Story

by Robert McKee

  18

  THE TEXT

  DIALOGUE

  All the creativity and 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 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 the 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 a scene around its Turning Point. All this precision, yet it must sound like talk, using an informal and natural vocabulary, complete with contractions, slang, and 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 theater. 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 Cop? Ha! Got busted. Had his fist in the till. Harvard grad out 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.

  We all share the same crucial human experiences. Each of us is suffering and enjoying, dreaming and hoping of getting through our days with something of value. As a writer, you can be certain that everyone coming down the street toward you, each in his own way, is having the same fundamental human thoughts and feelings that you are. This is why when you ask yourself, “If I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do?” the honest answer is always correct. You would do the human thing. Therefore, the more you penetrate the mysteries of your own humanity, the more you come to understand yourself, the more you are able to understand others.

  When we survey the parade of characters that has marched out of the imaginations of storytellers from Homer to Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Hemingway, Williams, Wilder, Bergman, Goldman, and all other masters—each character fascinating, unique, sublimely human and so many, many of them—and realize that all were born of a single humanity… it’s astounding.

  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 calls 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 Greek 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 overarticulate 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 is 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 moment 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:

  SALIERI

  All I ever wanted was to sing

  to God. He gave me that

  longing. And then made me

  mute. Why? Tell me that.

  The Priest looks away, pained and embarrassed, so Salieri answers his own question rhetorically:

  SALIERI

  If he didn’t want me to praise

  Him with music, why implantr />
  the desire… like a lust in

  my body and then deny me

  the talent?

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

  SALIERI

  You understand, I was in love

  with the girl…

  (amused by his own

  choice of words)

  … or at least in lust.

  (seeing the priest

  look down at a

  crucifix held in his

  lap)

  But I swear to you, I never

  laid a finger on her. No.

  (as the priest looks

  up, solemn, judgmental)

  All the same, I couldn’t bear

  to think of anyone else

  touching her.

  (angered at the

  thought of Mozart)

  Least of all… the creature.

  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 of 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 lift the scene’s energy and make the cueing rhythm pop.

  Excellent film dialogue 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 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 you 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 audience is hungry for it. Lean dialogue, in relief against what’s primarily visual, has salience and power.

  THE SILENCE: Ester and Anna (Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom) are sisters living in a lesbian and rather sadomasochistic relationship. Ester is seriously ill with tuberculosis. Anna is bisexual, has an illegitimate child, and enjoys tormenting her older sister. They’re traveling home to Sweden, and the film takes place in a hotel during their journey. Bergman has written a scene in which Anna goes down to the hotel restaurant and allows herself to be seduced by a waiter in order to provoke her sister with this afternoon affair. The “waiter seduces the customer” scene… how would you write it?

  Does the waiter open a menu and recommend certain items? Ask her if she’s staying at the hotel? Traveling far? Compliment her on how she’s dressed? Ask her if she knows the city? Mention he’s getting off work and would love to show her the sights? Talk, talk…

  Here’s what Bergman gave us: The waiter walks to the table and accidentally on purpose drops the napkin on the floor. As he bends to pick it up, he slowly sniffs and smells Anna from head to crotch to foot. She, in reaction, draws a long, slow, almost delirious breath. CUT TO: They’re in a hotel room. Perfect, isn’t it? Erotic, purely visual, not a word said or necessary. That’s screenwriting.

  Alfred Hitchcock once remarked, “When the screenplay has been written and the dialogue has been added, we’re ready to shoot.”

  Image is our first choice, dialogue the regretful second choice. Dialogue is the last layer we add to the screenplay. Make no mistake, we all love great dialogue, but less is more. When a highly imagistic film shifts to dialogue, it crackles with excitement and delights the ear.

  DESCRIPTION

  Putting a Film in the Reader’s Head

  Pity the poor screenwriter, for he cannot be a poet. He cannot use metaphor and simile, assonance and alliteration, rhythm and rhyme, synecdoche and metonymy, hyperbole and meiosis, the grand tropes. Instead, his work must contain all the substance of literature but not be literary. A literary work is finished and complete within itself. A screenplay waits for the camera. If not literature, what then is the screenwriter’s ambition? To describe in such a way that as the reader turns pages, a film flows through the imagination.

