Writing for the Cut
Writing for the Cut
Greg Loftin
The principles discussed here apply to all screens and all stories.
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you’ll fi nd lots of fi lm-editing strategies that will transport your writing from the word to the
moving image. All of them shake out from one central idea: juxtaposition is the motor of fi lm
storytelling.
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#juxtaposition
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Juxtaposition is a kind of magic. Th rough the collision of images, we ignite fresh ideas in the
mind of the viewer. And when we do that, viewers become active partners in the storytelling —
they discover the story for themselves. Discovering the story, rather than being literally told the
story, is what gives us greatest pleasure when we watch a fi lm. Th e Pixar writer-director
Andrew Stanton puts it like this:
“Good storytelling never gives you four, it gives you two plus two . . . Don’t give the audience the
answer. Audiences have an unconscious desire to work for their entertainment. They are
rewarded with a sense of thrill and delight when they find the answers themselves.”
(Screenwriting Expo 5)
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#juxtaposition #curiosity
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Returning to Ex Machina, it’s clear that Alex Garland was writ-ing in images with editing in mind.
Th ere is a kind of poetry here.
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And poetry is our bridge between the world of words and the world of cinema.
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#juxtaposition
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In this book, you will discover how to apply a number of for-the-cut strategies to your writing. All
stem from the poetry of the cut:
Substitution splice — magic at the scene break Split scene break — spill across the cut
Nonlinear shuf f l e — move the parts around Ellipsis — don’t show don’t tell In medias res —
start in the middle Script-planned montage — poetry in motion Opening / title sequence —
overture Parallel action — the thrill of cross-cutting Action scenes — writing the set piece
Suspense — stretching those nerves Dialogue — another kind of action
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#cutting strategies
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POETRY IS OUR BRIDGE between the world of words and the world of moving images.
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as a construction of jumps, jerks, fragments, and collisions, we can better understand what to
show and what to hide. Above all, we can focus on what happens at the join. Because what
happens at the join is juxtaposition, and juxtaposition is a kind of magic.
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The Kuleshov Effect You maybe already know about this editing phenomenon, but let’s do it
again. Lev Kuleshov, a teacher and theorist at the world’s fi rst fi lm school in Moscow, set up an
experiment with his students to explore the expressive potential of the cut. Using a Medium
Close Up shot (MCU) of a man looking straight ahead, he chose to cut
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this same shot with three dif f erent Point of View (POV) images:
a bowl of soup, a child in a cof f i n, and a young woman.
So reading lef t to right, we see an uninf l ected shot of Ryan star-ing, then we see what he’s
looking at, and then we return to Ryan, and now this same image is inf l ected with a sense of
hunger, then grief, then desire.
T h is famous experiment (which became known as the Kuleshov Ef f ect) proved that no single
image has an absolute meaning; shots change their meaning through juxtaposition with the next
shot.
T h is ef f ect is not unique to editing. Director Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin), found
examples of this juxtapositional ef f ect in haiku poetry. He also demonstrates how it works in
Chinese characters: Here one pictogram is combined with another to form a meaning:
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I found more recent authority for this idea when I discovered an online interview between a poet
and a movie editor.
And not just any fi lm editor. Walter Murch is surely one of the most brilliant fi lm editors in the
last fi f t y years, and certainly the most fertile thinker about the craf t . In an interview with the
poet Joy Katz, Murch talks about the “secretly architectural” nature of both poetry and fi lm
editing. He points to the relation-ship between the length of a line of poetry and the duration of a
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JUmp 7 “A dog + a mouth = ‘to bark’; a mouth + a child = ‘to scream’; a mouth + a bird = ‘to
sing’; a knife + a heart = ‘sorrow,’ and so on.
But this is — film editing!” (The Film Sense
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#juxtaposition #kuleshov effect
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SLEIGHT OF HAND and magic have always been associated with fi lm editing. In 1896,
magician-f i lmmaker George Méliès made a short fi lm called Th e V anishing Lady. A magician
walks on stage with his female assistant. She sits on a chair and he covers her in a cloth.
With a fl ourish, he pulls away the cloth — she’s gone! He waves his arms in the air and tries to
summon her back. Whaaa! A human skeleton suddenly appears on the chair. He banishes the
skeleton, waves his hands, tugs the cloth, and — ta-da! — his female assis-tant reappears.
Phew.
T h is was one of the fi rst examples of what became known as the “substitution splice.” Méliès
stumbled on this trick one day while fi lming street life in the Place de l’Opéra. His camera
jammed. Af t er a few moments, he got the camera rolling again.
