A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

Hold off for just a moment before you sharpen your pitchforks, knitting needles and miscellaneous other weapons of mass destruction so you can dice me up, boil me in the blood of failed screenwriters past and then eat my brains for daring to utter such outrageous sacrilege. I know perfectly well that directing on paper is the quintessential hallmark of the amateur and that nothing will get your script tossed in the recycling bin faster… except maybe for all the other things that will do the job just as well, including but not limited to poor grammar, boring and predictable plotting (or no plot at all), the lack of a good hook, misuse of the screenplay form, aimless characterization, painfully unrealistic dialogue, and bad breath. (And if you think I’m kidding about the bad breath part, think again.)

And you know what? In many ways, I agree with the conventional wisdom on this count. It’s no fun to read a bunch of crap like “THE CAMERA TRUCKS BACK FROM A MEDIUM SHOT TO A MEDIUM-MEDIUM-LONG SHOT” and “EXTREME CLOSE-UP OF AN EXTREME CLOSE-UP OF A WIDE SHOT”. And yet film, as we’re always told, is a visual medium, and screenplays without visuals — screenplays full of dialogue and nothing but, in other words — are sneered at just as much as scripts crammed with camera directions and explicitly called shots.

So how does the aspiring screenwriter reconcile this seemingly irreconcilable contradiction? Simply. By writing well. Great writing paints a vivid picture in the reader’s mind without conscious effort on the reader’s part. That’s why the stereotypical kind of directed-on-paper scripts don’t work. “THE CAMERA CRANES IN THROUGH THE WINDOW to a MEDIUM CLOSE-UP of BOB THE WANNABE SCREENWRITER staring at a rejection letter in stunned disbelief” doesn’t readily form a visual in most people’s minds. In fact, the more technical jargon you use, the more you’re going to pull your reader out of the story instead of pulling him or her into it, because technical terms requires mental translation and interpretation. So forget about the jargon. Just describe the image you want the reader to form, and make your description as vivid and effective as possible.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

First, the typical “directing on paper” version.

INT. POWER PLANT - DAY

EXTREME WIDE SHOT of Tom.

He rushes up to the immense hydraulics assembly at the base of the power plant.

And now here’s the jargon-free rewrite.

INT. POWER PLANT - DAY

Looking like nothing more than a man-shaped insect about to be crushed under the looming foot of a giant, Tom rushes up to the immense hydraulics assembly at the base of the power plant.

Which one has more impact? Brownie points if you say the second one, since it’s pulled from one of my own scripts. Extra bonus points if you notice that my version also takes up less space on the page, a more and more important consideration as the acceptable length for screenplays in both Hollywood and the indie world continues to drop.

Anyway, by now you’re probably wondering what the heck any of this has to do with Tell No One. After all, it’s been fantastically well-reviewed, it’s a cinch to end up on a whole bunch of critics’ Best of the Year lists come December, and I’ll even admit that it’s my co-favorite movie of the year so far, along with Wall-E. So what the heck am I complaining about?

Instead of getting all abstract and theoretical, I’ll give you an example.

First, though, a little spoiler-free story background — nothing you wouldn’t get from the trailer. Tell No One is a thriller about a doctor named Alex Beck, whose wife, Margot, is killed while they’re vacationing in the country. He loved her so much, and he’s so broken up by her death, that eight years later, he still hasn’t moved on. He visits her parents each year on the anniversary of her murder, he lives a mostly solitary, almost monastic life, he’s not in the least bit romantically involved with anyone… and then one day, he starts getting emails that seem like they might just be coming from Margot, and his whole, carefully shielded life starts to fall apart.

It’s a terrific setup, and Alex’s yearning for Margot generates much of the film’s genuinely immense emotional power. Unfortunately, though, the director (Guillame Canet) plainly had no idea of how to use the camera — the film is shot in a very generic, workmanlike fashion which utterly fails to do its part to focus and magnify the power of the story — and there’s one scene in particular, the flashback to Margot’s cremation, in which he completely dropped the ball.

Probably because he thought it would be more visually interesting, Canet shot the actual cremation from inside the furnace. In the most superficial sense possible, it might seem that it would be more exciting to see flames licking over a coffin than it would be to watch a bunch of people standing around on the other side of the furnace door. Alex Beck, however, is the protagonist, and his emotions and his experiences drive the story. Instead of showcasing a piece of burning wood, that scene should have been shot from his perspective to make the audience vicariously feel the ultimate pain of his final separation from his wife. We should have seen him watching her coffin disappearing into the furnace. We should have seen the furnace door closing, cutting him off from her mortal remains. We should have seen the flames from his perspective, muted and obscured by the glass window in the furnace door, forcing him to experience the last moments of her mortal remains just he experienced the last moments of his wife’s living existence, at a distance, cut off from her. And throughout, we should have seen the pain written on his face.

All of that could have (and should have) been written in the screenplay without a single called shot, not too differently from how I described it above. That’s because the kind of “directing on paper” I recommend is really a writer’s task — deciding what to emphasize, what to include, and how to present it all… which is to say, writing. It’s a sad irony that as well as directing Tell No One, Canet also co-write the screenplay. But hey, he was an actor first; directing the camera isn’t his home turf. Just don’t make the same mistake yourself. And go see the movie while you’re at it, because for all its flaws, the good parts are really great.