Earlier this week, I pointed out that two out of three of Demonic’s first scenes were “sitting down and talking” scenes. I said that I knew, as soon as I watched those scenes, that the movie was doomed. “Sitting down and talking” scenes are the worst types of scenes you can write. They’re stagnant. They’re visually uninteresting. They lack imagination. And they’re just straight up uninspired.
And yet, as several of you have pointed out, you see them ALL THE TIME in movies. How can I possibly say to NEVER use “sitting down and talking” scenes when there are so many of them? To answer this, we have to understand why the majority of “sitting down and talking” scenes are shot.
They’re shot because they ARE THE CHEAPEST AND EASIEST SCENES TO SHOOT. So what will often happen is that a day is running long, you need to get the scene in, so you scrap your more elaborate idea and settle for a “sitting down and talking” scene. This happens all the time. It’s important to note that nobody wants to do this. They’re forced into it by circumstance. So when you see that, that’s often the reason – time and money.
But here’s the thing – as a spec screenwriter, you never have to worry about that. It’s not your job to save money or time. It’s your job to write the most entertaining script possible. In other words, you have zero excuse to write a “sitting down and talking” scene.
I’m sure many of you are thinking of dozens of “sitting down and talking” scenes that you’ve liked and that it’s unlikely were dictated by a rushed production schedule. The opening scene between Zuckerberg and Erica in The Social Network. The fake orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally. Vincent and Mia at Jack Rabbit Slims in Pulp Fiction. DeNiro and Pacino in Heat.
If it’s such a bad idea to write a “sitting down and talking” scene, why do these scenes exist? It basically comes down to philosophy. If there’s a designed PURPOSE to sitting your characters down to talk, it’s okay to write a “sitting down and talking” scene. Where it’s not okay, is when you don’t know what to do, so you fall back on sitting your characters down and having them talk to each other.
When it comes to the When Harry Met Sally scene, that scene is building up to a huge moment – when Sally fakes the orgasm. Let me ask you a question. Does that scene work if they’re in the car together? No. It requires them being in a big public space with a lot of people around. In other words, the scene was designed around that restaurant. So sitting down and talking made sense.
With Vincent and Mia, the Jack Rabbit Slim’s sequence is a stand-in for a sex scene. The dancing is them having sex. Quentin uses the dinner portion, then, as foreplay. Them eating at the table is all about the sexual tension building between them so that it can explode out on the dance floor. Again, sitting down and talking is by design. It’s not because Quentin couldn’t think of anywhere to put his characters.
Another time when it’s okay to sit your characters down to talk is when the situation warrants it. For example, if you’re writing a romantic comedy and you’re building up to the first date, it makes sense that your characters might sit down at a restaurant for their date.
But this is where things get tricky because I’d argue that you could come up with something more interesting than a restaurant date. Set the date up for the restaurant, but when they get there, they find out that the restaurant doesn’t have them down for a reservation. So they can’t eat there. What do they do? I don’t know, but you’ve already created a much more interesting date than had you sat them down at a table to talk for an entire scene.
Do you see what I’m getting at? Yes, you can write “sitting down and talking” scenes. But there are always better options out there. And those are the options you should be exploring.
Often, the reason we write “sitting down and talking” scenes is due to a mistake we made before we started the script. A story without a proper engine will leave your script sputtering along, fertilizing the pages with very little to do. When there’s nothing for your characters to do, you’re going to start sitting them down to talk – anything to fill up pages.
Look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. Do you remember any scenes in that movie where two people are sitting across form each other just to chat? There might be two or three. But I’m going to bet that, if there are, there’s tons of tension in those scenes, which still makes them entertaining.
The reason Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn’t have many sitting down and talking scenes is because the story engine is so powerful. There’s some of the best GSU (goal, stakes, urgency) in any movie ever. Goal – Find the ark, Stakes – if you don’t, Hitler uses it to destroy the world, Urgency – you got to find it before Hitler does, and he has his entire army looking for it.
When you have strong GSU, YOUR CHARACTERS ALWAYS HAVE SOMETHING TO DO. They don’t have time to sit down and talk. That’s why sitting down and talking scenes are bad. They’re a symptom of a deeper problem – that your story doesn’t have a powerful enough plot engine.
Now things get trickier when you’re writing character pieces. By their very nature, character pieces don’t have giant story engines. I don’t know if movies like Moonlight or Minari have any story engine at all. Also, since those movies are more character driven, the set pieces are built around character interaction. And if your characters are constantly interacting, it’s only a matter of time before they’re sitting down to do so.
When you find yourself in this place, you have to have a creative mindset. Only sit your characters down to talk as a last resort. For example, let’s say you want to write a scene between two characters at a coffee shop. What if you, instead, had them talk on the way to the coffee shop? Or on the way to somewhere else?
Sure, if you have a wife and a husband discussing a problem, you can sit them down at the breakfast table and have them hash the problem out. Alternatively, you could make it so the husband is late for work, and the argument is happening as he rushes to get his clothes on, get the kids ready, and get out the door. That’s a much more interesting way to approach the scene.
With all that said, there are times when you do want to sit your characters down to talk. The biggest of these is when you’ve built up a ton of tension between characters and don’t want any distractions for when they collide. The most obvious example of this is the DeNiro Pacino diner scene in Heat. I had no problem with that being a “sitting down and talking” scene because the movie had done such a great job building up to that moment.
Again, to be clear, this scene is BY DESIGN. It’s not because the writers didn’t know what to do and, therefore, sat the characters down to talk to each other. It was carefully orchestrated. Their sitting down and talking is crucial to the design of the movie.
A few last points about these scenes. If you’re a dialogue master, you’re allowed to write more of these scenes than the average writer. Tarantino has quite a few “sitting down and talking” scenes in his movies. But he’s also one of the top 5 dialogue writers in the world. And great dialogue neutralizes the boredom that typically occurs during a “sitting down and talking” scenario.
The worst type of “sitting down and talking” scene is the exposition “sitting down and talking” scene. If you do that more than once in your script, I guarantee you the reader will stop reading. That is the epitome of a lack of creativity – when you’re so boring that the only scene idea you can think of is your characters sitting down and talking, and then, on top of that, you bore us to death with a bunch of exposition.
Finally, in television, you’ll have more sitting down and talking scenes. They have less time and less money in television so they have no choice but to shoot more of these scenes. But that doesn’t give you a free pass to make the scene boring. If anything, it should challenge you to make the scene entertaining in spite of these restrictions. Make sure there’s tons of conflict or tension or sexual tension or unresolved problems between the characters invovled. White Lotus does a great job of this. When the characters sit down for, say, dinner, they’re rarely on the same page with each other, which creates lots of unresolved conflict that plays out during their conversations, keeping things entertaining.
Can you write “sitting down and talking” scenes? Of course you can. But only if they’re by design and only if you’ve done everything in your power to come up with a better option but came up empty.
Good luck!
Genre: Slow-Burn Thriller/Period
Premise: Set in the 1930s when a giant dust cloud had settled over Oklahoma, a mentally unstable mother and her two children must survive both the dust and a mysterious person using the cover of the dust to infiltrate her home.
About: This script finished with 7 votes on the 2020 Black List. Karrie Crouse is relatively new on the scene. She wrote on HBO’s Westworld.
Writer: Karrie Crouse
Details: 105 pages
Readability: Slow/Clunky
One of my favorite horror movies is The Others. I absolutely love that movie. There was nothing spookier than that trio in that house, with the sick kids who couldn’t endure sunlight. I loved it. Which is why I chose this script. Cause it sounded like an update to that formula. Was it? Or was it dust in the wind?
Margaret Bellum and her family live in the Oklahoma Panhandle in the year 1933. They live in a farm house in the middle of nowhere and have been dealing with a never-ending dust drought that’s already killed one of their kids, who breathed too much dust.
Currently, Margaret is getting her kids, Rose (16) and Ollie (7) ready for their father’s extended absence. He’s got to go to work. Which means these three will be on their own. Well, unless you count the dust as a person, which it might as well be. It’s all anybody in the town talks about.
Speaking of the town, the rumor is that a creepy man has made his way into the area and is appearing inside peoples’ houses, sometimes stealing, other times killing. The assumption is that the dust has driven him crazy. Margaret isn’t convinced that the rumor is real. Although maybe she’s just telling herself that because the alternative is too terrifying to accept.
After the father leaves, Margaret becomes obsessed with all the little cracks in her house that are letting in dust. So she cuts up all her clothes to stitch up those cracks. And yet, the dust keeps getting in. Her obsession starts to worry her daughters, who are not down with a crazy mommy. But what can they do?
Margaret also starts thinking that someone is sneaking into the house at night and stealing things. Just when it seems like she’s imagining it, she catches the man in question, Wallace, a preacher who says he knows Margaret’s husband. Wallace somehow convinces Margaret that he’s good people. But she later receives a letter from her husband that says, “By the way, watch out for a psycho preacher.”
Margaret and her children are able to get rid of the Wallace problem. But now they’re back to square one – Margaret going crazy and all that darned dust! As we creep towards the climax, we get the sense that Margaret might do something drastic to herself and her children. Will the town step in before it happens? Or might the kids finally realize that, in order to survive, they’ll have to turn against their crazy mommy?
It’s appropriate that today’s script is titled, “Dust” because that’s what you feel like you’re looking through when you read it – layers and layers of dust. We talk so much on this site about character and plot and structure and dialogue. But we rarely talk about the words on the page and how they’re constructed to create an engaging reading experience.
The Oklahoma Panhandle circa 1930 is an interesting setting for a movie. A constant onslaught of dust makes for all sorts of unique challenges. Unfortunately, the script is plagued – at least early on – with a writing style that’s hard to follow. I’ll give you a few examples.
“A DINGY HALO OF DUST radiates out from a clean WHITE CIRCLE where Rose’s head blocked her pillow from dust.”
While I eventually understood the image this sentence describes, it goes about describing it in an inefficient and confusing manner. A “dingy” halo of dust. Isn’t that redundant? Isn’t all dust dingy? Or is dingy being used to add another layer of dirt? It’s confusing. This is followed by the adjective “radiates,” which seems like the worst possible way to describe dust. Which makes me think I’m reading it wrong. Which forces me to go back and read it again. Which is never a good sign for a screenplay.
It seems like we’re trying to say that there’s a spot on the pillow where there’s no dust because that’s where Rose’s head was. So why not just say that?
“There’s a halo of dust around the center of the pillow where Rose’s head was lying.” That’s it. That’s all you need.
Here’s another sentence from the same page:
“MILK pours into the cup, Margaret quickly places a saucer ON TOP of the cup.”
Sentences become unnecessarily complicated when you shift the action from the person to the object. Milk can’t pour itself. It needs someone to pour it. So starting with milk pouring itself results in a reading hiccup. We *will* understand what you mean. But not without some effort.
This is followed by a comma, and then a brand new sentence. Why is there a comma? The sentence has come to an end. You need a period there.
Why not just, “Margaret pours some milk then places a saucer on top of the cup?” Isn’t that a million times clearer?
A page later, Margaret’s daughter talks about meeting her grandparents. Margaret replies, “They want to meet you too. Maybe next summer. If the crops come in.” Which is followed by the description line, “Margaret quickly moves to the door. Clearly a sore spot.”
How unnecessarily confusing can a simple one-two beat be? The ‘sore spot’ is in relation to the grandparents. But if you read that sentence, you’d think it was referring to the door.
I bring this up because it’s a classic example of a writer trying to be too cute. You’re telling a story. Yet you’re doing everything in your power to get in your own way. Just tell us what’s happening.
I understand that screenwriting contains its own shorthand. For example, you might say “GUN APPEARS, pointed at John’s face,” as opposed to, “Ray yanks his gun out of his holster and shoves it in John’s face.” But you have to be careful with this stuff because, as the writer, you have a lot more information than we do. What you think is clear isn’t always clear.
Because of all these clunky faux-pas, “Dust” exists in this hazy netherworld where the reader only grasps about 70% of what they’re reading. You’re constantly having to go back and re-read pages because you realize, by the end of the page, you’ve forgotten everything you’ve read.
Despite this issue, the script does rebound when Wallace enters the picture. Whenever you insert a potential danger into a home, you create a looming dread that builds all sorts of suspense. We’re terrified of who this guy might be and what he’ll do when he finally reveals his true colors.
Also, some of the stuff with Margaret going crazy, particularly her obsession with sealing up every little crack in the house to keep the dust from getting in, was interesting. I was curious whether she was going to get herself back on track or completely crack.
But these cylinders take so long to get turning that we’ve already made up our mind by that point. Even if I wanted to be engaged, it’s hard to turn it on after 50 pages of a ‘waiting around’ narrative that doesn’t have the easiest writing style to follow.