Later when he saw the ef f ect of the jam on the projected image, he was amazed — “I
suddenly saw the Madeleine-Bastille bus changed into a hearse, and men changed into
women.”
In these early years before cinemas were invented, Méliès showed his fi lms at fairgrounds.
Film-as-fairground-ride is a great image. A ride is engineered for fun, thrill, motion, and emotion.
And that’s the core business of screenwriting.
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#substitution splice
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Substitution Splice T h e substitution splice is Méliès’ gif t to screenwriters. And the best place to
use it is the scene break.
In the standard screenplay format that we all use, the scene break doesn’t appear to be any
kind of event — we’re simply start-ing a new scene. Th ere’s nothing here to remind us that the
out-going and incoming scenes are actually images / sounds that snap together in a fraction of a
second. A scene break is nearly always a cut, and you can use it as a juxtapositional
opportunity that speaks volumes.
Substitution splices come in all fl avors — some will echo the movement in one shot with the
movement in another. (A small boy draws his fi nger across his throat > cut > an identically
framed adult completes the gesture.) An object in one location is matched with the same object
in a new location (the beautiful tattoo that covers the skin on Tom’s back > cut > tattoo now
shown stretched and framed in an art gallery). And then there are substitutions that use a proxy:
Martha has a fever in one shot, and black mourning dresses hang on a clothesline in the next
shot. Unexpected substi-tutions create surprise — a skeleton appears instead of the lady!
A huge number of substitutions center on a simple magician’s device: Th e assistant steps into
a hinged box, the door closes, and reopens to reveal . . .
The hero escapes the gang, jumps in the lift, the door closes — cut — a gangster waits on the
ground fl oor and when the lift door opens — it’s empty!
A version of this last trick is memorably used in one of the big set pieces in Silence of the
Lambs. Armed feds head towards the
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home of the serial killer “Buf f alo Bill.” Th rough parallel action, we see Bill’s sadistic activities
indoors, while the feds are surround-ing the house. An undercover fed carries a bouquet of fl
owers to Bill’s front door. He rings the bell. Bill opens it and — eh? Our hero Clarice Starling is
standing there! Before we can gather our thoughts, we cut to the feds kicking down the front
door of an empty house. And now we get it — the feds got the wrong address, and Clarice has
unwittingly stumbled into the serial killer’s lair.
So this is a substitution splice. Sometimes called “match cut” editing.
Maybe this sort of trick can appear a bit cheesy. In a sense, it is.
Méliès said, “I must say, to my great regret, the cheapest tricks have the greatest impact.” But
properly judged, it can be the moment of epiphany in your story. Here’s one you’ll remember: a
prehistoric hominid just discovers an animal bone makes a great weapon and slaughters his
enemy. Th en he throws it triumphantly in the air — cut — a bone-like spaceship fl oats in
space. 2001 Space Odyssey.
T h ere’s another classic substitution splice in Lawrence of Arabia.
Th is is a “match cut” in both senses. It looks like this: World War I, and T.E. Lawrence has been
summoned to the Arab Bureau in London for a brief i ng before he sets of f to fi nd Prince Faisal
in Arabia. Bureau Chief Dryden is holding an unlit cigarette — Lawrence lights it for him. Th en:
Lawrence contemplates the lighted match.
He blows it out.
Cut (Substitution splice) Dawn. A desert horizon.
The sun mounts an Arabian sky.
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h is kind of substitution cut (f l ame / sun) triggers poetic asso-ciations in the viewer’s
imagination, and the viewer’s imagination is greater, more powerful than anything we can hope
to directly put on screen.
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#substitution splice
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It seems to me there were three kinds of poetic juxtaposition, and each can trigger a different
contribution from the viewer:
1. Suggestion: The cut ignites aesthetic and lyrical possibilities. The viewer adds imagination
and subtext.
Two girls with blood on their hands and face are running and screaming along a bushy track >
cut > the same two girls are screaming with delight as they run towards their pa
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So we have suggestion, puzzle, and kinesis. Of course, all scene breaks are necessarily
juxtapositions, although in reality many carry minimal narrative freight: we’re in the park > cut >
now we’re at the wedding reception. The cut says we’ve changed locations. Or think of a
dialogue scene that very often will end up as a shot-reverse-shot sequence: he’s talking, now
she’s talking, now he’s talking again. The cut might be saying little more than “these guys are
talking to each other in the same room.”
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Clearly there’s sometimes more and sometimes less storytelling at the cut.
