The other day I was reading a script and getting bored. This is not an unusual occurrence. The odds dictate that I’ll be bored by most of the scripts I read. But this one was bothering me because the writer wasn’t bad. The characters were interesting. The world was interesting. The writing itself was vivid and showcased a unique voice. I SHOULD HAVE BEEN into it. But I wasn’t. Why?
It finally came to me. The scenes were all boring. The writer was good at setting everything else up. But the scenes themselves would land with a big dramatic THUD. The main reason for that was that the characters didn’t have anything to do but talk.
Now dialogue is an essential part of any screenplay. There’s nothing wrong with sitting your characters down and having them talk to each other. Dozens of sit-coms have become billion-dollar businesses using that very format. But while it may appear to the untrained eye that characters are just standing around and talking, there’s usually something else going on. And that something is called:
PULLING.
“PULLING” is the act of creating something that’s pulling at some variable within the scene, usually the characters. The best way to explain it is to give you an example.
Imagine a scene where Jake is visiting his friend Charlie at his office job. We cut into the scene with Jake sitting in the corner and Charlie sitting at his desk. The two are talking about whatever the writer wants them to talk about – who’s going to win between the Knicks and Bulls tonight. This scene is going to be boring 99% of the time. Go ahead, try and write the scene yourself. I guarantee it won’t be good.
But if you step back and create something that’s pulling at one of the variables in the scene, you’ll immediately notice improvement. For example, what if Charlie has someone waiting for him in the lobby, preferably someone of importance who makes him nervous. Now when we cut into the scene, it begins when Charlie’s secretary calls in and says “Fred Clayborne is waiting in the lobby.”
Now Charlie and Jake can’t sit there and chat away with all the time in the world. There’s something pulling at Charlie from outside the scene which limits the amount of time he has to talk with Jake. This creates a psychological shift in the audience where they care more about the conversation because they know it’s ending soon.
One of the biggest mistakes I see writers make is believing that their dialogue is so good that it can withstand a static setup. I can tell you from experience that only 1 in every 1000 writers is able to pull this off. You’re better off finding something to pull at your scene.
One of the most well-known examples of PULLING is the “bomb under the table.” If you have a non-dramatic scene of two people talking to each other at a restaurant, you’re probably going to write something boring. But, if at the beginning of the conversation, the camera cranes down to reveal that there’s a bomb under the table that neither of them know about, the conversation all of a sudden becomes fascinating. And all you did was create something pulling at the scene – in this case, a bomb.
And remember that the “bomb” can be anything. It doesn’t have to literally be a bomb. It can be a jealous ex-girlfriend trying to talk her way past the front door hostess to inform her ex’s date how terrible a person he is. It could be we learned in the previous scene that the woman on the date is pregnant and plans to tell the guy later during dinner. It could be that we know this guy is a serial killer but his date has no idea.
In each of these cases, there is something PULLING at the scene. And while it sounds obvious when I use examples, I read a ton of scenes with no pulling whatsoever. Just characters sitting around talking. It’s deceptively easy to overlook.
I was just watching Curb Your Enthusiasm the other night and noticed that Larry David uses PULLING all the time. There’s this hilarious sub-plot in the most recent episode where Larry will be flying everyone back from a wedding in a private plane. Because the plane is so small, the pilot needs to know each passenger’s weight in advance of the flight. But his friends refuse to disclose their weights to Larry, leaving Larry to spend the entire trip trying to trick it out of them.
Eventually, Larry’s out at a local carnival (the wedding is in Mexico) and stumbles across one of those “Guess Your Weight” exhibits where a man tries to guess your weight. Larry pays the guy to discreetly give him the weight of each of his friends when they show up. He’s going to herd them over in the direction of Weight Guy, pretend like he’s just talking to them, when, in actuality, he’s turning and positioning them so the weight-guesser can see them from all angles and properly guess their weight.
The PULL is coming from Larry and the Weight Guy. You have a group of characters at a festival talking. But if that’s all you have, your scene’s going to be boring. By creating the PULL of Larry secretly trying to get all their weights, the scene is all of a sudden alive and interesting.
Another script I read recently had this woman – we’ll call her Jane – who lived across the street from a hunky guy. Every day at exactly 5pm, the guy would come home and immediately undress. Jane built her day around this moment. It was the only thing that mattered – watching him get undressed. Then, in an early scene, Jane’s annoying neighbor shows up to talk about a bunch of boring exposition-related stuff that we’ll need to know for later on.
This is a classic example of a scene that could’ve been boring. Two characters talking about plot. But the writer had the annoying neighbor show up at exactly 4:57pm, walk past Jane into her apartment, and start talking. Now, boring exposition becomes exciting! Because we know that all Jane cares about in this moment is getting Annoying Neighbor out of her apartment before Hunky Guy gets home. Time is one of the most reliable types of PULLING. Put a time crunch on a scene and it immediately becomes more interesting.
One of the reasons Parasite won Best Picture is because it was jam-packed with PULLING. In one of the early scenes, Kim Ki-Jung, the sister from the poor family, must come in and convince the rich mother that she’s the right art tutor for her son. There’s only problem. Kim isn’t an art teacher. She knows nothing about art. She’s tricking the family in order to get on the payroll. So in the first scene where she’s tutoring the son, Kim herself is the PULL. Her deception is what’s pulling at the scene.
In order to understand that better, imagine if Kim really was a great artist. That she really did tutor children in art for a living. And she came in to interview for the job. There’d be a little bit of pull in that she still has to prove herself. But the pull is much more powerful if she’s lying. That’s what makes the scene exciting.
Another thing to note is that you can save yourself a lot of trouble if the PULL is built into the concept itself. Parasite is about a poor family who is secretly infiltrating a rich family. Almost every scene contains some element of deception. And deception is a powerful PULL. So when you do that, you don’t have to think hard about how to make every scene exciting since the PULL is baked into the equation.
To simplify that down even more, the most common PULL is a limited time frame. If characters always have somewhere to be, then in every scene they’re being pulled to someplace else. Therefore, films like 1917 are the ultimate PULL movies. The characters can never sit down and be boring because they’re always being pulled somewhere else. And even in the moments where they’re not – where they take a break or catch their breath – the lack of time is always looming over them, creating a natural PULL that looms over the scene.
Let me finish this up by saying the hardest scene to write is characters in a location, with nothing to do, nowhere to be, and all the time in the world. This is the ANTI-PULL. And while there are examples of some writers who can pull it off, it’s way more likely that you’ll write a boring scene. Add a good PULL and problem solved.