  No small task. The first step is to recognize exactly what it is we describe—the sensation of looking at the screen. Ninety percent of all verbal expression has no filmic equivalent. “He’s been sitting there for a long time” can’t be photographed. So we constantly discipline the imagination with this question: What do I see on the screen? Then describe only what is photographic: Perhaps “He stubs out his tenth cigarette,” “He nervously glances at his watch,” or “He yawns, trying to stay awake” to suggest waiting a long time.

  Vivid Action in the Now

  The ontology of the screen is an absolute present tense in constant vivid movement. We write screenplay in the present tense because, unlike the novel, film is on the knife edge of the now—whether we flash back or forward, we jump to a new now. And the screen expresses relentless action. Even static shots have a sense of alive-ness, because although the imagery may not move, the audience’s eye constantly travels the screen, giving stationary images energy. And, unlike life, film is vivid. Occasionally, our daily routine may be broken by light glinting off a building, flowers in a shop window, or a woman’s face in the crowd. But as we walk through our days we’re more inside our heads than out, half-seeing, half-hearing the world. The screen, however, is intensely vivid for hours on end.

  On the page vividness springs from the names of the things. Nouns are the names of objects; verbs the names of actions. To write vividly, avoid generic nouns and verbs with adjectives and adverbs attached and seek the name of the thing: Not “The carpenter uses a big nail,” but “The carpenter hammers a spike.” “Nail” is a generic noun, “big” an adjective. The solid, Anglo-Saxon “spike” pops a vivid image in the reader’s mind, “nail” a blur. How big?

  The same applies to verbs. A typical line of nondescription: “He starts to move slowly across the room.” How does somebody “start” across a room on film? The character either crosses or takes a step and stops. And “move slowly”? “Slowly” is an adverb; “move” a vague, bland verb. Instead, name the action: “He pads across the room.” “He (ambles, strolls, moseys, saunters, drags himself, staggers, waltzes, glides, lumbers, tiptoes, creeps, slouches, shuffles, waddles, minces, trudges, teeters, lurches, gropes, hobbles) across the room.” All are slow but each vivid and distinctively different from the others.

  Eliminate “is” and “are” throughout. Onscreen nothing is in a state of being; story life is an unending flux of change, of becoming. Not: “There is a big house on a hill above a small town.” “There is,” “They are,” “It is,” “He/She is” are the weakest possible ways into any English sentence. And what’s a “big house”? Chateau? Hacienda? A “hill”? Ridge? Bluff? A “small town”? Crossroads? Hamlet? Perhaps:
“A mansion guards the headlands above the village.” With a Hemingwayesque shunning of Latinate and abstrate terms, of adjectives and adverbs, in favor of the most specific, active verbs and concrete nouns possible, even establishing shots come alive. Fine film description requires an imagination and a vocabulary.

  Eliminate all metaphor and simile that cannot pass this test: “What do I see (or hear) onscreen?” As Milos Forman observed, “In film, a tree is a tree.” “As if,” for example, is a trope that doesn’t exist onscreen. A character doesn’t come through a door “as if.” He comes through the door—period. The metaphor “A mansion guards…” and simile “The door slams like a gunshot…” pass the test in that a mansion can be photographed from a foreground angle that gives the impression it shelters or guards a village below it; a door slam can crack the ear like a gunshot. In fact, in MISSING the sound effects of all door slams were done with gunshots to subliminally increase tension as the conscious mind hears a door slam but the unconscious reacts to a gunshot.

  These, on the other hand, were found in submissions to the European Script Fund: “The sun sets like a tiger’s eye closing in the jungle,” and, “The road twists and knifes and gouges its way up the hillside, struggling until it reaches the rim, then disappears out of sight before bursting onto the horizon.” They are director traps, seductive but unphotographable. Although the European writers of these passages lack screenwriting discipline, they are ingenuously trying to be expressive; whereas American writers, out of cynicism and laziness, often resort to sarcasm: