What goes into writing a great movie script?
Last Updated: 26.06.2025 08:29
Conflict is your power source; without it you have no drama and hence no script.
Only God gets it right the first time. Rewrite everything.
Use status to help drive conflict. King Lear/fool. Upstairs/downstairs.
To develop a unique voice for each character, try interviewing your characters.
Your primary job is to create situations. Modern actors will fuck up your dialogue, despite whatever your contract says.
All rules are made to be broken, but you damn well better know WHY you’re breaking them.
Who is/was the genuinely toughest actor in Hollywood movies?
Research the facts and then throw away the research.
Learn to tell a story orally and not through writing. Try telling your story to a friend.
Cut everything that is not a payoff, or a setup for a specific payoff. “Omit needless words.” Think about the sparseness of joke telling, or Grimm Brothers.
How are max different from medical and minimum security prisons?
Make sure to pack enough explosives into the rocket.
Outline everything. Use story beats. Keep character’s mouths taped up, until they absolutely MUST speak. Write the script and the dialogue at the last minute, after you’ve revised the hell out of the outline.
People choose what to see based on the high concept. Make sure to deliver an ending consistent with the high concept -- it is what the audience paid for.
FDA Gives Tomato Recall Over Salmonella Highest Risk Warning - TODAY.com
What you leave unwritten is as important as what you write. SUBTEXT.
The DSM 5 is a wonderful character compendium.
A scene should change valence from beginning to end. Up to down, down to up.
Reports: Bills RB James Cook ‘won’t be in Buffalo anytime soon’ - Buffalo Rumblings
Don’t direct from the page. Everyone, from the director on down, wants to be part of the process of making movies. Let them do their work.
Primary characters must change polarities. Secondary characters can change less.
A critical function of storytelling is wish fulfillment. This is why video games are so popular. “That protagonist is JUST LIKE ME.”
Why do some mothers hate their daughters especially when they're the eldest?
Actors give better feedback than writers do.
Get up there yourself. Be in a movie. Take some acting (not writing) classes. Learn how a trained actor approaches a text. Learn why actors take roles. They do as much if not more than the writer does.
Leave holes. Write and unwrite. Put it in, take it out.
Why do Democrats claim to be Americans when they are actually Globalists?
Audiences are smarter than you think. Something about turning down the house lights makes their IQs go up.
Maintain a slush pile/idea file. When you are ready to write, choose the best seeds to plant.
Write in reverse time. Major characters need to change polarity; minor characters may remain the same at the end.
Samsung could drop Google Gemini in favor of Perplexity for Galaxy S26 - Ars Technica