As I work on crafting scenes in my screenplays I find myself trying to avoid having the characters be very direct. I tend to think indirect communication in film is more interesting. That is, I want my characters to communicate but on two levels: a) what they say, and b) what they don't say but mean or wish they could say or are trying to avoid saying. Audiences are smart. (I mean, you and I are in the audience, right?) People are not only good at picking up on subtleties of human interaction and communication, we relish it. It's one of the reasons we love films. Our antennae are out and looking for cues. We appreciate when films trust us, even when we don't realize they are because we are just so locked into the story. My goal is to get better and figuring out how to do that better.
In thinking about this, I came across some quotes from one of the best script (stage, television, and film) writers ever, Harold Pinter:
“Language... is a highly ambiguous business. So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken... You and I, the characters which grow on a page, most of the time we're inexpressive, giving little away, unreliable, elusive, obstructive, unwilling. But it's out of these attributes that a language arises. A language, I repeat, where under what is said, another thing is being said...
There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smokescreen. When true silence falls, we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase, "failure of communication", and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
I am not suggesting that no character in a play can ever say what he in fact means. Not at all. I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back.”
― Harold Pinter, "Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics"
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And we complain about producers using AI to create screenplays.
What I see happening is a sea of basically unwatchable AI generated movies flooding Youtube and Vimeo. They may even start charging us f...
Expand commentAnd we complain about producers using AI to create screenplays.
What I see happening is a sea of basically unwatchable AI generated movies flooding Youtube and Vimeo. They may even start charging us for hosting.
I will not be using it. Mostly because the years I have spent learning to write is just the same as the time other artists like cinematographers and directors have spent learning. I cry foul when someone says a computer can write a screenplay, I cannot request protection when I sacrifice others.
I believe when we let machines think, we stop.