As People, Are We Good or Bad?

This question has been playing in my mind a lot over the past year.  Everyday, I see bad things on the news, people doing bad things to each other, doing bad things to the earth, the earth doing bad things to people, and overall society as a whole being mean spirited.  It leaves me wondering at times, are there really any "good" people on this earth; and what do we really consider good?  Usually it's our own messed up version of good.  Diluted by our own experiences and angles as well as our upbringings.  And then sometimes, there are people who are genuinely nice spirited, but do something horrible like sell, make, or do drugs, have cheated on there partner, have stolen things, or even hurt other people.  I'm sure at this point your wondering, how does this even remotely relate to filmmaking. 

One of the things that got me thinking about this subject was the show Breaking Bad.  Not a single character on the show is clean.  Walter is (in the beginning) a nice guy, a teacher, but has the unfortunate luck of getting cancer and because of this decides to make meth so he can make money to give to his family.  Then you have Hank who is a police officer and again, a generally nice guy.  Yet Hank makes poor decisions that go against what society and the law deem acceptable even though most people fully back him for what he does.  Then you have Jessie who does drugs, sells drugs, is a womanizer, steals, has killed people, yet has a personality that you can't help but love.  I could go through every single character and do the same thing.  They all share the same bond, the all have good and bad in them.

Being a realist, I find it hard to side with people being good or bad, one or the other.  I hate when you see a T.V. show and you can tell who the "bad guy" is and you can tell who the "good guy" is.  I hate this thinking because it is not real.  Good and bad in my opinion is a sense of perspective.  What I might consider good maybe horribly bad to someone but what I might consider bad, someone might treat that as a normal everyday thing.  While I do say this I do thing that people are good, and are born with the ability to do good, but the problem is society.  Society comes along and tells us what is good and what is bad.  It gives us this rigid framework that were suppose to fit our own beliefs into and deal with what society says is and isn't okay.

I don't bring this up to yell at the world over the internet, or to tell you you're all bad or good people.  I mainly bring this up because we start shooting our projects in the next few weeks and will start developing characters and stories.  I think it is always good to keep in mind this theme for when you shoot.  Shows like Breaking Bad that create characters that are so much more than one dimensional succeed.  They succeed because subconsciously, we all can relate to theses characters and there struggles to be good in a bad world.  To understand that sometimes what the world considers good, is not good, and sometimes what the world considers not good, can be good.  

Hopefully we all can create these types of characters so our stories can be told realistically and with purpose.  So our audiences can truly feel for our characters as if they are real people.  None of us are pure, none of us are wholly good.  We're all trying to grasp that fact and find other people that can prove that point.  We all have good, we all have bad.  Everyone wants to find something that they can relate to and our stories can provide that missing link.