Now if we add this to the mix, then our diagram starts to look more like an XYZ graph, where
each kind of juxtaposition has a sliding scale of intensity:
Suggestion > Statement
Puzzle > Exposition
Kinesis > Stasis
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Anything that sits at the far end of the scale (statement, exposition, stasis) is going to be pretty
uninvolving.
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Of course, for most scenes in most films, much of the storytelling is not at the cut, but in the shot
itself — it’s right there in the dialogue, the action, the look, the mise-en-scene, and the
cinematography. Nevertheless, the cut is the key mechanism for prompting the viewers’
contribution to the story.
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#juxtaposition
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The poetry of suggestion is how silent films told their stories; they used symbol, gesture, action,
and the cut to trigger the imagination of the viewer. There were captions too, but for the most
part this really was the era of “show, don’t tell.” This spirit has never gone away.
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Top left is the Source Window — this is where you select material from your rushes.
Top right is the Program Window — this is where you preview your cut.
Lower third of the screen is devoted to the timeline — this is where you assemble your film. In
this timeline, you can see video (V1) and two audio channels (A1 and A2). There are two clips
here with a vertical cut in the middle.
More on this later. First, I want to talk about the editing interface and connect the screenplay
directly to the cut.
So the scene break we described in Lawrence of Arabia is what an editor calls a “straight cut”
(also called a hard or butt cut) — meaning the video and the audio cut together at the same
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moment.
We’re now going to look at another common cut — the split edit, and then discuss the
screenwriting equivalent.
The split edit (also called a “L” or “J” cut) is a staggered cut where the audio of the outgoing shot
continues under the visuals of the incoming shot (or the other way around)
It looks like this:
In this timeline, you can see the cut is now staggered, with audio continuing under the incoming
images.
It looks like this:
Split scene break
The screenwriting equivalence of a split edit we might term a “split scene break.” John Truby,
author of a seminal screenwriting manual called The Anatomy of Story, gives an example of this
editing shape being used as far back as 1931 in the screenplay for the Fritz Lang film M:
“In M, a child murderer buys a lit
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tle girl a balloon. In the next scene, a woman prepares dinner and then calls for her child, Elsie.
As she continues to call the little girl’s name, the visual track splits from the soundtrack, and the
audience sees an empty stairwell, a block of apartments, Elsie’s empty chair, and her plate and
spoon at the kitchen table while the ever more desperate cries of the mother calling ‘Elsie!’ are
heard. The visual line ends with the shot of a balloon that catches in some electrical wires and
then floats away. This contrast between the sound line and the visual line produces one of the
most heartbreaking moments in the history of film.” (The Anatomy of Story)
It looks like this:
INT. APARTMENT — DAY
The Mother leans over the communal stairwell and calls for her daughter.
She enters the apartment,
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[The picture cuts here but the audio continues …]INT/EXT. APARTMENT BLOCK, VARIOUS
LOCATIONS — DAY
A drying room — washing hanging under the rafters
MOTHER (V.O.)
Elsie!
Elsie’s empty chair, and her plate and spoon at the kitchen table.
MOTHER (V.O.)
Elsie!
A utility pole — Elsie’s balloon is snagged in the overhead wires.
MOTHER (V.O.)
Elsie!
It wasn’t the editor who discovered this juxtaposition between word and image in the cutting
room; it was written that way by Thea von Harbou. She was writing for the cut.
Used appropriately, this splitting technique can lift both the poetry and the forward motion of the
story.
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Here’s a more recent example. I was interviewing Richard Hughes about cutting a horror film
called It Never Sleeps, and he described a problem he was having. The scenes were written like
this:
INT. DELI — DAY
The slack hour, the café is almost empty. Joan and Rachel are chatting over a cup of coffee at a
corner table.
(Extract from much longer dialogue scene …)
RACHEL
How was it this time?
JOAN
It was … I don’t know — seems like all we do is talk — but I think it’s helping …
RACHEL
Got to keep at it, Joan — you still doing those breathing exercises?
JOAN
Yeah — it’s all good …
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“By using the dialogue (of the two women in conversation) as voiceover into the next scene, we
can introduce another level, a juxtaposition where what we’re seeing now contradicts what Joan
is saying. We’re seeing the hero sitting alone in her room looking stressed, staring at a glass of
water, and in voiceover, she’s cheerfully saying the therapy’s going well, she’s feeling good.
Now you open the whole thing up creatively in the sound world too. There’s a tension here, the
sequence is much more suggestive. And so the sound designers then took it to the next level.”
So after he performed a split edit, the script/sequence looked like this:
INT. DELI — DAY
The slack hour, the café is almost empty. Joan and Rachel are chatting over a cup of coffee at
a corner table.