For all the issues I found in yesterday’s script, Emancipation, this script doesn’t come close to that one in terms of storytelling and writing. There’s such a clear directive in yesterday’s story whereas, with Dust, you get the feeling that the writer is trying to figure out their story as they write it.
So this is another no-go for me, guys.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When it comes to screenwriting sentence construction, the default approach should be starting with the subject. For example, you would say, “Joe runs” as opposed to, “Running along the sidewalk is Joe.” It’s not that the second example is wrong or should never be used. But it’s usually harder for the reader to follow. Not to mention, when it comes to screenwriting, you’re trying to say as much as possible in as few words as possible. When you start your sentence with something other than your subject, you usually have to use more words.
Might Emancipation be the next Revenant, switching out a bear for an alligator?
Genre: True Story/Drama/Thriller/Period
Premise: (from IMDB) A runaway slave forges through the swamps of Louisiana on a tortuous journey to escape plantation owners that nearly killed him.
About: This is the huuuuuge package that sold to Apple TV (for 105 million bucks!), no doubt buoyed by the attachments of Will Smith and Antoine Fuqua. One of the more interesting things about the project is that it was written by Bill Collage, who isn’t known for this kind of material. He wrote Assassins Creed, Allegiant, and broke into the industry with the college comedy, Accepted. This is pretty cool to see since it’s often thought to be impossible to break out of your pigeonhole. Emancipation proves it can be done!
Writer: Bill Collage
Details: 104 pages
Readability: medium
Figure out what’s unique about your script THEN LEAN INTO THAT. Simplest most effective screenwriting advice there is. If your concept doesn’t have anything unique about it, you’re probably in trouble. Because how do you mine unique scenarios out of a familiar premise?
You would think, at first glance, that Emancipation would fall victim to this pitfall. A slave on the run isn’t exactly an original premise. But look closer and you’ll find that you’re dead wrong. That’s because of one, seemingly, irrelevant factor – TERRAIN. The terrain that our main character must escape through is swampland. And swampland might be the most unique terrain of all.
It’s 1862. The Civil War is raging. Slaves are free but only in the North. In the South, where our main character, Peter, lives, slavery is still legal. Peter is ripped away from his family and sold to a man named Jim Fassel, who’s using slaves to build a railroad halfway across the state. Peter’s specific job is to bury slaves who die on the job.
Peter is two things – a God fearing man and a perceptive man. And he hears a few of Fassel’s men talking about how Baton Rouge was claimed by the Union army. That’s about a 5 day journey north. He thinks he can make it. So he pitches the idea to four other slaves. They think he’s crazy but eventually buy in.
When the time is right, they make a break for it. When Fassel and his hounds begin chasing, the five split up. Which means Peter is alone. He eventually trespasses on a farm, resulting in the family hunting him throughout their cornfields. Peter escapes to the bank of the swampland, and reluctantly enters. Within seconds, he’s attacked by an alligator. This is not going to be easy.
Peter improvises his way through miles of swampland, at one point building a makeshift canoe out of a hollowed tree. He encounters 100 degree heat, giant spiders, gianter rats, snakes, more gators, even raging fires. He finally makes it to the end of the swamp and jumps on a passing train. The train takes him to the battlefield, where he’s forced to join the war and fight. But before he does, someone sees his back, which is scarred with lash marks. A war photographer takes a picture of it and that picture becomes one of the most well-known photos in American history and the face of slavery.
Emancipation tries to walk a three-pronged tightrope over the course of its 100 pages. Those prongs include 1) entertainment 2) reality 3) trying to win an Oscar. I liked when the script was focused on 1, not so much when it was focused on 2 or 3.
One of my favorite moments occurs when Peter first goes into the swamp, sees an alligator, turns back to shore, sees his pursuers, and must choose which direction to go. He chooses the alligator, which forces him to fight it, leading to, easily, the most memorable scene in the script.
There are also encounters with snakes, with spiders, and with a terrifying animal I’d never heard of before called a Louisiana swamp rat. Just the way these things were described scared the hell out of me. These were the moments when the script felt most alive, mainly because of what I said at the outset – we were leaning into what was original about the material.
The reality stuff was harder to stomach. There’s a sequence where Peter comes across an abandoned slave house and goes down into the basement to find that a dozen slaves were chained up and left to die. There’s one 10 year old girl barely still alive who Peter tries to save to no avail. Those moments were too sad for me. I found myself not wanting to subject myself to more of that.
