Dialogue

[alexwhitmer]

Okay, so I'm watching a fistfull of western short films, many of which are shot quite beautifully. Some good stories. Two things stand out ...

Locations and dialogue.

Some of the locations are just great. Add to that the attention to detail in costume and props and things are pretty authentic. Not easy on a zero budget.

The dialogue, however, is dismal. This is something I see in many short films (don't get me started on some of the feature junk Hollywood pukes out). So much of the dialogue comes across as 'scripted', melodramatic, or just plain nauseating. I might even use the word 'dreadful' for a few of the films.

And writing is the culprit.

Hands down, dialogue is the hardest thing to master - and teach - in writing. Sure, an actor can do a poor job of delivery, or a director can misinterpret the underlying intention of the lines, but good dialogue has to be there from the get go. I'm seeing precious little of that, not only in these short films, but in so many of the scripts I read. Folks just don't know what to say, or how to say it. I'm telling you, bad dialogue will kill an otherwise brilliant cinematic endeavor.

Screenwriters, and filmmakers who write for themselves, really need to read up on the use of subtext and double intendre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_entendre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtext



Never underestimate the power of words.

a

 

[Steve Das]

The dialogue, however, is dismal.

Yes..it usually is in modern films. But it reflects our times.
As a society we are not very literate...how many people
even read the newspaper these days. And people rarely
if ever..seem to think before they speak.

In contrast films from the '30s all the way up to the '60s..and
some '70s seem to have much better dialogue. People at least
in the movies said much more interesting things back then they do now.

 

[Brian Petrie]

Yes..it usually is in modern films. But it reflects our times.
As a society we are not very literate...how many people
even read the newspaper these days. And people rarely
if ever..seem to think before they speak.

In contrast films from the '30s all the way up to the '60s..and
some '70s seem to have much better dialogue. People at least
in the movies said much more interesting things back then they do now.

It makes me wonder if peoples attitude has changed when making these short films. People used to think "even if the images aren't perfect, having good dialogue will make it enjoyable". Whereas today, it is the opposite, "as long as I have excellent imagery, the dialogue isn't as important and the viewer will still enjoy it".
Now, I'm saying this about short films not because "Hollywood features" don't have the same problem, quite the opposite. However, it used to be near impossible for low/no budget films to get high quality equipment, thus, turning to storytelling. Today, high quality imagery is possible on a low/no budget film, so they create stunning images to make up for their lack of good dialogue. Anyways, that's just what I was thinking of a few weeks ago...:tongue_smilie:

 

[Steve Das]

...Whereas today, it is the opposite, "as long as I have excellent imagery, the dialogue isn't as important and the viewer will still enjoy it"...

Bingo..probably alot of films are made with this thought. However there
is still some great dialogue/story work out there...but it's mostly in
television these days.

 

[Mark Collins]

Dialogue is hard for short films. Since you have to get a large amount of info across in a short span of time, it's easier to show rather than tell. With features you generally have more time to tell a story, meaning the dialogue can be heavier.

That being said. As a writer, I am terrible with dialogue.

 

[Joel Kaye]

having good dialogue will make it enjoyable

I think that's assuming people are even capable of writing good dialogue. Most writers simply can't. I've read stuff and I think "who talks like this". Then I talk to the writer and THEY talk like that. Like, they actually use bizarre or overly melodramatic words etc.

I think a really good actor can pull off just about any line though. But most actors can't. They really need to be so well cast that they can rework the dialogue into their own voice. How many control freak writer/directors will allow that?

Ergo... bad dialogue.

I've never met anyone that thinks they've written mediocre dialogue or a boring scene. They truly think they've written poetry.

I wonder if you have to be delusional to even want to try to make a movie in the first place though. It's pretty rare to find talent combined with delusion... but it happens. .0001% of the time. The rest of the time it's simply delusional people...

 

[DCC Erickson]

...Today, high quality imagery is possible on a low/no budget film, so they create stunning images to make up for their lack of good dialogue. Anyways, that's just what I was thinking of a few weeks ago...:tongue_smilie:

In my little backwater (Minneapolis) the usual M.O. is that the filmmaker is either the guy with the camera who thinks he can scribble out a script over a weekend, and it'll be great because he's mastered the 5-point lighting system, or the film buff who knows what's wrong with everything that's ever come out of Hollywood and can do it better ala Tarantino. And these (local) people are young and in a hurry. As you all well know, any fool can point and shoot even an expensive camera, get crappy images, and still not know the difference. Shooting well is its own challenge, and finding a worthy script is a MAJOR hurdle when these kids only read books assigned in class and are honing their storytelling skills in text messages. AND THEN all they want to shoot are "coming of age" schlock and one-location horror films with bad dialogue. All the talented people in my town are in advertising.

 

[Grinner Hester]

More and more, scripts are outlined. This allows good actors to be great actors, naturally bouncing off one another rather than treating it like a bad play like films use to be.

 

[Sam Eilertsen]

Writing dialog and characters who feel "real" is incredibly hard. There are many great writers who aren't very good at it, and get around this by relying mainly on description and internal monologues.

