DIALOGUE

All the creativity & labor that goes into designing story and character must finally be realized on the page. This chapter looks at the text, at dialogue and description, and the craft that guides their writing. Beyond text, it examines the poetics of story, the Image Systems embedded in words that ultimately result in the filmic images that enrich meaning and emotion.


Dialogue is not conversation

Eavesdrop on any coffee shop conversation and you’ll realize in a heartbeat you’d never put that slush onscreen. Real conversation is full of awkward pauses, poor word choices and phrasing, non sequiturs, pointless repetitions; it seldom makes a point or achieves closure. But that’s okay because conversation isn’t about making points or achieving closure. It’s what psychologists call “keeping the channel open.” Talk is how we develop and change relationships.


When two friends meet on the street and talk about the weather, don’t we know that theirs isn’t a conversation about the weather? What is being said? “I’m your friend. Let’s take a minute out of our busy day and stand here in each other’s presence and reaffirm that we are indeed friends.” They might talk about sports, weather, shopping…anything. But the text is not subtext. What is said and done is not what is thought and felt. The scene is not about what it seems to be about. Screen dialogue, therefore, must have the swing of everyday talk but content well above normal.

First, screen dialogue requires compression and economy. Screen dialogue must say the maximum in the fewest possible words. Second, it must have direction. Each exchange of dialogue must turn the beats of the scene in one direction or another across the changing behaviors, without repetition. Third, it should have purpose. Each line or exchange of dialogue executes a step in design that builds and arcs the scene around its Turning Point. All this precision, yet it must sound like talk, using an informal and natural vocabulary, complete with contractions, slang, even, if necessary, profanity. “Speak as common people do.” Aristotle advised, “but think as wise men do.”

Remember, film is not a novel; dialogue is spoken and gone. If words aren’t grasped the instant they leave the actor’s mouth, annoyed people suddenly whisper, “What did he say?” Nor is film theatre. We watch a movie; we hear a play. The aesthetics of film are 80 percent visual, 20 percent auditory. We want to see, not hear as our energies go to our eyes, only half-listening to the soundtrack. Theatre is 80 percent auditory, 20 percent visual. Our concentration is directed through our ears, only half-looking at the stage. The playwright may spin elaborate and ornate dialogue-but not the screenwriter. Screen dialogue demands short, simply constructed sentences-generally, a movement from noun to verb to object or from noun to verb to complement in that order.

Not, for example: “Mr. Charles Wilson Evans, the chief financial officer at Data Corporation in the 666 building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, who was promoted to that position six years ago, having graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Business School, was arrested today, accused by the authorities of embezzlement from the company’s pension fund and fraud in his efforts to conceal the losses.” But with a polish: “You know Charlie Evans? CFO at Data Corp? Ha! Got busted. Had his fist in the till. Harvard grad ought to know how to steal and get away with it.” The same ideas broken into a series of short, simply constructed, informally spoken sentences, and bit by bit the audience gets it.

Dialogue doesn’t require complete sentences. We don’t always bother with a noun or a verb. Typically, as above, we drop the opening article or pronoun, speaking in phrases, even grunts.

Read your dialogue out loud or, better yet, into a tape recorder to avoid tongue twisters or accidental rhymes and alliterations such as: “They’re moving their car over there.” Never write anything that call attentions to itself as dialogue, anything that jumps off the page and shouts: “Oh, what a clever line am I! The moment you think you’ve written something that’s particularly fine and literary-cut it.

Short Speeches

The essence of screen dialogue is what was known in Classical Greet theatre as stikomythia-the rapid exchange of short speeches. Long speeches are antithetical with the aesthetics of cinema. A column of dialogue from top to bottom of a page asks the camera to dwell on an actor’s face for a talking minute. Watch a second hand crawl around the face of a clock for a full sixty seconds and you’ll realize that a minute is a long time. Within ten or fifteen seconds the audience’s eye absorbs everything visually expressive and the shot becomes redundant. It’s the same effect as a stuck record repeating the same note over and over. When the eye is bored, it leaves the screen; when it leaves the screen, you lose the audience.

The literary ambitious often shrug this problem off, thinking the editor can break up long speeches by cutting to the listening face. But this only introduces new problems. Now an actor is speaking offscreen, and when we disembody a voice, the actor must slow down and over articulate because the audience, in effect, lip reads. Fifty percent of its understanding of what is being said comes from watching it being said. When the face disappears it stops listening. So offscreen speakers must carefully spit out words in the hope the audience won’t miss them. What’s more, a voice offscreen loses the subtext of the speaker. The audience has the subtext of the listener, but that may not be what it’s interested in.

Therefore, be very judicious about writing long speeches. If, however, you feel that it’s true to the moment for one character to carry all the dialogue while another remains silent, write the long speech, but as you do, remember that there’s no such thing in life as a monologue. Life is dialogue, action/reaction.

If, as an actor, I have a long speech that begins when another character enters and my first line is “You’ve kept me waiting,” how do I know what to say next until I see the reaction to my first words? If the other character’s reaction in apologetic, his head goes down in embarrassment, that softens my next action and colors my lines accordingly. If, however, the other actor’s reaction is antagonistic, as he shoots me a dirty look, that may color my next lines with anger. How does anyone know from moment to moments what to say or do next until he senses the reaction to what he just did? He doesn’t know. Life is always action/reaction. No monologues. No prepared speeches. An improvisation no matter how we mentally rehearse our big moments.

Therefore, show us that you understand film aesthetics by breaking long speeches into the patterns of action/reaction that shape the speaker’s behavior. Fragment the speech with silent reactions that cause the speaker to change the beat, such as this from AMADEUS as Salieri confesses to a priest:



Or put parentheticals within dialogue for the same effect, such as this from later in the scene:



A character can react to himself, to his own thoughts and emotions, as does Salieri above. That too is part of the scene’s dynamics. Demonstrating on the page the action/reaction patterns within characters, between characters, between characters and the physical world projects the sensation of watching a film into the reader’s imagination and makes the reader understand that yours is not a film to talking heads.

The Suspense Sentence

In ill-written dialogue useless words, especially prepositional phrases, float to the ends of sentences. Consequently, meaning sits somewhere in the middle, but the audience has to listen to those last empty words and for that second or two they’re bored. What’s more, the actor across the screen wants to take his cue from that meaning but has to wait awkwardly until the sentence is finished. In life, we cut each other off, slicing the wiggling tails off each other’s sentences, letting everyday conversation tumble. This is yet another reason why in production actors and directors rewrite dialogue, as they trim speeches to life the scene’s energy and make the cueing rhythm pop.

Excellent film dialog tends to shape itself into the periodic sentence: “If you didn’t want me to do it, why’d you give me that…” Look? Gun? Kiss? The periodic sentence is the “suspense” sentence.” Its meaning is delayed until the very last word, forcing both actor and audience to listen to the end of the line. Read again Peter Shaffer’s superb dialogue above and note that virtually every single line is a suspense sentence.

The Silent Screenplay

The best advice for writing film dialogue is don’t. Never write a line of dialogue when you can create a visual expression. The first attack on the every scene should be: How could I write this in a purely visual way and not have to resort to a single line of dialogue? Obey the Law of Diminishing Returns: The more dialogue to write, the less effect dialogue has. If you write speech after speech, walking characters into rooms, sitting them in chairs and talking, talking, talking, moments of quality dialogue are buried under this avalanche of words. But if you write for the eye, when the dialogue comes, as it must, it sparks interest because the audiences hungry for it. Lean dialogue, in relief against what’s primarily visual, has salience and power.