Beyond Words

The dimensions of dialogue

To the novice screenwriter, dialogue is a maddening conundrum. It has to be spare but expressive, sound natural, fit the characters and allow for insights and revelations. The most skillful dialogue on film also achieves a structural dimension. It can shape the narrative just as surely as the plot does.

Dialogue can take any number of forms. It can become a map of the lead character’s emotional journey, a smokescreen for the plot to proceed behind or a storm cloud of oncoming disaster.

topics: bay area, filmmakers, how-to, screenwriting

Beyond Words

The dimensions of dialogue

To the novice screenwriter, dialogue is a maddening conundrum. It has to be spare but expressive, sound natural, fit the characters and allow for insights and revelations. The most skillful dialogue on film also achieves a structural dimension. It can shape the narrative just as surely as the plot does.

Dialogue can take any number of forms. It can become a map of the lead character’s emotional journey, a smokescreen for the plot to proceed behind or a storm cloud of oncoming disaster.

[Editor’s note: This is first in a series for SF360.org’s Indie Toolkit devoted to the screenwriting craft, and it looks at how different uses of dialogue can alter the narrative blueprint of a film. Future articles will profile notable screenwriters, focus on new directions in narrative and reflect further on aspects of craft.]

topics: bay area, filmmakers, how-to, screenwriting

Ask the Documentary Doctor

Trailer talk

Dear Doc Doctor: What’s the best way I can start my demo to make a strong impression—especially when submitting to a very competitive grant?

Doc Doctor: Far from offering a formula that can cripple your creativity, let’s discuss some principles that can help you put your efforts in the right place. For starters, you’re on the right path when acknowledging the need for a strong beginning for a fundraising trailer, especially when having to stand out among many at a grant evaluation.

topics: documentary, filmmakers, how-to

Experience

Baloney Sandwiches with no cheese: Ted V. Mikels' wild world at the Clay

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s great backstage drama, The Red Shoes (1948), Boris Lermontov, the controlling impresario behind a famous ballet company, asks the up-and-coming dancer Victoria Page why she wants to dance. She snaps back with the question, “Why do you want to live?” I imagine that director Ted V. Mikels would give the same response were he asked why he makes movies. “It takes your guts and your entrails and your soul to make a film,” Mikels proclaimed in an interview in RE/Search’s Incredibly Strange Films. “It takes everything you possess within you!”

topics: directors, documentary film, genre films, horror, how-to

Manual of Self-Reliance

Not quite quiet desperation

Desperate times require desperate measures. Or, as Guy Fawkes supposedly put it (regarding the Gunpowder Plot), "The desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy." For instance, when Thor Heyerdahl’s theory about the possible migration of folks from Peru to the islands of the South Pacific was repeatedly ridiculed, the Norwegian explorer and ethnographer built a raft and made the journey himself. Proved it could be done by sailing the Kon-Tiki toward Tahiti. Didn’t prove that it was done, though.

The minor kerfuffle that resulted from a pair of pieces that ran at the Daily (They didn’t build their sales model for you and An open reply) and the similar outpouring of naysayers that followed former Miramax President/current The Film Department CEO Mark Gill’s speech at the Los Angeles Film Festival (Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling) reinforces the notion of two overlapping realities—that, firstly, truth is critically needed but, secondly, such truths will nonetheless be systematically rejected by those who need them most.

topics: bay area, distributors, how-to