The Screenplay: the Dance of Word and Deed

When characters talk, shouldn’t they be doing something too?

Hitchcock the Silent Moviemaker

Alfred Hitchcock was one of the great commercial directors of his era. He started in movies before sound reproduction became viable; his first sound movie (Blackmail in 1929) was planned as a silent film, and much of it was already shot when the producers in London decided to complete it as a talkie. Dialogue scenes were written and shot and intercut with already-shot silent scenes, a common practice for those movies caught in the transition.

Oddly enough, Hitchcock would continue to follow this pattern throughout his career. He would make films more than 30 years later that alternated dialogue scenes with scenes that were essentially silent, either without any dialogue at all, or with such minimal dialogue that it wasn’t needed or could have been handled in the old way of the silents, with a couple of title cards.

And his most famous, suspenseful, and interesting scenes and sequences, were the silent ones. Those are the ones we remember best.

In other scenes, Hitchcock used a hybrid approach, and flood a suspenseful scene that would work as well as silent with lines of endless talk, so much talk that we the audience would tune out and concentrate on the visual compositions, which always showed the suspense — which was what the scene was really about. (An example would be the scene in The Lady Vanishes where the evil Nazis have drugged the drinks in the club car, and we worry lest Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave’s characters will drink, and be defeated. The shots show the drinks, the hands reaching for the drinks, the Nazis watching to see if the English will drink the drinks. Meanwhile they all chatter on and on.) Sometimes, knowing that the audience would tune out the dialogue in these scenes, Hitchcock would slip into the speeches some vital clue or bit of information, confident that we would miss it … and yet, it was there: he had ‘played fair’ with us.

Talk and Action

A similar effect takes over the beginning screenwriter and, sometimes, the veteran as well. He will compose some scenes for their actions, and neglect dialogue, or reduce it to its minimum. Or he will compose other scenes for their dialogue, and forget that his characters might also be doing something while they talk.

One recurring example is the dining scene. It can be in a home dining room or kitchen, it can be in a bar or restaurant: the characters will sit at the table and talk. Important matters will be discussed; exposition and backstory will fill the air, personal conflicts will heighten. But the characters won’t eat a thing. Instead the screenwriter and the director will set the scene in the moments before the food arrives, before anyone eats anything, or after the last mouthful is swallowed.

Directors rather prefer this approach, since it saves them a lot of trouble with continuity: was the hero about to sip his drink when he said that line, or was he cutting his meat? How much of her soup should the heroine have in her bowl at this point? Was the wineglass full or almost empty, and was it here or there on the table? Such points bedevil the best script girl or continuity consultant, and the more characters there are about the table, the more the complexities conjugate. Not to mention that props must provide a fresh set of every item of food with each new take.

Actors (at least beginning actors) also prefer this approach, since it is difficult to remember to match actions with lines of dialogue in take after take and angle after angle so that everything will match. And they have to act as well? Chewing food makes it hard to enunciate, and when the mounting number of takes adds to the number of plates of brussel sprouts the actor must eat…

Moreover, the lowly screenwriter in such scenes ends up with little control over how they will be played: he can clutter his screenplay with line directions over what should be done, but the director and actors will gleefully (or scornfully) discard all such when they begin rehearsals.

All the same, it is a grave error for the screenwriter to fall completely into the dialogue of these talking scenes, whether at the dinner table or in the bedroom or the boardroom, and forget about the actions of his characters. This is to give up control of such things to the director and actors who, when production is rushed, might forget them as well. What we end up watching is a scene where two or more people sit or stand and talk at one another … while doing nothing else. (For a painful example of this, look at all of Robert DeNiro’s scenes in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart. The only excuse I can offer for Mr Parker, a good director, is that DeNiro and Mickey Rourke were offering such wildly different line readings with every take, that letting them move in addition would have made it impossible to intercut between takes. But that is an excuse, not a justification.)

What Deeds Can Add

The problem of the action scene without enough dialogue is less than this, the talking scene with no activity. So let’s look at what actions can add to the lines of dialogue.

An action can put the lie to what the character is saying. ‘No, I care very much what you’re saying,’ says one character, while idly leafing through a mail order catalogue.

An action can reinforce what the character is saying. ‘No, I care very much what you’re saying,’ says one character, leaning forward across the table, all ears.

An action can reveal the character’s true feelings, that his words and even his control over his voice, may try to mask.

An action can symbolize some deeper feeling or meaning the character brings to the scene.

An action can symbolize something deeper to the other characters in the scene, especially if the point of view of the scene is strongly anchored on one of these characters.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, June 16, 2008)