Then you had the statue-chasing moments. The big one occurs when Peter takes off his shirt to have his scarred back photographed. It’s an iconic moment because Peter is based on the slave who the original picture was taken of. The problem is that the original picture has inspired so many versions of this scene throughout history that it, ironically, feels cliche. It also feels like it’s trying to be a big important moment. And that’s when moments don’t work. Cause we feel the manipulation of the writer underneath the scene. For these moments to work, you have to come at them in the most natural way possible. Which Emancipation does not do.
I think the reason I’m on the fence about Emancipation is because the first 45 pages promise something intense and visceral and entertaining. I loved, for example, the escape sequence in the opening act. It was like a mini-version of The Great Escape. Then, right after that, it becomes this exciting chase movie.
But the script makes this choice to become darker as it continues on and so, with every 15 pages, I was a little less engaged than I was the previous 15 pages. Which leaves me not quite sure how I’d rate the script. If I were basing the rating off the first 45 pages, it would get an “impressive” without question. But, unfortunately, movies don’t get graded on their best 45 minutes.
The straw that may have broken the camel’s back was Peter himself. He just wasn’t that interesting. His core identity is built around his unwavering belief in God. For every obstacle he encounters, he assures everyone that he’s going to be fine because of God. And he’s right. He always comes out okay.
But how does that make for an interesting character? For characters to be interesting, their inner beliefs need to be challenged in some actionable way. So what you would do is place Peter in a dire situation where his only way out is to denounce, or stop believing in, God. In that moment, Peter has an actionable choice of whether to live, in which case he denounces everything he believes in, or die, in which case he goes to the grave still believing. That’s how you develop character. You constantly challenge their belief system, whether that be a belief in God or a belief in drinking alcohol til you’re blackout drunk every night.
But nothing like that ever happens in Emancipation. There isn’t any character growth at all. I think they figure you’ll get your emotional needs met through the ups and downs of Peter’s harrowing journey. But my experience has taught me that these movies only stay with audiences when there’s character growth. And there’s none of that here.
Emancipation has some really great moments. But the majority of them are packed into those first 45 minutes. What my rating comes down to is simple. Would I tell people to read this? I probably wouldn’t. It just never quite lives up to its promising opening.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make a little movie out of your first act. Don’t get locked into this idea that your first act is only about setting your characters up. Do what Emancipation does. It uses its first act to create a mini-movie built around escaping “prison.” The planning, the suspense, the build-up to their escape – all of that makes for a really exciting mini-movie that thrusts us into the second act.
Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror
Premise: A woman is recruited to participate in an experiment where she’s digitally inserted into her comatose mother’s mind. Once inside, she must come to terms with her mom’s homicidal past.
About: Demonic is the latest entry from writer-director Neil Blomkamp, of District 9 fame. Blomkamp, who was once anointed the next great science-fiction director, followed up surprise hit District 9 with two disappointing films, Elysium and Chappie. After becoming momentarily attached to two gigantic 80s properties, Alien and Robocop, he retreated back into his filmmaking cocoon, choosing to make short films. “Demonic” is his first feature film in six years. It is currently at 14% at Rotten Tomatoes.
Writer: Neil Blomkamp
Details: 104 minutes
One of the things I’m fascinated by is artists who create something amazing then never replicate their success again. Because it taps into this fear that I think a lot of artists have, which is: “What if it’s all luck?” You come up with a masterpiece like The Sixth Sense only to then make a dozen terrible movies in a row. Why is it you can’t tap into that reservoir again?
That’s the question that comes up with Blomkamp. But, with Blomkamp, it goes a step further. Because his latest film isn’t just “not as good as District 9.” It’s a legitimately terrible movie. It doesn’t work on any level. So you have to start asking tough questions. Was Blomkamp involved with the screenplay for District 9 at all? Because it doesn’t make sense that the same person who constructed that universe constructed this one.
I know that he had a co-writer on District 9 in Terri Tatchel. And I remember Peter Jackson was shepherding the project, which means he was bringing two decades’ worth of storytelling experience to the table. So maybe it’s as simple as Blomkamp took care of the visuals while everyone else wrote the story. Otherwise, Demonic’s existence doesn’t make sense. It plays like a 23 year old film school student shooting his first movie.