The tough thing is, theoretically, you are supposed to make your characters talk like real people talk. But, you can't ACTUALLY make them talk like real people do, because real people say "um" all the time, use incomplete sentences, say way more words than they need to to get their point across, etc.

You also have to use dialog to bring out the context of the characters' world. Real people don't explain things that they already share context for, they don't need to. But characters need to explain to the AUDIENCE their context, while at the same time appearing to be talking to one another.

That's why, in most films and TV (and novels), you have a certain style of dialog that is actually very exposition-y and unrealistic, but is so common that the audience can suspend disbelief and pretend that they are watching people. It's only once in a while that you see a writer who is good enough to write characters who are truly believable, who actually seem like they could come out of the screen or the page and you would still believe in them.

 

[Andrew Wilding]

The tough thing is, theoretically, you are supposed to make your characters talk like real people talk. But, you can't ACTUALLY make them talk like real people do, because real people say "um" all the time, use incomplete sentences, say way more words than they need to to get their point across, etc.

I disagree here - The notion that one should boil down a characters dialogue to the mere essentials is one of the most pervasive and destructive myths in Hollywood. Character emerges from hemming and hawing, almost saying things stopping short when you realize your going to put your foot in your mouth, etc etc. When you strip these elements from speech, you remove the plausibility of the characters but even worse you strip the depth from them. Film writers have become so subservient to plot (which is grossly overvalued) that they have effectively reduced movies to "this happens, then this happens, then this happens." Its very difficult to do anything meaningful in that format. It is especially difficult to create characters that extend beyond the borders of the film - they often, as a result of being defined solely by their actions and shorthand stereo types, are nothing more than objects created to serve plot points.

There are some writers that refuse to excise all that is not directly related to plot. The Coen bros. have made a career of "ums", "ahs", gaffes and colorful details that are utterly unrelated to the march of plot. Thank god.

 

[Subhadip Sen]

Real people talk awkwardly and say uninteresting things at most times.

I am not saying I am averse to such films - I love them - but most of the audience constantly want sensational happenings thrown at them. We want larger-than-life, unrealistic, crowd-pleasers. And the dialogue is thus expected to be more exposition, one-liners, entertaining and sentimentalist than realistic dialogue.

The master of realistic dialogue is Aphichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul. He's also in my opinion the best director working today. But the Hollywood audience has in the past simply found him "boring". People don't want to see life, they want an escape into sensational larger-than-life happenings. And the dialogue has to explain these events and extract emotional response from them.

A great exception to this rule is the Coen Bros., as previously mentioned. You still wouldn't find their characters going on for an hour about trivial conversation where the characters keep repeating themselves. But it is not explicitly expository, and they certainly don't say funny stuff like "Talk to the hand!" or "I'm the king of the world!" or something. Still, they are master filmmakers, and just as entertaining as insightful. Tarantino is another exception, but his dialogue is clearly meant to be funny, sensational and entertaining than realistic. But he is still not afraid to go into several tangents. That is because is dialogue his so important to his cinema, perhaps more than plot.

 

[Craig Ryan]

I think the main culprit for bad dialogue in shorts has more to do with relying too much on dialogue to tell the story. The best shorts I've seen have hardly any dialogue, if any.

Now, don't get me wrong; this is not to say that beautiful/well crafted shots are the only key to a great film (quite the opposite); what I mean are visuals that say something, that speak emotions through the characters more than a line would. Pictures worth more than 1000 words, etc.... A lot of the times much can be said without characters saying a word.

The dialogue should be the icing on the cake, not the cake.

As far as dialogue in movies VS real life; well it all depends on genre, and the story right? For Cinéma vérité, you'd want some sense of gritty realism VS Fantasy. But it all depends on what you're after. I like campy dialogue if its appropriate.

There are some writers that refuse to excise all that is not directly related to plot. The Coen bros. have made a career of "ums", "ahs", gaffes and colorful details that are utterly unrelated to the march of plot. Thank god.

Great point on the Coens. However, in the context of shorts, I think even they would be a little more efficient with use of dialogue.

 

[Andrew Wilding]

"Real people talk awkwardly and say uninteresting things at most times. "

SOME real people say uninteresting things all the time. Other people say incredibly interesting things. Both kinds of people likely have a place in every film.

You can tell what economic background someone has, whether they have siblings or are an only child, where they summer, which albums they spent the entirety of of their childhood playing on repeat, etc, all from the specific words they choose, and which ones they don't choose. And what inane things they choose to say, or dont. They may not push the story forward, but you will find that once the story gets going you care more about these people than if you hadnt spent the time listening to exactly what makes them unique, or perhaps mindless and conformist...

Ok, im rambling.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Yes..it usually is in modern films. But it reflects our times.
As a society we are not very literate...how many people
even read the newspaper these days. And people rarely
if ever..seem to think before they speak.

I completely disagree. Literacy doesn't assist in writing dialog. If anything the more literate the writing is the worse its becomes. Writing dialog as 'proper' English will result in a flat, unnatural and forced conversation.

