Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  Skillful dialogue creates a kind of transparency. The text of a character’s spoken words conceals her inner life from other characters, while at the same time allowing the reader/audience to see through the surface of her behavior. Adept dialogue delivers the sensation of insight, the sense of reading a character’s mind and knowing what she is really thinking, really feeling, really doing to the point of understanding her inner life better than the character herself.

  We who live in the word-centric culture of European heritage tend to believe that language sets the limits of experience. While there can be no doubt that language molds thinking in subtle ways, a writer must come to grips with how other modes of expression—the paralanguage of gesture and facial expression, along with tone of voice, dress, movement, and the like—influence a character’s experience of his inner self and outer life, and most importantly, how he expresses himself with or without words.

  When, for example, Character A says to Character B: “Hi, how ya doing? Oh look, you’ve lost weight!” On the text, Character A’s actions greet and compliment Character B. But depending on the nature and history of their relationship, in the subtext Character A could be doing anything from encouraging to seducing to taunting to insulting Character B. The possible subtextual actions under the most seemingly neutral expressions are as varied as the beings who take them.

  Human nature constantly combines an outer behavior (text) with subterranean selves (subtext). Those rare and rather strange people who put their unsaid directly into their said seem mechanical, unreal, inhuman, disconnected, even insane. Hitler, for example, had no subtext. Mein Kampf was not a metaphor; it was a timetable for the holocaust. He stated his full intentions in the text, but because his visions were too horrible to believe, allied politicians spent the 1930s searching for consolation in a nonexistent subtext.

  4

  EXPRESSIVITY II: FORM

  The qualities and quantities of dialogue vary with the levels of conflict used in the storytelling.

  THE CONFLICT COMPLEX

  Conflict disrupts our lives from any one of four levels: the physical (time, space, and everything in it), the social (institutions and the individuals in them), the personal (relationships of intimacy—friends, family, lovers), and the private (conscious and subconscious thoughts and feelings). The difference between a complicated story and a complex story, between a story with minimum dialogue versus maximum dialogue, hinges on the layers of conflict the writer chooses to dramatize.

  The action genres put their protagonists up against physical conflict almost exclusively. For example, J. C. Chandor’s film ALL IS LOST. On the other hand, the novelistic technique of stream of consciousness submerges the telling entirely at the layer of inner conflict. There, it churns crosscurrents of dream and memory, of regret and yearning that flood the protagonist’s mind. For example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

  Filmmakers like Chandor, who strive for a purity of objectivity, or authors like Woolf, who seek a purity of subjectivity, complicate their works at the extreme of only one level of conflict. As a result, their genius crafts a compelling story with little or no need for spoken dialogue. Stories told with highly kinetic concentration at just one level of life are complicated, often dazzlingly so, but, in my definition, not complex.

  Complex stories embrace two, three, or even all four levels of human conflict. Authors with worldviews both wide and deep often bracket their tellings with inner conflict at one level, physical strife at another, and then concentrate on the middle ranges of social and personal conflicts—the two venues of talk.

  Personal conflicts embroil friends, family, and lovers. Intimacy, by its nature, begins in talk, then builds, changes, and ends in talk. Personal conflicts, therefore, roil with multilayered, multi-meaning dialogue.

  For example, this exchange between Walter White and his wife, Skyler, in Season 4, Episode 6 of BREAKING BAD. From the first season’s first episode on, Walter White’s characterization portrays a nervous, insecure, defensive man. But by the end of this scene we glimpse his true character.

  INT. BEDROOM—DAY.

  Husband and wife sit on the bed.

  SKYLER

  I said before, if you are in danger, we go to the police.

  WALTER

  No, I don’t want to hear about the police.

  SKYLER

  I do not say that lightly. I know what it could do to this family, but if it is the only real choice we have, if it’s either that or you getting shot when you open your front door—

  WALTER

  —I don’t want to hear about the police.

  SKYLER

  You’re not some hardened criminal, Walt. You are in over your head. That’s what we tell them, that’s the truth.

  WALTER

  That’s not the truth.

  SKYLER

  Of course it is. A schoolteacher, cancer, desperate for money—

  WALTER

  (getting up)

  —We’re done.

  SKYLER

  —roped into working, unable to quit. You told me that yourself, Walt. Jesus, what was I thinking?

  (pause)

  Walt, please, let’s both of us stop trying to justify this whole thing, and admit you’re in danger.

  Walter slowly turns to her.

  WALTER

  Who are you talking to right now? Who is it you think you see?

  (pause)

  Do you know how much I make a year? Even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it. Do you know what would happen if I suddenly decided to stop going to work? A business big enough that it could be listed on the NASDAQ goes belly up. Disappears. It ceases to exist without me.

  (pause)

  No, you clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens a door and gets shot. You think that’s me? No, I am the one who knocks.

  He walks out of the bedroom; Skyler stares after him.

  Walter is describing his new, other self, the doppelgänger we come to know as Heisenberg. Skyler, dumbfounded by her husband’s words, can only grasp for the meaning.