And I’m not talking about just the writing. I’m talking about the acting. Who are these people? You’ve never heard of anybody in this cast. Blomkamp’s career may not be what it was after District 9. But he can get name actors if he wants to. The fact that he’s choosing not to indicates he has at least some propensity for self-sabotage.
30-something Carly, who lives out in the wilderness as far as I can tell (any sense of geography in this movie is non-existent), is contacted by her ex-boyfriend, who informs her that he recently signed up for an experiment at a local medical company only to find out that the company has Carly’s mom there, who’s in a coma and on life support.
Carly heads over there to see what’s up and they explain that her mom fell into a coma and the only way to get in touch with her is by digitally entering her mind. They would love it if Carly could go into her mind to see what she’s thinking. Carly reluctantly agrees and heads into her mother’s brain, which has her waiting for Caarly inside their old house.
It’s here where we learn that Carly’s mom burned an entire building full of people, killing them all, which is why Carly hasn’t seen her in forever. Carly takes this opportunity to tell her mom how much she hates her. Carly’s mom is apologetic, but there’s something else bubbling underneath the surface with her. The company (which amounts to 2 guys) thinks it’s worth sending Carly in for a second visit.
Eventually, we learn that Carly’s mom may be possessed and it was the demon who killed all those people, not the mom. Meanwhile, Carly starts experiencing incidents where she’s out in the real world only to realize she’s actually still in her mother’s, aka the demon’s, mind. The movie’s only scene that approaches halfway decent territory takes place when her best friend transforms into the demon and comes after her.
We eventually learn that the two company men are exorcists, complete with military Vatican gear (I’m not kidding). And they’ve been using Carly to pull the demon out of the mother’s mind so they can kill it. At least I think that’s what they were doing. Carly then runs around the woods a lot until she defeats the demon, I believe. The end.
Blomkamp just did a three hour interview with Joe Rogan which brought up even MORE questions because, when you listen to Blomkamp, you note how smart he is. He’s smarter than me. He’s smarter than anyone in this comment section. He’s smarter than 99% of the people in Hollywood. And yet he made this terrible movie. How can that be?
This got me wondering if being too intelligent is actually a detriment to creativity. Because to create great art, you have to have a strong connection with the non-logical side of your brain. That’s the side that comes up with the weird interesting shit. The logical side helps when it comes to structuring and plotting. But, in every other facet, logic gets in the way.
A steel skeleton cyborg limping down the street chasing a woman named Sarah Conner – that’s not a logical idea. That’s pure creativity. Listening to Blomkamp, he seems stilted and logical when he’s explaining his work. And, unfortunately, that’s not how you create great art.
Another issue Blomkamp has to contend with is that he’s never studied screenwriting. The most blatant example of this is Carly. Carly does not have a job. We have no idea what she does for a living. We have no idea how she makes money, how she survives, what her daily list of tasks is.
That’s because Blomkamp doesn’t know. As a result, the character is just waiting in her room for the writer to call on her. This is one of the most common beginner screenwriting mistakes there is – not knowing what your character does for a living. Thinking that that’s not important. As I’ve stated here before, a person’s occupation makes up half their life. It has tons of influence on who somebody is. Imagine a coder’s daily life compared to a fisherman’s. Do you think those jobs aren’t going to lead to those two people being drastically different? So why would you ever write someone without a job?
But it’s not just that. A job structures a character’s day. If a character doesn’t have one, they have nothing to do. Which makes them inactive, which makes them boring, which makes them unclear. Yet that’s the character leading this story. And the fact that nobody told Blomkamp to fix this indicates that he has zero people giving him feedback. Which is a recipe for disaster.
Where does Blomkamp go from here? I don’t know. Spike Lee ran into a similar problem back in the early 2000s. He was making a lot of bad movies that nobody saw so he was forced to make a studio film. That ended up being The Inside Man and giving his career new life. Of course, it only led to him making more bad movies that nobody saw but at least he was working. Blomkamp will now have to consider making a studio film in order to keep the lights on.
Unless someone pays him to make District 10. But I’ll be honest with you. It’s starting to look like the *other* people involved in District 9 had more of a creative impact than we thought. I still think Blomkamp is an excellent technical director. He has some shades of Lucas in him in how he comes up with interesting sci-fi imagery. But if this guy is going to keep making movies, he needs a collaborator who understands storytelling. Swallow the ego, find a screenwriter you love, and let him write your movies. If you don’t do that, your career might be over.
