By Ron Suppa.

As promised in the first part of this article, here are a dozen basic strategies for creating good screen dialogue:

1. Characters don’t talk to each other, they argue.

No pleasant chitchat, please, and don’t have your characters preach to us. Dialogue maintains the tension and dramatic conflict between the characters. Especially if forced to reveal expository information, having characters scream it at each other may be your best choice.

2. Give each of your characters his/her own voice.

They should speak as one would with their education, background, occupation, personality, experience, country accent or regional dialect. They have their own characteristic rhythms, their own sense of humor or lack thereof, and they react to situations in their own unique way. Mel Gibson’s psycho cop in Lethal Weapon will respond to a crisis, a woman, a felon, or order a sandwich much differently than his more grounded partner, Danny Glover.

3. Limit parenthetical character directions.

They are an admission of failure by the writer to have written the line or the scene powerfully or accurately enough. It’s better to risk the director or actors coming to the wrong conclusion than to give into the fear that makes you want to control the words. Tolerate uncertainty. Let the actors discover the work for themselves. Our accidents are God’s purpose.

Martin Landau

No one in the world tries to cry except bad actors. Good actors try not to cry. No one tries to laugh except bad actors; people try not to laugh. No one tries to be drunk; drunks try to be sober. How a character hides his feelings tells us who he is.

Martin Landau

 

4. When you’ve cut your dialogue to the bone, cut another 25%.

“The art of dialogue is in its terseness,” advises Lajos Egri in The Art of Dramatic Writing. Economy is so crucial to good dialogue that I’m making the point again. Steven Zaillian, who wrote the screenplay for Schindler’s List, said his first draft includes everything the characters have to say on the subject. Then he cuts, until if he cut one more word, the dialogue would make no sense whatsoever.

5. Avoid talking heads.

Give actors physical business to do. Keep their hands busy. And tie the business into their character. No one smokes a cigarette or takes a drink in a movie without purpose. In The Graduate, Mrs. Robinson uses a cigarette in bed to punctuate key dialogue, allow for tense pauses while exhaling, and as a weapon to threaten Benjamin when he announces he’ll take out Elaine.

6. Don’t bring out the home movies.

In From Russia with Love, James Bond’s ally lights a cigar and tells a tied-up enemy “I’ve had a long and interesting life. Would you like me to tell you about it?” He was being sarcastic, of course. Genre can also determine dialogue – heroes in action films want to walk the talk, not vice-versa. And when they speak they want everyone to lean close and pay attention. Know someone who talks a lot? Others tend to tune them out. As opposed to the person who never says much at all: when they speak, everyone else shuts up and listens.

7. Limit profanity, racism and misogyny.

Kevin Rodney Sullivan

If that’s the way your character is wired, fine. But just a little in the script goes a long way – no sense in alienating your readers — and will be enough to tip the actor or director willing to take it to another level.

I think when you get people in a dark room for two hours, that is a privilege… Now, if you’re going to celebrate violence, marginalize women, make racial statements, unanswered, you are abusing that privilege.

Writer/director Kevin Rodney Sullivan (How Stella Got Her Grove Back)

 

8. Let your characters be understood.

Accents, dialects, inflections and slang can be indicated with a word here or there to give the flavor of the speech. A Frenchman may toss in a “Oui, Monsieur” instead of “Yes, sir”, or his accent or language may be noted once in the character’s description or in a parenthetical when he first speaks. But don’t try and mimic a Scotsman or a Louisiana bayou accent in every line – it’ll drive a reader crazy. It’s better to note characteristics of speech, such as foreigners rarely using contractions: “You can not go there,” instead of “You can’t go there.”

Filmmakers find their own solution to language concerns. In The Hunt for Red October, Sean Connery portrays a Russian submarine commander. He and his crew briefly speak their native tongue to convey the reality of the situation, but obviously that can’t continue. In a shot, we fade from him speaking Russian and when he comes back in focus, he and the crew are speaking English. We all got the point.

9. Avoid clichés and prompts.

“Drop the gun. Do it. Now!” Or the hero grabbing the fence and screaming, “Nooooooo!” as his partner/lover/friend suffers some horrible fate. Or an extra making an innocent comment only to have the main character say, “What did you just say?” before revealing her brilliant plan. And don’t let characters repeat lines just to fill space in the script: “I told him to go home.” “You told him to go home?” Or ask questions just to prompt an answer: “So, what did you do then?”

10. Avoid introductions.

Cut right into a scene. Actors don’t like to say “yes” or “no” or “hello” or “goodbye” or introduce themselves. Don’t use “well” or “so” or “actually” or other such opening nonsense either.

11. Limit names and questions.

It’s awkward and unnatural for characters to call others by name in a dialogue exchange: “Well, Tom, I don’t know, do you?” “No, Clara, I never found out.” People don’t us names every time they address someone. And main characters don’t play the straight man for jokes and they don’t stand around in scenes asking leading questions like “Really?” and “Is that what he said?” or “What happened then?” so supporting players can draw the clever conclusions.