Extract from much longer dialogue scene …)
RACHEL
How was it this time?
JOAN
It was … I don’t know —
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Subtext
When the cut delivers a suggestive kick such as this, the audience might add subtext. Subtext is
a very desirable thing in film storytelling. Director Mike Nichols (The Graduate) gives a neat
definition:
“I’ve always been impressed by the fact that upon entering a room full of people, you find them
saying one thing, doing another, and wishing they were doing a third … The words are
secondary and the secrets are primary. That’s what interests me most.” (New York Times)
Secrets, hidden desires, and true intentions can sometimes be expressed in more conventional
ways such as voiceover. This is legitimate, of course, particularly if the writing is sharp and
tangy like the “cool girl” monologue in Gone Girl. Exceptionally it might be expressed through
dialogue: In Amadeus, Salieri’s madness allows him the special privilege of soliloquizing his
own subtext. Famously, in the film Annie Hall, subtext appeared as subtitles alongside the
spoken word.
But juxtapositions — particularly reaction shots — are a far more com
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At one end of the scale, nonlinear shuffle means the shuffling of entire scenes to form new
“wrongly” ordered configurations. At the other end, it might be the “intercutting” of two different
scenes. Nonlinear shuffle was the term film editor-director Lisa Gunning used. She gives an
example from the film Nowhere Boy, the film about John Lennon’s early life growing up in
Liverpool:
“There is a scene of the mother and John listening to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins ‘I Put A Spell On
You’ and they’re listening together and the mother’s painted nails brush against
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John’s thigh. I made another montage there … I intercut this moment with a sex scene in the
forest with this young girl who also happens to have the same red nail varnish …”
Now the audience can’t help adding an Oedipal subtext. And where there was only a single
break between two scenes, with Lisa’s version there are several. This increases the number of
juxtapositions, creates new rhythms and patterns, and has the potential to ramp up the poetic /
subtextual power of a scene. This works a bit like parallel action (described later in the Kinesis
section) — but whereas parallel action intercuts scenes occurring at the same time, nonlinear-
shuffle intercuts scene fragments backwards and forwards in time in a way that may be
uncanny, illogical, but entirely like the dream dimension of cinema.
For some reason, sex scenes are particularly suited to this kind of shuffling. Maybe this points to
the difficulty of showing this most intimate act as a straight-in-your face scene. When a sex
scene shows up in a drama, we can sometimes feel uncomfortably like voyeurs. Or it can
sometimes seem mechanical — sex is too literally a pla
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the adjacent post-coital scene. By juxtaposing intense images of two people sexually united,
with images of the same couple, quietly and separately getting dressed for dinner, the sequence
seems to reveal something profound about the human condition.
In an interview some years later, Roeg said, “A lot of filmmaking can be linked to prestidigitation,
you know — a shuffling of the cards.” (film4productions.com)
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#shuffling
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about how to simulate in words the dynamics of the cut by reading haiku poetry. If you’re new to
haiku, Google some examples online; you’ll get the idea in no time. Now write some action lines
for your screenplay in the style of a haiku poem. Don’t get snagged on the form; you’re not
really writing haiku — you’re writing the beats of your story in a compressed form and looking to
create juxtapositions. Maybe we should call this a new kind of beat poetry.
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#juxtaposition
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Write two short scenes with the intention of creating a split scene break that suggests subtext.
Scene 1 must have dialogue, and Scene 2 must be image / sound / action only. Now write two
short scenes where the split works the other way around. Scene 1 is all image / sound / action,
and this time the dialogue from the second scene invades the first scene in voiceover.
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#subtext
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Just to remind ourselves what a Tang poem looks like, here’s the first four lines of a verse that
celebrates a great tidal bore that sweeps along the Qiantang River:
Thunder heard a hundred miles,
The song of the lute falls still.
Horsemen stream from the compound gate
And riverside watch for the tide.
The verse is a master class in economy: big visual / aural impact conveyed in the smallest
number of words (in the context of film editing, let’s just say Tang is doing something similar to
haiku — sorry to everyone in China and Japan). Each line is a fresh idea: thunder, lute,
horsemen, riverside.
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“The scenes are not connecting,” but this is precisely how the viewer is drawn to complete the
story.
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This chapter is about juxtapositions that create puzzle; and sometimes puzzle can be created
simply by removing information “things the audience didn’t need to know …”
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#economy
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When we start to design a new screen story, we may often write in a linear way, and we’re likely
to include a gre
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at deal of exposition. And at this pre-script stage, it’s probably essential — we’re mapping the
full journey of the story for ourselves. But later, when we’ve moved on to the treatment phase,
we’ll want to hide some of the map and allow the audience to find their own way.
