Dialogue writing skills of film and television directors

Dialogue writing skills of film and television directors

Writing dialogue is a headache for writers, and even the most experienced writers can't guarantee to write well. Bad dialogue is often one of the important reasons why the script is stifled, because dialogue is the most straightforward stimulus to readers and audiences-every sentence from the actor's mouth is known as boring. The following are the dialogue writing skills of film and television directors that I brought to you. Welcome to reading.

1, which defines the style of the character.

One of the criteria to test the quality of dialogue is whether you can tell who said it if you cover up the names of the characters. If you can, it means that you have found a unique speaking style suitable for the role. In the script, the rhythm of the characters' speech, the world outlook and their background stories reflected by the content of the speech should be reflected in the dialogue of the characters. Does your character like to interrupt others when he is talking? Are they chat terminators? Are these people extroverted or introverted? What is their social status? They always like to fight for the right to speak? Or do you tend to obey others? Know your role better, and they will talk to you themselves.

2. Clever arrangement of explanatory dialogue

When the dialogue has the function of explanation and explanation, it should be squeezed into the audience bit by bit like eye drops, instead of telling the whole story. Use dialogue to cause reversal or humorous effect, so be careful not to expose the truth prematurely. In the movie butch cassidy and the sundance kid, two outlaws were chased by the police and villagers to the edge of a cliff. Butch suggested that they jump into the river to escape. At this life-threatening critical moment, Butch learned from his partner that he could not swim. Explanatory dialogue needs to be slowly paved and brewed in the early stage.

3, fully understand your characters.

Before you start writing dialogues with characters, you must really understand them, so you can write a background story for them first. Laios and Egri put forward a good template for the construction of character background in the book The Art of Movie Scripts, which mainly covers three main aspects of characters-psychological level, physiological level and social level.

4. Introduce dialects according to the needs of the plot.

Considering the regional problem of the story, if the plot needs it, the role dialogue can quote dialects appropriately. The film "The Child and the Eagle" directed by ken loach is adapted from Barry Hynes' novel, and all the dialogues in the novel are written in South Yorkshire dialect. During the adaptation of the script, these dialects were changed into Mandarin. Finally, when local Yorkshire actors were invited to perform, the written dialogue was changed to the dialect that best matched the theme of the film.

5. Use voice-over carefully

Telling a story with a voice-over is a terrible thing. If narration is used to tell the story, what's the point of scriptwriting? However, there are still many excellent films with voice-over, such as Apocalypse Now, blade runner, American Beauty and so on. Voice-over is very instructive. If the owner of the voiceover is an unreliable narrator, you can make full use of this to mislead the audience and create suspense, because people are more inclined to listen to the content of the voiceover.

6. Learn to pave the way with dialogue

In addition to using vision to predict or mislead what will happen next, plot development can also use dialogue to complete this process. In the classic Sicily scene in quentin tarantino's Love Actually, the gang threatened dennis hopper's father and said, "Now, tell me, am I lying?" The dialogue in this play has many functions, interesting, revealing characters, creating tension and predicting what will happen next.

7. Don't write rubber duck monologues.

Sydney Lu once said in Making a Movie, don't write rubber duck dialogue.

Rubber duck dialogue is a monologue, in which the characters will directly explain to the audience how they became what they are because of past trauma. However, in real life, people usually unconsciously realize the reasons and experiences that affect their growth trajectory.

8. Make your character joke

Your character must be able to joke. To some extent, it certainly depends on the type of story. Action movies rarely have time to dig characters, but drama movies are different. At the beginning of the film, the screenwriter wants to win the sympathy of the audience as much as possible for the role, because you have to let the audience have the initiative to understand the role. Letting the characters tell jokes is a good way to attract the audience into the plot. In this joke, you can start to pave the way for the theme or specific information of the story. In the movie Alien, the audience can learn some dynamic relationships between the characters by laughing and cursing, such as Brett and Parker's antipathy to ripley; Kane's laziness (which got him into some trouble later).

Another function of making characters joke is to create suspense. One rule of drama writing is: make them laugh, make them cry and make them wait. In a word, playful dialogue can help us like and understand the characters and create tension when necessary. In comedy, banter dialogue will be the focus of the whole story.

9. It is better to write more than less.

Many people often write a lot of dialogues in the first draft, but when the final draft is completed or filming begins, the dialogues will be greatly deleted. When writing a script, we usually write a lot of dialogues, because at this stage, we have to deal with the words on the page, and at this time we have not entered a visual environment. Therefore, it is easy for writers to replace characters with what they see (everything we will eventually see on the screen) and replace them with feelings (in fact, expressions or gestures can be used instead).

10, do research and write quickly.

William goldman once said, do a good job of research, build a good background story of the role, and when you feel ready, start writing at once. This method is very effective for me personally. If the research work is done well, the character will automatically talk to you. Fast writing can temporarily block critical psychology and improve writing efficiency.

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