12. Hold a cast reading.

Cast your friends, though actors are better if you can get them. Nothing improves dialogue like hearing someone new to the script try and get his or her mouth around the words. Sit back and listen, don’t comment, don’t try to direct, don’t fill everyone in on the hidden meaning behind your clever motif. And don’t distract them by taking notes. (Blue pencil reminders of where they fidgeted, their eyes glazed over or they got up to stretch – but try to avoid nodding maniacally and feverishly starting your brilliant rewrite.) In fact, don’t do or say anything except serve refreshments and say thank you when they’re done. You’ve just been to school.

Ah, but what about the all-important Subtext?!

I’ve been holding it back from you — the one dialogue tip so crucial it needs its own subsection: What you say in dialogue is never as important as what you don’t say. The subtext gives life to the text. Screen dialogue must be emotionally charged, informal, purposeful, economical and – here’s the part I left out – brimming with subtext.

And the key to understanding subtext is this: subtext is directly determined by context.

In HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, for example, series creator/star Larry David writes a detailed story outline – perhaps 7 or 8 pages long – for each episode, but doesn’t include a single line of dialogue. The context – the comedic situation that he places the characters in – provides not only the framework for the intersecting stories, but also a comedy setup so strong that the dialogue can be improvised by the actors. Nothing need be particularly witty or clever; actors can give honest reactions to the situation they’re in, and it works!

An acting coach gave me the following non-specific (no story) actor’s dialogue. As you read, picture a couple that just returned from an idyllic honeymoon.

I’m sure you can picture our couple very much in love and not wishing to part on this morning after their honeymoon. But read it again. Only this time change the situation: the couple has been married for five years and just had their first, much-wanted child. This morning is one week after they lost that child to sudden infant death syndrome. Go ahead, read it again.

Still hold true for you? To borrow from Bill Clinton, can you feel their pain? Their depression? It works, right? Okay, one last time. Now it’s the morning after the wife has found out that her husband has been having an affair with his secretary. He knows that she knows and she knows that he knows that she knows. Okay, read it again.

I’m betting you made it work there too. Maybe you even put in a little inflection when she said, “You going to work this morning?” But what made this dialogue work for us was not the words themselves – open to interpretation and dramatically weak as they are – but the context – the dramatic situation in which we placed the characters, and the emotions and underlying feelings that truly motivate their statements and responses.

What characters say is the product of who they are in the story and the situation they find themselves in. If the context is dramatically strong enough, you can script practically any words. Two adult women sitting across from each other at lunch is not a very dramatic scene premise. But even ad-libbed dialogue will suffice when one (a lower class white woman married to a white man) has just discovered the other is the sophisticated daughter she never knew she had – and that she’s black! (Secrets & Lies.)

As long as the audience is let in on the underlying subtext, they can interpret the true meaning – and hidden psychological need – behind what the characters say and do. This helps make the audience less a passive voyeur and more an active participant in the drama before them. They learn, like good detectives, who the characters really are as they decipher their words and actions in the story based on the clues they are given.

What does a character mean when they say, “I love you?” That depends on who they are in the story and what their intentions in the moment may be. Are they trying to be honest, manipulative, polite, deceiving, placating or kind?

Maybe they mean, like Jack Nicholson’s character in Terms of Endearment, “Sure I love you, baby,” which might not be exactly what Shirley MacLaine hoped to hear. Was he trying to deflect her interest with humor or was he being deliberately cruel or perhaps masking his own fears of commitment and getting too close? Who he is in the story up to that point will be our clue. Because we understand that people tend to avoid addressing emotional issues directly, we will substitute what we believe is the real emotion behind the words they say.

In good writing, it is the unspoken emotions that convey the deeper meaning. Ever attend a funeral when the deceased’s relative is weeping and gnashing her teeth? We feel horrible for her but we detach ourselves because she is doing the crying for us. But if she delivers the eulogy with measured words and quiet courage and, suddenly, her voice cracks just a little – look out, open the floodgates, there won’t be a dry eye in the room.

In The River, when Mae and Tom Garvey (Sissy Spacek and Mel Gibson) argue in bed over the dwindling fortunes of their farm, we know their argument is really over the worsening state of their marriage and we feel the deeper levels of emotions they cannot say to each other. But, if either character was to come out and say, “Hey, we have a problem in our marriage. Let’s talk about it,” it would undercut the life-like, participatory quality of the drama and, hence, the power of the scene.

This “on-the-nose” dialogue – a character saying exactly what it is they want without subtext or context helping define the words – is to be avoided at all times.

Missed the first part of this article? Check it out Here.

If you enjoyed this article, why not check Ron’s DVD, What To Do After It’s Written, available to purchase in our store?