On screenwriting

So I've been juggling three balls these past few weeks. The big one is the feature film for the summer, Captain Abu Raed. I've done a million rewrites since the first draft last summer, and I'm sure there's more to come as I get feedback from industry pros I've given it to. My instructor Gil Dennis (who wrote Walk the Line) is giving it a read in the next couple of weeks along with a couple of other people. I'll tell you what, screenwriting is an ongoing process and you have to be completely willing to take stuff out, change things, shuffle them, and just wen you think that's it, it's done... guess again, there's more work you need to do to make the script better.

As a writer/director, it is very gratifying to find yourself writing moments that you know will become magic on the screen with the right performance. And the key to all this is scrapping out unnecessary dialogue. Never should you have the dialogue state what can be communicated to the audience visually. The easy way out is to have the characters talk about what they're feeling or say what they're thinking. But the problem with that is that when you take it to the screen, it becomes on the nose and hokey, and gives the actors nothing to play with, thus creating a one-dimensional performance. There's tons of this coming out of Hollywood by the way. As a simple example, let's say you have a character who's having a terrible day. How boring is it when a their dialogue says "I'm having a bad day" to the other person, and how much more interesting is it when you have them say "Everything's great!" The dialogue should attempt to mask what's really going on. That's the idea of creating subtext. Giving the scene an extra layer of complexity that will engage the audience. And you know what? Sometimes, a smile to mask the sadness is much more powerful than the face of sadness.

So that's what I've been doing to my movie, rewriting any cliches or surfacey scenes into more unpredictable or dramatically powerful moments and emotional shifts. I want to take the audience on an engaging ride through a simple story.