.
• The growth on screen. When a fan says a character “had great character development,” they usually mean the character changed.

Both meanings matter, but they’re not the same thing. The change itself has its own name: the character arc.

	Character Development	Character Arc
What it is	Building the person	The change that person goes through
When it happens	Before and during the writing	Across the structure of the story
The question it answers	Who is this person?	Who do they become?
Example	Paul Hunham’s Harvard past in The Holdovers	Phil Connors learning to care in Groundhog Day

Good development is what makes an arc believable. If you want the change itself, our guide to what a character arc is covers the 3 types with 10 examples.

The 8 Elements of Character Development

Every well-developed movie character is built from some mix of these 8 elements. The diagram shows how the core steps connect.

1. Want. The goal the character is chasing. It drives the plot and gives the audience something to root for. Writers also call it the character’s motivation or goal.
2. Need. What the character is missing inside. It’s often the opposite of the want, and the character rarely sees it until late in the story.
3. Flaw. The habit, belief or weakness that keeps them from what they need. Selfishness, pride and fear are the classics, and our list of 50 character flaws has plenty more.
4. Backstory. What happened before page one. Our guide to the power of backstory shows how actors use it too.
5. Relationships. The people who push back. A foil character shows who your lead is by being different. A deuteragonist shares the story with them.
6. Pressure. The situation that forces the issue. Without it, a character can stay the same forever.
7. Choices. What they do when it costs them something. This is where the audience learns who they really are.
8. Small actions. The way they make breakfast, answer the phone or leave a room. Behavior shows character faster than dialogue, and it’s often what makes memorable movie characters stick.

You don’t need all 8 on the page at once. Most great characters lean hard on two or three.

8 Character Development Examples in Movies

Each of these 8 movie characters shows one element of character development. They count down from an animated classic to a 1952 film many critics call one of the greatest ever made.

8) Chihiro Ogino, Spirited Away (2001)

Chihiro shows how pressure from the world around a character can build them faster than any speech.

Chihiro starts the film as a sulky 10-year-old in the back seat, unhappy about moving house. Within minutes her parents eat food meant for spirits and turn into pigs. To survive, she has to take a job at a bathhouse run by the witch Yubaba, who takes her name and calls her Sen.

Miyazaki said he wanted “a heroine who is an ordinary girl, someone with whom the audience can sympathize.” Chihiro grows because the world gives her no choice. She scrubs a giant tub for a stink spirit, keeps her real name and, at the end, picks her parents out of a line of pigs by knowing that none of them are her parents. The film won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and was Japan’s highest-grossing film until 2020.

7) Ruby Rossi, CODA (2021)

Ruby Rossi shows what happens when a character’s want pulls against the people she loves.

Ruby is the only hearing member of her family in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She works on the family fishing boat and interprets for her deaf parents and brother. Then she joins the school choir, and her teacher pushes her to audition for Berklee College of Music.

Her want is to sing. Her family needs her on the boat, and when their fishing license requires a hearing person on board, she gives up on college. That tension drives every scene. At her concert, her father asks her to sing again while he feels the vibrations in her throat. Emilia Jones spent nine months learning American Sign Language and taking voice lessons. CODA won all 3 Oscars it was nominated for, including Best Picture.

6) Charlie Babbitt, Rain Man (1988)

Charlie Babbitt shows how a clear flaw gives the audience a starting point to measure a character against.

We meet Charlie in debt and in a hurry. He’s an arrogant dealer importing four Lamborghinis, and the EPA is holding them. Then his estranged father dies and leaves his $3 million estate to the care home where Raymond lives. Raymond is a brother Charlie never knew he had. Charlie gets the rosebushes and a 1949 Buick Roadmaster.

So he takes Raymond out of his care home to get control of the money. The flaw is selfishness, and the film never hides it. By the end, Charlie turns down a $250,000 offer to walk away and tells the doctor he wants a relationship with his brother. Barry Morrow based Raymond on the real savant Kim Peek. The film won 4 Oscars, including Best Picture.

5) Paul Hunham, The Holdovers (2023)

Paul Hunham shows how a backstory revealed piece by piece can turn a joke into a person.

At first Hunham is the teacher every student hates. He’s strict, sour and stuck babysitting the boys who can’t go home for Christmas in 1970. The film lets us laugh at him for a while.

Then the past comes out. Hunham was expelled from Harvard after a rich donor’s son accused him of plagiarism, and he hit the accuser with his car. His old headmaster at Barton Academy gave him a teaching job. Once we know that, his bitterness makes sense, and so does his choice at the end to take the blame for a student and lose his job. Hemingson has said the script is partly drawn from his own life. Da’Vine Joy Randolph won the Oscar for playing Mary Lamb, the school cook whose son died in Vietnam.

4) Ted Kramer, Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

Ted Kramer proves that a character’s growth can play out in one small, repeated action.

