by Jim Mercurio
Use a clear understanding of one character to help clarify another. For instance, in The Godfather, if you see that Sonny Corleone (James Caan) is a hothead (a reframe from the movie), that might lead to the more subtle insight that his brother Michael (Al Pacino) is cold—too cold, even.
Go through your scene line by line and consider the characters and conflict. Can you push it a bit more? Can the characters’ perspectives become a bit clearer? Can you make them come harder at each other?
Often you’ll find that you more readily identify with a certain character’s point of view. Maybe it’s a character based on yourself, or on someone you know. And it’s okay to admit that maybe you’ve picked a favorite. If you find that this character always has the best lines and the most poignant perspective, challenge yourself to elevate the other characters to equally powerful perspectives and voices.
In Man of Steel, when a thirteen-year-old Clark saves a school bus load of kids, his father, Jonathan (Kevin Costner), chastises him for not keeping his powers secret. When the young Clark retorts by asking his father if he was supposed to let the kids die, his father’s surprising response begins with, “Maybe.”
Brainstorm to determine the most extreme statement a character could make. Then use any insight you get to bring the understanding of that character into the scene and out into the rest of the story. While talking into his recorder in Avatar, Jake stumbles upon a profound revelation:
JAKE (RECORDED)
… There’s nothing we have that they want. We’re a horror to them. We’re the monsters from space.
Use lines like this to bring newfound clarity to the relationships between characters.
6) Eliminate on-the-nose dialogue and create audacious subtext.
One of the most common forms of on-the-nose dialogue is where redundancy is created by two lines back-to-back that convey the same message: one is the text and the other is the subtext (For example, “I can’t stand to see you. Go away.”). Go through the scene, and whenever a character says what he means—when text equals subtext—cut it or rewrite it.
If you are having trouble pushing your dialogue away from being on the nose, often the real issue is your setup. In Liar Liar, Fletcher beats himself up in hopes that his trial will be postponed until the curse is lifted and he can lie again. When he faces the judge, the judge asks him who did this to him.
Consider what we know. We know he did this to himself. We know that he must tell the truth, so, regardless of his answer, it will describe him. We know exactly what to expect. We will immediately get the joke when he answers in a creative, metaphorical, or euphemistic way: “A madman, Your Honor. A desperate fool at the end of his pitiful rope.”
See how the setup and context creates leeway for imaginative dialogue? If the audience knows that an ensuing line will absolutely be a dig, then it immediately perceives any response as such. When your beats and structure are clear, it gives your dialogue great freedom.
7) Be specific.
The way you break clichés is with specificity.
Sometimes this involves research. Sometimes it requires you to simply get personal and inject your voice, filtered through the world and characters, into your screenplay.
I grew up near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which has one of the smallest regional dialects in the country, and I don’t think it has ever been captured or integrated in a film that takes place there.
Having all of the characters speak in a distinct dialect for the heck of it might not necessarily be the best idea, but maybe there is a better way to integrate it. Remember how Hannibal Lecter calls Clarice on the “pure West Virginia” accent that she couldn’t quite shed.
Local flavor isn’t the only peculiarity to embrace. Another great detail from The Silence of the Lambs is when Jame Gumb replaces the preposition “she” with “it” when addressing his victim: “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.” This simple touch deftly characterizes his deep psychopathic detachment by showing how he dehumanizes and objectifies his victims.
Be quirky.
Be risk-taking.
Be specific.
If you want some place to start, here are some examples of specificity that jumps off the page:
• An odd habit from a parent or sibling that sets off your character. (“Dad, you’re the only person in the world who makes a slurping sound when eating bread.”)
• The weirdest details from a character’s fantasy or dream. (From Real Genius: “Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in some sort of sun god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?”)
• A clever way to handle the “dating résumé” moment for love interests on a first date. (Texting a link to a PDF or private YouTube link with the written or oral history.)
Whether the detail comes from your life or from the deep recesses of your imagination, you must surprise us sometimes. If the specifics of your story don’t sometimes feel “too close to home”—embarrassing, personal, or just weirdly you—then you still have some work to do.
8) Visuals: use props, blocking, wardrobe, and location.
To encourage good habits, here is a systematic list that can remind you of various ways to incorporate visuals into your script:
Props and Blocking
Look for dialogue that can be replaced or meaning that can be created by using a prop or blocking. Start with a one-to-one swap of a line with an image—preferably an image that moves.
Earlier, we showed that if we put a greasy spatula in the hand of a chef in a scene with his annoying boss, it opened up possibilities. Why write something bland and uninspired such as “get out of my space” or “stand back” when a subtle shooing gesture with a grease-laden spatula does it much better?
A shaky hand or inability to pour lemonade smoothly can do as much to reveal a character’s inner state as a page of chatter.
Although it’s never specified as such, how can Uncle Rico’s gaudy ring in Napoleon Dynamite be anything but a class ring from 1982, which he saw as his potential glory days?
Technically, it might not be a prop, but the ending of Harold and Maude, when Harold’s hearse hurls over the cliff, creates a powerful and meaningful reversal. What looks like suicide reveals itself to be the absolute rejection of death.
