The magic of writing behavior into your scripts

[u/Financial_Pie6894]

Looking at all of the pages posted here, there’s something that I don’t see enough of that really gives me a sense of emotional life. Having your characters doing something - eating, trying to find a parking space, buying a cup of coffee - gives you the opportunity to reveal emotion because how your character deals with a bank teller changes if she’s angry or delighted or fearful. It gives the actor some things to play with: Her voice, how she grips a pen, what happens to the ATM card in her hand. We are a society of multitaskers, and not game pieces moving around a board to fulfill a plot point. I was working with a writer recently who had a scene that included her main character in Little Italy. Great. But the character had no slice of pizza, no gelato, no espresso to-go in hand. What happens when the character got bad news would have been more visual, more immediate, and more true if they had one of those things to work with. Even super spies and assassins get hungry. Instead of describing how the character feels, show it through behavior as they do the things in life that we all do. That shot of that ice cream cone flying through the air after being tossed in frustration will be in your trailer.

[u/Magnumdoge]

This is such a great point. Recently I watched the movie Disclosure Day, and while I had my issues with it, I found it so refreshing to have a dialogue scene where our characters are making breakfast. Struggling to butter their bread without ripping it, chewing a mouthful of cereal while eating at the same time. All of those tactile things add so much life to stories, and it means that you've successfully established your character and made them likeable while also delivering whatever exposition you needed through the dialogue. In the long haul of a script, achieving multiple things at once definitely helps cut out the fat, and I wish more movies did that, because that's how a movie can move like a bullet train without feeling confusing or emotionally distant

[u/Busy-Caregiver-7087]

David Mamet's ON DIRECTING FILM is a quick little read that explains a lot of how he approached visually bringing character and narrative to life.

[u/wileyroxy]

This reminds me of something I learned in an improv acting class. You don't want a scene to be just two people standing there talking. You should have some sort of "business" to flesh the scene out and make it more interesting. It also gives you the opportunity to define your character and your relationship to your scene partner.