[x] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: ‘Sitting down and talking’ scenes are the real demon in “Demonic.” I’ve told you before that you should never choose to write sitting down and talking scenes in your script. Ever. The only time you should write a sitting down and talking scene is when you’re on set, you’ve just lost your location, you have to get the scene shot, and the only option is to sit your actors down and shoot the scene quickly. That’s it. That’s your only excuse for writing a ‘sitting down and talking’ scene. But, believe it or not, there’s something even worse than sitting down and talking scenes. And that’s sitting down and talking scenes AT THE BEGINNING OF YOUR MOVIE. When you sit your actors down to talk, you are promoting stagnation. You are promoting inactivity. You are taking the “move” out of “movie.” It’s a terrible precedent to set for your story because it starts things off on a lifeless uninspired note. Of the first three scenes in Demonic, TWO of them are ‘sitting down and talking’ scenes – one with Carly’s best friend, the other with her ex-boyfriend. It was in those moments that I knew this movie was screwed.
Sci-Fi Showdown is just a month away and that means you should be carving your script into shape!
What: Sci-fi Showdown
When: Entries due by Thursday, September 16th, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
How: Include title, genre, logline, Why We Should Read, and a PDF of your script
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
The most important thing when it comes to writing a science fiction screenplay is having a good concept. Since we’re well past the conceptual stage, I’m going to assume you’ve taken care of that part. This article is going to focus on everything else you can do to make your script great. So let’s jump into it!
I Need A Hero
Make sure we love your hero. This is applicable to all genres, of course. But when you look at the great sci-fi films of our time, they all have characters we love. From Neo to The Terminator to Ripley to Mad Max. All of these protagonists are iconic. A specific theme running through most great sci-fi characters is that they’re underdogs. Neo is a nerdy loner hacker. The Terminator gets his ass handed to him by the newer slicker T-1000. Ripley is just some lowly consultant in a ship full of marines. Mad Max is the ultimate loner, a man without a single friend. Robocop is relentlessly riddled with bullets until there’s barely anything left of him. The character in Upgrade becomes a paraplegic.
Giving the audience an easy reason to root for your hero can do wonders. If your protagonist isn’t an underdog, find other ways to make them sympathetic. When we meet Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, he loses his mother to cancer. Sympathy is a screenwriting superpower when done right.
Don’t Settle For Average
One of the big things I’m going to be looking at is set pieces. ENTIRE MOVIES have been made because someone loved a single set piece in a script.
I recently read a solid action script for a consultation. But the writer seemed surprised that I didn’t like his set pieces more. What I explained to him was that I read set pieces ALL WEEK LONG every single week, and they’re all basically the same.
There’s a lot of running. There’s a lot of shooting. There’s a lot of fighting. There’s a lot of car-chasing.
What screenwriters don’t understand is that it’s virtually impossible to make those four elements exciting on the page. Think about it from the reader’s side. Let’s say you’re writing a shootout in the streets. How can you possibly write a shootout that isn’t going to have those same repetitive beats that we’ve read a million times?
So what I’m looking for when it comes to set-pieces is CLEVERNESS or UNIQUENESS. I’m looking for a setup that I haven’t quite seen before. That’s the kind of thing that gets me excited as a reader.
Inception is a good example. A situation where the environment is rotating and time is expanding. John Wick 3 – a fight in a library where books are being used as deadly weapons. Playing a deadly game of hide and seek with velociraptors in a kitchen. Navigating the collapse of a space elevator 100,000 feet above the earth’s surface (Ad Astra). These are the types of scenes I’m going to respond to.
Nuts and bolts action scenes like motorcycle chases through cities can work on screen. BUT THEY ARE OFTEN BORING ON THE PAGE. This is why spec screenwriters have to approach their set pieces differently. Their scripts are not getting automatically greenlit. So they must come up with set pieces that don’t just work on screen, BUT ON THE PAGE. Sci-fi is the perfect genre for achieving this because you have more elements at your disposal than just guns, fists, and cars.
World Build Your Ass Off
One of the unique things about science fiction is the mythology. Because you’re creating something that doesn’t actually exist, you are responsible for constructing all of that world’s backstory and rules. If you don’t do a thorough deep dive into your world’s backstory or effectively convey your mythology’s rules, you will lose the reader.