Ted is a workaholic advertising man who has just landed a big account when his wife, Joanna, walks out. The next morning he has to make breakfast for his son. Eggs go into a coffee mug, the toast burns and the pan ends up on the floor.

By the end of the film the two make French toast together without a fuss. The scene needs no dialogue to show that Ted is now a father. Hoffman was going through a divorce at the time, and he brought many personal moments to the role, including the improvised ice cream standoff with young Justin Henry. The film won 5 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor.

3) Ruben Stone, Sound of Metal (2019)

Ruben Stone shows the gap between what a character wants and what he needs.

Ruben is a heavy metal drummer and a recovering addict, touring with his girlfriend Lou in their duo Blackgammon. Then he starts losing his hearing. He moves into a community for deaf recovering addicts run by Joe, a Vietnam veteran who lost his own hearing in the war.

Ruben’s want is simple: get his hearing back. He sells his RV and his gear to pay for cochlear implants. His need is what Joe tries to teach him each morning in a quiet room with a pen and paper: to find “moments of stillness.” In the last scene, he takes the processors off and sits in silence. Paul Raci, who plays Joe, grew up as the hearing son of deaf parents. The film won 2 Oscars and was nominated for Best Picture.

2) Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, Lady Bird (2017)

Lady Bird shows how much of a character comes out in her closest relationship.

Christine is a senior at a Catholic high school in Sacramento who has renamed herself Lady Bird. Asked if it’s her given name, she says it is: “It’s given to me by me.” She wants to go to college on the East Coast, somewhere with culture.

Her mother, Marion, is where most of her development happens. In the opening scene, they cry together over an audiobook, start arguing, and Lady Bird throws herself out of the moving car. By the end, she’s using her real name and calling home to thank her mother. Gerwig has said that “nothing in the movie literally happened” to her, but it has “a core of truth.” The film earned 5 Oscar nominations.

1) Kanji Watanabe, Ikiru (1952)

Kanji Watanabe tops our list because his whole story comes down to a single choice and what it costs him.

Watanabe has spent 30 years in the same office job at Tokyo’s public works department. Then he learns he has stomach cancer and less than a year to live. He tries drinking and nightlife, and none of it helps. A young coworker, Toyo, gives him the idea that changes everything.

He decides to push one small request through the system: a group of local parents want a cesspool drained and turned into a playground. Kurosawa then jumps to Watanabe’s wake, and his coworkers piece together why he changed. The final image is Watanabe on a swing in the snow, singing “Gondola no Uta” in the playground he built. In 1972 the Sight and Sound critics’ poll ranked it the 12th greatest film of all time, and in 2022 it was remade as Living with Bill Nighy.

How to Develop a Character in 6 Steps

Here’s a method you can use on any character, lead or supporting.

1. Write the want in one sentence. What does this person want more than anything? Our character profile template puts it on page one.
2. Find the need under it. Ask what’s missing inside them. Ruben wants his hearing. He needs peace.
3. Pick one flaw that blocks the need. One clear flaw beats five vague ones. Charlie Babbitt’s selfishness is all Rain Man needs.
4. Write the backstory, then use a tenth of it. Know where the flaw came from. Show only what changes how we see them.
5. Surround them with people who push. Every secondary character should test your lead in a different way.
6. Build the pressure and force a choice. Put the want and the need in conflict, and make the character pick. Our guide to internal conflict shows how.

20 Character Development Questions to Ask

Use these before you write a scene, or when a character feels flat. You won’t use every answer, but you should know them. Actors ask many of the same questions, and our guide to using improvisation to discover your character shows how they find answers on their feet.

Want

1. What does your character want more than anything?
2. Why do they want it now?
3. What will they do to get it that they wouldn’t have done a year ago?
4. What happens if they fail?

The past

5. What’s the worst thing that ever happened to them?
6. What are they proudest of?
7. Who taught them how the world works, and was that person right?
8. What secret would they hate the audience to learn?

Flaw and need

9. What do they believe about themselves that isn’t true?
10. What’s their worst habit?
11. What do they need that they can’t admit?
12. What would make them lie?

Relationships

13. Who knows them best?
14. Who do they want to impress?
15. Who are they afraid of disappointing?
16. Which character is their opposite?

Under pressure

17. What would make them break a rule?
18. What will they never do, and what would it take to make them do it?
19. How do they act when they’re losing?
20. What’s the hardest choice the story can give them?

FAQs About Character Development

The Final Cut: Character Development

Character development isn’t a list of traits. It’s a person with a want, a need, a flaw and a past, put under enough pressure to make a choice. Get those right, and the change takes care of itself.

Ted Kramer has his French toast, Chihiro has her name and Watanabe has his playground. What one small action will show your audience who your character has become?

For more on building a story around your characters, see our screenwriting guide and our guide to the Dan Harmon story circle.