  Social conflicts surge through institutions of public purpose: medical, educational, military, religious, governmental, corporate—all societal enterprises, legal and criminal. As people move from personal to social relationships, they often speak with less sincerity and greater formality. When public conflicts peak, characters break into speeches.

  Consider this example from HOUSE OF CARDS. A political operative rejects a proposal from Frank Underwood. As the operative walks off, Frank turns to camera with this aside:

  FRANK

  Such a waste of talent. He chose money over power. In this town a mistake nearly everyone makes. Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after ten years; power is the old stone building that stands for centuries. I cannot respect someone who does not see the difference.

  To generalize: The more physical and social a story’s conflicts, the less the dialogue; the more personal and private the conflicts, the more the dialogue.

  Therefore, to create a complex story, the writer must master the double dimension of dialogue—the outer aspect of what is said versus the inner truth of what is thought and felt. When first spoken, a line of dialogue conveys a surface meaning, the meaning the speaker hopes other characters will believe in and act on. This first meaning seems logical in its context, conveys a sense of character purpose and tactic, and arouses curiosity as we glance across the scene to see its effect. The language itself may also delight us with tropes or wordplay, especially when written for the stage. In the next moment, however, this solid speech seems to dissolve, and we sense a second, deeper meaning hidden behind the words.

  Thanks to our powers of intuition and perception, character-specific dialogue inspires a sudden insight into the character’s ineffable inner self, his unseen needs and desires. True-to-character talk lets us read past conscious thoughts and sense un
spoken feelings down to a character’s subconscious urges. This effect is so powerful that the fullness and depth of insight we have into fictional characters often surpasses what we glimpse in the living people around us.

  Dialogue, at its best, hangs suspended between a character’s public face and her secret self. Like multifaceted crystals, her spoken words refract and reflect aspects of her inner and outer lives. Because personal and social lives begin, evolve, and end through talk, the complex relationships and conflicts between human beings cannot be fully dramatized without expressive, character-specific dialogue.

  Inept dialogue, on the other hand, not only rings false, but also shallows out the characters who speak it. Weak dialogue suffers from many faults such as poor word choices, but the root cause runs much deeper:

  Dialogue problems are story problems.

  With almost algebraic symmetry, the worse the storytelling, the worse the dialogue. And because stories are so often hackneyed, we suffer dissonant dialogue in countless films and plays and on hundreds of TV channels. The same is true of the novel. Although modern prose often speeds the read with page after page of dialogue, when was the last time you were deeply moved by a chapter of talk? The majority of dialogue published or performed is serviceable at best and instantly forgotten.

  We’re drawn to stories not only because they reflect the life around us, but also because they illuminate the life within. One of the great pleasures of story is staring, self-absorbed, into the mirror of fiction. Dialogue shows us how we lie to others, how we lie to ourselves, how we love, how we beg, how we fight, how we see the world. Dialogue teaches us what could or should be said in life’s harshest or most rapturous moments.

  DIALOGUE ONSTAGE

  The stage is a symbolic space. From that moment untold millennia ago when the first actor stood up to perform a story for his tribe, audiences have instinctively understood that what is said and done in that precious space means far more than words and gestures.1

  The stage puts the artificiality of art on open display. In the ritual of theatre, actors act out fictional people in the living presence of other people, everyone breathing the same air, all the while pretending that this unreality is, for the moment, real. By taking her seat, the theatergoer signs an implicit contract with the playwright: He may turn the onstage space into any world he imagines, symbolic of whatever meaning he wishes to express; she in turn will suspend her disbelief and react to his characters as if they were living their lives in front of her.

  Are there limits to the “as if” convention? Apparently not. Since the advent of Dada over a century ago, audiences have signed on for the wildest rides, embracing surrealist plays such as André Breton’s If You Please (1920), Theatre of the Absurd pieces such as Eugène Ionesco’s anti-play The Bald Soprano (1950), the fragmentations of the Furth and Sondheim concept musical Company (1970), and the literally hundreds of avant-garde plays performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe every August.

  The “as if” conspiracy between author and audience licenses playwrights to write dialogue at heights and depths of sublimity no human being has ever actually spoken. From the master dramatists of classical Greece, through Shakespeare, Ibsen, and O’Neill, to contemporaries like Jez Butterworth, Mark O’Rowe, and Richard Marsh, playwrights have used imagistic language and verse rhythms to intensify dialogue with poetic force. And the audience listens because in the theatre we want to hear first, see second.

  What’s more, the stage inspires the constant exploration and reinvention of language. When Shakespeare couldn’t find the word he wanted, he made one up: barefaced, obscene, eyeball, lonely, zany, gloomy, gnarled, bump, elbow, amazement, torture, and over 1,700 other words are Shakespeare’s invention.

  From the naturalistic barroom grit of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh to the poetic elegance of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, the spectrum of language in the theatre is unmatched in the other media of story.