What do I mean by ‘thorough deep dive?’ Let’s take District 9 as an example. The movie starts with a ship hovering over a city. The beginner screenwriter says, “That’s all I need to know.” The seasoned screenwriter asks, where did that ship come from? How long did it take to get here? Why did it leave its planet? What kind of planet was it? What was the environment like? Was it a cold planet? A hot one? How did that affect the aliens? Why did they decide to come to earth specifically? What do they want? Are they intelligent?
The more questions you ask, the more SPECIFICITY you build into the mythology, which allows your world to feel more genuine. Remember, GENERALITY breeds GENERICNESS. So, the more you know, the more specific, and therefore believable, your world will be. Let’s take just one of these questions to see how it can affect the story. “Why did the aliens decide to come to earth specifically?” Maybe the answer is, they didn’t. Maybe they were on their way to somewhere else, got an intergalactic flat tire, and were forced to stop at earth. That changes the mythology drastically compared to if they had come to earth to destroy mankind and take over the planet, which is how most screenwriters would’ve approached the story.
The reason you do a deep dive on the first part – the mythology – is so that you can effectively convey the second part – the rules. The more you know about the backstory, the easier it is to formulate the rules. Now, District 9 isn’t as rule-based a mythology as say, The Matrix, which requires lots of explanation. But it’s still got rules that you need to convey, such as the fact that all the alien tech is DNA encoded so that humans can’t use it.
I was developing a loop script recently and one of the questions that came up was, “Why did the loop start?” If a loop just decided to happen to, of all the people in the world, our hero, clearly something/someone made a choice to do that. Who was that someone/something? Why did they pick our protagonist? We actually never came up with a good answer. But, make no mistake, you need to ask those questions.
I can’t stress this enough. The more you know about your world, the more confident both your writing and your story will be. The opposite is also true. The less you know, the less it SEEMS LIKE YOU KNOW. And the second the reader senses that the writer is bullshitting them, they’re out. This happens ALL THE TIME WITH AMATEUR SCI-FI SCRIPTS. I know because I’ve read them all. Don’t let it happen to you.
A Sense of Urgency
Sci-Fi doesn’t tend to do well with slow narratives. It’s a genre that wants to move. Look no further than the trailer for Reminiscence. As I told you months ago, it looks slow and boring. What are all the critics saying now that they’ve watched the film? You guessed it. That it’s slow and boring. From Source Code to Terminator to Star Wars to Guardians to Fury Road to District 9 to Edge of Tomorrow… sci-fi works best with a sense of urgency. So I implore you to add a sense of urgency if you don’t already have it.
It’s true that not every story is set up to sprint. Ex Machina is a good example of that. But even Ex Machina operates within a contained timeframe – I believe that our main character is visiting the famous tech CEO’s compound for one weekend. So, even though the story takes its time, we, the audience, know the end of the journey is near. I know some of you loved Blade Runner 2049 but one of the reasons that movie only hit with sci-fi die hards and cinephiles is because there was zero sense of urgency. Don’t make the same mistake in your script. Especially if you want to do well in the Sci-Fi Showdown.
Before I let you go, let’s take a second to remember a few science-fiction movies over the last couple of decades, shall we?
Anon
The Island
Gamer
Equilibrium
After Earth
Mute
Battle Los Angeles
Space Between Us
Valerian
Life
The Darkest Hour
Ultraviolet
Jupiter Ascending
Johnny Mneumonic
Battlefield Earth
Elysium
In Time
I Am Number Four
What do all of these awful sci-fi movies have in common?
The hell if I know.
But if I had to bet, I would say that ‘writing laziness’ was a major contributor. This is a genre that if you don’t put in the hard work and make every aspect of the script as good as you can possibly make it, it will definitely fail. Assuming all the basics are in place (good concept, goal, stakes, urgency, conflict, obstacles, good dialogue, clean exposition, structure, character development) you must be creative. You must be imaginative. Know your world. Know your story. Give us scenarios we haven’t seen before. Give us someone to root for. If you do that, your script will have a chance with me and, hopefully, the rest of Hollywood.
Are you actually sending your screenplay out into the world without getting professional feedback first? That is dangerous, my friend. I can tell you exactly what script issues they’re going to criticize you for and help you fix them BEFORE you send it out. I do consultations on everything from loglines ($25) to treatments ($100) to pilots ($399) to features ($499). E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested. Chat soon!
