#Skull gun deus ex movie#
#Skull gun deus ex tv#

The cult classic surreal comedic film Monty Python and the Holy Grail is loosely structured around a knightly quest for the sacred relic.Д®xamples in television include various Rambaldi artifacts in Alias the orb in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. In both film and literature, the Holy Grail is often used as a MacGuffin. ExamplesД®xamples in film include the Maltese Falcon in the film of the same name the meaning of 'Rosebud' in Citizen Kane (1941) the Rabbit's Foot in Mission: Impossible III (2006) the Heart of the Ocean necklace in Titanic. In a broader sense, says Lavandier, a MacGuffin denotes any justification for the external conflictual premises of a work. A similar lack of motivating power applies to the alleged MacGuffins of The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, and Foreign Correspondent. North by Northwest 's supposed MacGuffin is nothing that motivates the protagonist Roger Thornhill's objective is to extricate himself from the predicament that the mistaken identity has created, and what matters to Vandamm and the CIA is of little importance to Thornhill. Yves LavandierДЇor filmmaker and drama writing theorist Yves Lavandier, in the strictly Hitchcockian sense, a MacGuffin is a secret that motivates the villains. In contrast, Lucas believes that the MacGuffin should be powerful and that 'the audience should care about it almost as much as the dueling heroes and villains on screen'.

#Skull gun deus ex tv#

In TV interviews, Hitchcock defined a MacGuffin as the object around which the plot revolves, but as to what that object specifically is, he declared, 'The audience don't care'.

#Skull gun deus ex movie#

On the commentary soundtrack to the 2004 DVD release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, writer and director George Lucas describes R2-D2 as 'the main driving force of the movie вЂ¦ what you say in the movie business is the MacGuffin вЂ¦ the object of everybody's search'. Screenwriter Angus MacPhail, a friend of Hitchcock, may have originally coined the term according to author Ken Mogg. Hitchcock also related this anecdote in a television interview for Richard Schickel's documentary The Men Who Made the Movies, and in an interview with Dick Cavett. Hitchcock's term 'MacGuffin' helped him to assert that his films were in fact not what they appeared to be on the surface. Interviewed in 1966 by FranГ§ois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained the term 'MacGuffin' using the same story. The first one asks, 'What's a MacGuffin?' 'Well,' the other man says, 'it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers, 'Well then, that's no MacGuffin!' So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh, that's a MacGuffin'. It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. Hitchcock explained the term 'MacGuffin' in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University in New York: The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term 'MacGuffin' and the technique with his 1935 film The 39 Steps, an early example of the concept.

The World War IвЂ“era actress Pearl White used weenie to identify whatever object (a roll of film, a rare coin, expensive diamonds, etc.) impelled the heroes, and often the villains as well, to pursue each other through the convoluted plots of The Perils of Pauline and the other silent film serials in which she starred. The name 'MacGuffin' was coined by the English screenwriter Angus MacPhail, although it was popularised by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s, but the concept pre-dates the term. For example, a small statuette provides both the eponymous title and the motive for intrigue in The Maltese Falcon. Objects that serve as MacGuffins are familiar in narrative fiction. For example, the Holy Grail of Arthurian Legend could be considered an early MacGuffin, doing for the plot all that a good MacGuffin should do'. As noted by Marjory Ward, 'the use of a MacGuffin as a plot device far predates this modern nickname.