  For example, consider the coffee table talk in Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage as translated by Christopher Hampton. Two couples begin the evening discussing a playground fight between their children. Their civilized conversation, lubricated with alcohol, descends into ugly truths about their marriages. In the dialogue below, both wives use sharp “as if” similes to belittle their husbands.

  MICHAEL: Drinking always makes you unhappy.

  VERONICA: Michael, every word that comes out of your mouth is destroying me. I don’t drink. I drank a mouthful of this shitty rum you’re waving about as if you were showing the congregation the Shroud of Turin. I don’t drink and I bitterly regret it. It’d be a relief to be able to take refuge in a little drop at every minor setback.

  ANNETTE: My husband’s unhappy as well. Look at him. Slumped. He looks as if someone left him by the side of the road. I think it’s the unhappiest day of his life.2

  Now compare the phlegmatic ridicule of these two wives to this vibrant speech from Blood Wedding (1933) by Federico García Lorca, translated by Fernanda Diaz. As a servant sets the table for a wedding, she warns the bride of a coming tragedy, spinning trope upon trope:

  SERVANT:

  For the wedding night

  let the warping moon

  part the black leaves

  and gaze down

  from her white window.

  For the wedding night

  let the frost burn,

  let the acid almond

  turn sweet as honey.

  O exquisite woman

  your wedding night nears.

  Tighten your gown, hide

  beneath your husband’s wing.

  He is a dove

  with a breast of fire.

  Never leave the house.

  The fields wait for the cry

  of eloping blood.

  To the ancient “as if” convention of the legit theatre, the musical theatre adds yet another glaze, transfiguring the poetics of spoken lines into lyrics and arias that heighten emotion the way dance enhances gesture. Indeed, all the principles and techniques of dialogue discussed in this book apply to musical theatre. From the recitativo of opera to the sung-through scenes of the modern musical, characters who sing and dance vocalize dialogue into music. Songs are simply another form of in-character talk.

  Theatre audiences hold to their belief in the “as if” so long as the play creates an internally consistent setting in which characters talk (or sing) in a manner that seems true to their world and to themselves; in other words, as long as dialogue stays in-character. For without credibility, stories risk billowing into meaningless, emotionless spectacles.

  DIALOGUE IN FILM

  A camera can fly through 360 degrees of global reality, devouring every object, shape, and color in its path. Anything a writer can dream, CGIs can duplicate beyond his dreams. Because the big screen foregrounds images and backgrounds sounds, film audiences instinctively absorb the story through their eyes, while they half listen to the score, sound effects, and dialogue.

  In fact, for some cinema purists, the ideal film would be wordless. I appreciate their aesthetic, but while it’s true that moving moments in film are often mute, when I compare the best silent films with the finest sound films, for me, stories told with audible dialogue win hands down. The image of Thelma and Louise driving over a cliff into the Grand Canyon shines vividly in my memory, but as I recall, they were shouting a joyful “Keep going!” as they did. Without that line, the impact of their suicide would have been halved.

  Although storytelling on the big screen clearly favors image over language, the balance varies greatly from genre to genre. An Action/Adventure film, such as ALL IS LOST, is told with no dialogue, whereas an education plot, such as MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, is told in all dialogue.

  The greatest difference between the screen versus stage and page, therefore, is not the quantity of dialogue but the quality. The camera and microphone so magnify and amplify behavior, that every phony glance, every false gesture, every affected line
looks and sounds more amateur than the worst dinner party charade. Screen acting calls for a naturalistic, believable, and seemingly offhanded technique. To make this possible, screen dialogue must feel spontaneous. When forced to deliver ornamented dialogue, even the finest actors sound ludicrous, cueing the audience to react with “People don’t talk like that.” This holds true in all genres, realistic and nonrealistic, in television and film.

  There are, of course, exceptions.

  One: Stylized Realism

  Realism bends with a certain elasticity. Setting a story in an unfamiliar world allows the writer to enhance dialogue with greater figurative language than a commonplace location, but the talk must still stay within the realm of believability that the story’s world sets for itself. A film or television series in a foreign setting (THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL and HOMELAND), a criminal society (PULP FICTION and DEADWOOD), a regional culture (BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD and JUSTIFIED), or the distant past (SPARTACUS and VIKINGS) can take dialogue well beyond the everyday, so long as it maintains credibility within its self-imposed limits.

  In these exotic cases consistency becomes a problem. The writer must be able to sustain an eccentric yet believable style over a full-length film or even long-form television series such as THE WIRE. No easy task.

  Two: Nonrealism

  Genres of nonrealism (science fiction, musical, animation, fantasy, horror, and farce) tend to tell allegorical stories, acted out by archetypal or symbolic characters. In these genres, audiences not only accept but also enjoy highly stylized dialogue. Think of THE MATRIX, 300, CORPSE BRIDE, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, DR. SEUSS’ THE CAT IN THE HAT, GAME OF THRONES, or GLEE.