What is not said in The Order and Woman of the Hour
Personally, I know there is nothing quite as joyful as watching actors in a table read say the words I wrote. As writers we are world builders and maybe—just maybe—some of us are control enthusiasts regarding how everything in those worlds operates.
We often talk about how screenwriting is the weirdest art form in that it is collaborative, but we often never meet our collaborators. We have to trust they will execute our visions. Achieving that trust is a sign of a mature, developed writer, but it must be coupled with clarity of vision on the page.
I’ve written about the power of context, which is one element of writing a powerful scene that doesn’t rely on dialogue. Another element is trust. You must trust your actors to use their skills to communicate the emotions of their characters. You must trust your audience to see and feel those emotions and to resonate with them. The more masterful we are at conveying intent and need, the easier it is to trust that our future collaborators will get our vision right. So how do we build that trust?
I recently screened The Order at the Austin Film Festival and was blown away by the timely true story and even more by the silences and the moments where the actors said nothing but conveyed so much. Jude Law’s deeply wounded FBI agent speaks volumes with his face and his eyes. In an early scene, we immediately understand that his commitment to the job has cost him his marriage by the emptiness with which he looks at some photos in a derelict field office. In a late scene, we feel the moment he understands that the actions he must take to catch the antagonist will come at a heavy, painful cost. In the hands of lesser writers, there may have been reams of expository dialogue. Writers Zach Baylin, Gary Gerhardt, and Kevin Flynn knew they could trust Jude and trust us to get it.
Likewise, the silences speak in booming tones in Anna Kendrick’s masterful Woman of the Hour. In interviews she’s spoken about being pressed by her producers for more dialogue to communicate the arc of a scene, but she pushed back. She said that her audience would get it, and she was right. In a bar scene, there is a subtle and emotional back and forth between her character, Sheryl, and Pete Holmes’ nosey neighbor, Terry. We—and she—realize too late that the interaction is a power struggle. What starts out as a way to decompress after a demoralizing day turns into a delicate dance to navigate Terry’s ego and what threat may lie in store for Sheryl if she puts a foot wrong. None of the strong subtext is ever spoken. Body language and surface banter convey everything as the scene reaches a heartbreaking, infuriating conclusion, precisely as Anna intended.
So how do you do that on the page? You start by getting very clear about the character goals in the scene. Maybe you write a draft where the characters say all their feelings out loud, if that helps you find your arc. Then you look for ways to submerge the dialogue into subtext. We so rarely talk about what we’re really feeling. We so rarely say precisely what we mean, so much so that it rings false if characters do it too easily. (That clarity must be earned, like in a Low Point or Final Challenge outburst or confrontation, when someone is pushed to a breaking point.) What else can your character speak about to represent what they need or want? How can they protect what they need or want by talking around it or deflecting?
Then, look at what they do in the scene. Of course we need to be careful not to overdirect from the page with too much body direction. But we can convey intent. We can convey how a turn in a scene hits a character, not so much by what they do with their body in reaction, but in how they feel, in what this means for them. What can you convey with an action instead of words? It takes practice to be subtle, economical, and rich on the page, and to trust that actors will make your intent live on the screen. It is more difficult to write this way, but it’s a satisfying skill to develop and makes your script more sophisticated.
How can you make subtext, actions, and silences work harder in your scripts? This is the sort of thing we work on in our Writing is Rewriting online lab.
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