The incredible difficulty of writing a great screenplay is that you have to convey literate and interesting information in a natural and expressive manner. How do you get a character to give a key piece of information without sounding like exposition? How do you express a message without it sounding like a sermon? How do you direct a conversation to the important topic without it sounding coerced and directed?

It's easy to write 'natural' dialog. It's actually pretty easy to write interesting and insightful essays. It's incredibly difficult to write an insightful essay in the form of 'natural' dialog.

The trouble with shorts as everyone is pointing out is you have an extremely limited resource in the form of run-time. So the only way to circumvent that limitation is to either: reduce the scope of the story, compress the dialog or shoot an abstract film where a lot goes unsaid.

Reduce the scope is unfortunately often discarded because the film maker has something specific they want to say and they really need 90 minutes to say it but they have 10. Unfortunately those 10 still don't say very much and it's lousy as entertainment or insight.

Compressing dialog results in stilted and academic boring exposition. Dialog that's essentially unreadable by the best actors on the planet.

Abstract film is the entire genre of 'student' short films which nobody understands. A few claim is brilliant because they pretended that the gaping holes in the film were actually filled with brilliant insight and pretty much annoys the rest of the human race for being incomprehensible--because it is.

 

[Andrew Wilding]

Short films are a very strange format. Its incredibly hard to make something compelling and original with such insane time (and often budgetary) constraints. So all too often you get short films that are stock footage of medical operations and protozoa super imposed over a girl contemplating her scarf at the edge of a cliff, set to the sound of ticking clocks and a baby crying.

I've decided that one is better off ignoring any sort of arc or even a traditional beginning, middle, and end in short films. The form usually ends up calling attention to itself and overshadowing performances and photography and feeling. How many shorts have you seen with a trick ending? or punchline? Its frankly horrific.

If I decide to venture once more into the world of shorts, I think I will shoot Happenings more than Stories. Character arcs and backstories are just too cumbersome in a format that is more haiku than novel. The best shorts, I think, tend to feel like a great scene plucked from a bigger movie, more than a self contained thing that maps and compresses all of the rules of narrative cinema structure into 6 minutes.

 

[Bryce O]

If anything the more literate the writing is the worse its becomes.

+1

I think this might be the best sentence of the whole thread.

 

[Subhadip Sen]

Abstract film is the entire genre of 'student' short films which nobody understands. A few claim is brilliant because they pretended that the gaping holes in the film were actually filled with brilliant insight and pretty much annoys the rest of the human race for being incomprehensible--because it is.

Some good points, but this bit bothers me. Few pretend. If they love it, they genuinely love it, most people. I don’t know who I am quoting, but I think it is Tarkovsky – “Cinema should be truthful, not understandable. Because truth is seldom easy to understand.” Now, that quote does not apply to experiential films you have talked about. But one must allow room for more personal, artistic work. You have to realize that art is never designed for you. How about, instead of assuming “gaping holes”, why not try to understand why it is so. Why not realize that, "If I don't understand it, doesn't make it crap."

That said, there is plenty of work that is just… hollow. But to dismiss all abstract films, and accuse audiences of pretension is not acceptable.

Besides, art is a spiritual medium. One does not have to understand. It is meant to be felt. By that I don't mean manipulated emotions. Most experiential films defy logic and reason anyway - hense the suspension of disbelief. We have been conditioned to accept 99% cinema being extraordinarily literary and experiential, but there should be room for more subjective art. It is folly to dismiss Dali as rubbish just because it doesn't make "sense".

 

[Tim Whitcomb]

Is it really any mystery that the only category of the 48 Hour Film festival that CONSISTENTLY gets rave reviews is the SILENT FILM section?

I dont think so.

 

[Andrew Rieger]

When it comes to producing a good script on a tight budget, you need to get creative. The problem with dialogue to a large extent is that its foundation is on paper. Most people do not write like they talk (I certainly do not) and thus, the words seem inhuman and often tacky when spoken, almost as if an essay was being read.

A good example of excellent low budget writing is a film called Ballast I saw a number of years ago. The director wrote a treatment and then cast his actors before writing any dialogue. He wrote out a direction for each scene and then had the actors improvise the dialogue. He recorded these improvised situations and conversations and then wrote a modified script using the material from the recorded conversations . Listening to the recorded prototype dialogue and watching the final film, you can see that a lot of changes were made but the feel of the performances are still there and overall, the words seemed more meaningful, since they were spoken from the get go. Actors often jump at the opportunity to improvise their own dialogue. Many famous lines were made up by actors.

Since films are often written by one person, they characters end up having the same feel in terms of sentence composition and word choice. By having different actors give their own take on how a character should talk, you can start to develop unique styles for each character that will help set them apart. Never underestimate the actors ability to form the films script. Since they are the ones speaking the lines, the words coming out of their mouths should feel and sound right to them.

 

[Joe D'Arcy]

Interesting thread.

Dialogue is only half of the script. A well written script will show the story between the written dialogue. In most cases the action of the story will carry the dialogue. Even a film with sparse dialogue should be carried by well written action (aka BIG PRINT).