Wardrobe and Extensions of Character
In The Hunger Games, Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), a foil to Katniss, is obsessed with manners and chides Katniss for eating like a savage. She tries to teach Katniss how to behave. Her over-the-top makeup and wardrobe are a satirical caricature of society and etiquette.
In My Best Friend’s Wedding, Julianne wears a sleeping mask, literally blinders, as she strays into morally ambiguous territory.
Hiccup’s prosthetic foot in How to Train Your Dragon parallels Toothless’s prosthetic tail fin. Their shared experience reflects on their friendship, alliance, and the symbiotic relationship between them and eventually between all of Hiccup’s Viking clan and dragons.
Location on a Small Scale
If you want to make a drastic change in the location that has a ripple effect on everything else in the scene, that’s something you should do in Step 1, above, when you consider a new concept. However, you can also draw from the specific details of your current environment to create and incorporate smaller obstacles.
In a public space, it might be as simple as a character looking over her shoulder before telling a dirty joke or a secret. A character might deliver bad news in the same environment to avoid a commotion.
Birdman combines wardrobe with location when Riggan (Michael Keaton) steps outside of the theater for a quick cigarette break during a performance of a play in front of a packed house. When a heavy steel door closes and locks him out of the building, it also catches a piece of his outfit. He’s stuck. It creates a comical but effective dilemma. He must choose between walking through Times Square in his underwear or not showing up to finish the perf
ormance and ruining the production for thousands of spectators.
The remake of Cape Fear (1991) combines a prop with location in a scene that’s a cinematographer’s dream come true. Max Cade (Robert De Niro) antagonizes Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) and his family at a movie theater. At first Cade’s silhouette blocks part of the screen, then he lights a cigar and begins to laugh incessantly. The smoke from the cigar wafts up and creates a beautiful haze in the light from the projector. The filmmakers cleverly make Cade’s menacing actions permeate the scene visually.
9) Eliminate exposition.
The word exposition fills me with dread the same way mentioning Voldemort unnerves the characters in Harry Potter’s universe. It is that which shall not be named. By uttering the word, I fear I invoke a self-fulfilling prophecy that speaks exposition into existence.
With any necessary piece of information, wait as long as possible before sharing it with the audience. Then reveal it as conflict, surprise, intrigue, tension, mystery or humor. Let it impact the characters. We discussed a scene from The Interpreter in which Broome (Sean Penn) has an important letter to give Sylvia. She asks, “Did you read it?” If a draft of the script had him responding, “Yes,” you can actually feel the figurative red pen of Sean Penn striking through the line.
Better yet, if the line survived until production, I can envision the actor, in character, simply being unwilling to answer the question. From that silence comes something much better. The other character sits with the uncomfortable silence and makes a discovery—one of the ways to get information into a scene—and responds, “Of course you did.”
This avoids a flat, static yes. And it allows Sylvia to be more active and smarter. In the film, she plays it with a self-deprecating choice to chastise herself for even asking what she believes, in retrospect, to be a question with an obvious answer, which creates some conflict and a touch of humor. It also reminds us and the characters of the strange intimacy that has developed between them. Get inside the head of both your actor and character. The actor will “tell you” he doesn’t want to answer easy questions. The character will “tell you” what’s not easy for him.
Challenge yourself to recalibrate your expositionometer. I want to engender a hostile disdain in your writing process for a much wider definition of what you consider to be useless information. For instance, screenwriting isn’t radio theater. In almost any context, the line “Give me the gun” is superfluous. If the audience sees a character reaching for the gun, why not just, “Hand it to me,” or if the action description illustrates the intent, then you can be even less on the nose: “Trust me.”
10) Find the opposite.
When we were looking at the zig and zag between expectation and surprise in the moment before a reversal, we found that the distance between the two opposites, or “poles,” created the emotional power. We also discovered that the principle applies to dialogue, in the magnitude of contrast between text and subtext.
Look for as many opposites as possible in your story and widen the gap between them. At the risk of sounding too philosophical, the moments that embrace opposites are what capture the essence of real life. Work this dichotomy into your story to enliven your writing.
Comical moments should have importance. The most serious drama can have—and usually should have—levity or humor.
All great scenes have a push and a pull. On one hand, they have reluctance and conflict, and on the other, affinity and attraction. If we look at conflict and obstacles in a scene as the “no,” we must perpetually strive to find the “yes.” If a character wants to break up with another character and she says so and walks out, where can you go from there? The character’s goal might be to end the relationship, but there should always be more. Actors use the phrase, “What am I fighting for?” to encapsulate the active thing they want—to which they are saying “yes.”
The goal might be to break up with her boyfriend, but the character might fight to do it without hurting him or making him cry. She also might want to convince him that it’s the right thing to do, hoping to walk away as friends.
Near the beginning of The Revenant, Hugh (Leonardo DiCaprio) warns his half-Native-American son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), against talking back to the white members of their party of trappers. He tells him that he has to be invisible, and when his son rebuts, Hugh shakes him violently and tells him that the other men see only the color of his skin.
Hugh seems harsh, violent, and cruel, but it comes from his love for his son and his desire to help him survive. When writing a scene like this, don’t think in terms of “warning” or “scolding.” Couch it in terms of “Hugh is fighting to save his son’s life.”
11) Finesse thematic touches.
You are a few weeks away from finishing your script. It’s time to finish incorporating your theme.
It’s okay that it has taken this long to know exactly what your film is about. Now that you do, close the deal. Let your theme blossom.
The “No Trespassing” sign in the opening image of Citizen Kane wasn’t in the original script. It wasn’t mentioned in the beginning, only in the end. We hope we have the same instinct, that if we were to stumble upon such a brilliant sign (literal or figurative) anywhere in the film, the image would scream out to us: “Use me as part of the opening image.” What a perfect set of bookends.
Polish your opening and closing image. Look for one to balance and inspire the other. Bury a theme line and a few counterpoint lines. Even if the first attempt is a bit on the nose, at least you have articulated the idea. You can always smooth them out during your final polish.
Do your character names mean something? Do they resonate? Katniss is a flower shaped like an arrow. Darth Vader is the dark father. Eugene Morrow in Gattaca is the eugenic of tomorrow. In the Matrix, Neo is an anagram of “one,” as in “the chosen one.” And it’s not a coincidence that Morpheus is the name of the god of dreams.
Beyond the script itself, what about your title? A title can have the same cohesive power as an opening or closing image. In a way, the title is your true opening image.
The smallest of revisions to a title can make all the difference. For decades, Bicycle Thieves was often referred to as The Bicycle Thief. The former, the plural version, indicts not only the everyman Ricci but the broken society that has pulled him down, as well as other decent people.
Could you imagine a better or more appropriate title for films like Breaking Away, Lethal Weapon, Vertigo, Fellini’s 8%, Persona, or Scream?
Every aspect of your story and every element in your script can contribute to theme and ideas.
In Dead Poets Society, images of flocking birds are used as a part of a transition montage that suggests time passing. However, the image multitasks. The idea of “flocking” is a positive permutation of conformity, an essential thematic strand of the film. Animals instinctively know to act in unison because it empowers and protects them. The relevance is cemented with overlapping sounds of the bird melding into the sound of a crowd of students, whom we see flocking down a staircase while one of the other teachers struggles to climb upward against the flow.
Even the lyric from the song “Everybody’s Talkin’” used in Midnight Cowboy acts as a reframe. “I’m going where the weather suits my clothes” foreshadows Joe Buck’s trek at the end to Florida, where he discards his Western getup.
12) Listen to your dialogue: stage a table read.
At some point during the rewrite of your dialogue, you should read your lines aloud to discover how your ear responds. This simple-sounding process will open an entirely new dimension for evaluating your dialogue.
In fact, I suggest you submit to a nearly essential late-in-the-process exercise. Host a table read of your script. Professional actors are not required, but it is a dramaturgical necessity that you inspire participants with copious soda, beer, and pizza.
Gather a group of people—preferably actors or drama students from a neighboring school, but it could be just a bunch o
f friends particularly receptive to cheap food—and stage a table read of your script. If you want to spend an extra day to tighten just the action description for the read, it will allow you to focus on the dialogue and interactions more, but it’s not necessary. Whatever you do, do not take any of the roles yourself—especially not the reading of action description. If you’re short on talent, assign all of the minor roles to the same person.
Listen carefully and take notes. Simply listening to the “actors” bringing life to your words on the page will be a powerfully enlightening experience for your growth as a screenwriter.
Don’t overdirect or “take over” the reading. Give the material to the performers beforehand, so they can familiarize themselves with the material. A brief discussion about or a paragraph of insight into the character is appropriate.
It’s up to you if you want to solicit feedback afterward, but if you do, make a pact with yourself that you will listen and take in the comments without being defensive. This will make the experience more pleasant for the participants and give you a better shot at getting their honest response.
13) Think like an editor.
The mind-set of an editor can help your scene writing in many ways. Instead of approaching your finessing as an editor of words, think of yourself as an editor of film. Imagine the scene as an actual piece of film that progresses in tiny ¹⁄₂₄th-second increments.
There’s a fine line between an ellipsis and a transition. An ellipsis omits something in the space between two shots, whereas a transition creates an overlap and makes an association between them.
The most basic ellipsis is when a character asks a question in one scene and then instead of letting the answer play out, there is a cut to an image or action that immediately gives us the answer. Look very carefully at the end of each scene and at the beginning of the next. Can the omission of information create more suspense or intrigue, or can it challenge the viewers without confusing them?
In Casablanca, when Rick gives the letters of transit to Ilsa, she professes her love for him and they kiss passionately. There’s a cutaway to a rotation of the light on the lighthouse and then we are back in the room, moments or hours later, as they discuss the logistics of how she and Lazlo will escape. Cinephiles have long debated whether we are to assume they made love during the ellipsis. A carefully planned omission can create suspense, mystery, and ambiguity.