So here’s a short example of what it looks like when we don’t hide the map.
INT. POLICE HQ: INCIDENT ROOM — DAY
Several Plainclothes are finishing a messy working lunch. Detective Plensky suddenly stands
and tosses a crime file on the table.
PLAINCLOTHES 1
(Sarcastic)
Hey — you got a lead?
PLENSKY
Heading over to the docks.
PLAINCLOTHES 2
How come?
PLENSKY
Those Tattoo Brothers are gonna make their move —
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just found a clue in the report — maybe you missed something? Drug boat’s coming in at three
— no hurry, boys, finish your pickle.
She heads swiftly to the door.
INT. POLICE HQ: LOBBY — DAY
Det. Plensky exits the lift, walks across the lobby, signs out at reception, and pushes through
the swing doors.
EXT. BUSY URBAN STREET — DAY
She strides across a busy sidewalk towards a waiting unmarked car. Opens the door. Gets in,
puts on the seat belt. Turns on the radio — pumping rock. She’s gone.
In this scene we’ve been told what she’s deduced, where she’s going, who is making a move,
and shown in near real time how she gets from the incident room to the car. This is what we
might call chauffeur-driven storytelling — the driver is taking care of the entire journey, so the
viewer can comfortably curl up in the back and fall as
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leep.
Now if you hide the map and go for Tang, it might look more like this:
INT. POLICE HQ: INCIDENT ROOM — DAY
Several Plainclothes are finishing a messy working lunch.
Det. Plensky suddenly stands.
All eyes on Plensky —
PLENSKY
It’s now.
She throws a crime file on the table.
INT. POLICE CAR — DAY
Det. Plensky is driving fast through the docklands.
PLENSKY
(on radio)
Tattoo brothers … the youngest has a history of violence … no hurry, boys — grab some
dessert.
In a single cut, the detective is in a speeding car, and the audience has to play catch-up to solve
where she’s heading, to whom she’s talking, and what she’s saying. There’s also a kine
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tic substitution, as the cut now falls between the flying file and the moving car.
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#exposition
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Of course, there will always be scenes where your characters have to spout backstory because
it’s simply not guessable, and the audience needs to know. And if this is the case then you need
to find cunning ways to deliver exposition and keep the viewer busy. You could try Blake
Snyder’s famous “Pope in the Pool” strategy described in Save the Cat! It goes like this: some
guys have come to Rome to let the Pope know about a plot to kill him. Oh, man, this is going to
be a really dull, talky scene. But no, the scene actually plays out in the Vatican where the Pope
is listening to the plot while doing laps in a pool. And so, as Blake puts it, the audience is
thinking, “‘I didn’t know the Vatican had a pool?! And look, the Pope’s not wearing his Pope
clothes, he’s … he’s … in his bathing suit!’ And before you can say, ‘Where’s my miter?’ the
scene’s over.”
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#exposition
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“Gaps in the story can be strangely effective. If the audience engages emotionally with the
character then the gaps are easy to fill. Filling in the gaps in a story is fun. Encouraging an
audience to do this creates a sense of additionality. Their imagination is far better than anything
that you can put on a screen.”(Interview with Lisa Gunning)
This can be a risky strategy of course; if the gap is well judged, the viewer will generate the
narrative electricity to arc the gap. If too wide, then there may be no spark, and the viewer is left
confused and heading for the exit.
In the early ’70s, Walter Murch was working on a five-hour cut of Coppola’s The Conversation,
trying to edit it down to a reasonable commercial length.
“— I would have the feeling that I couldn’t remove a certain scene, because it so clearly
expressed what we were after. But after hesitating, I’d cut it anyway … forced to because of the
length of the film. Then I’d have this paradoxical feeling that by taking away something I now
had even more of it. It was almost biblical in
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its idea of abundance. How can you take away something and wind up with more of it?” (The
Conversations)
Murch saw that some key scenes, ones that seemed to “shine” the theme of the film very
brightly, could cast into shadow those scenes where the theme was more subtly stated. He has
a good thumbnail for this: “You pay attention to the stars on nights when there is no moon.”
At the most extreme end of the gap strategy is “the missing reel.” For their grindhouse film
Planet Terror, directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino deliberately removed a reel
(that’s twenty minutes of screen time by the way) from the second act of the film, and replaced it
with a caption reading “missing reel.” When the story recommenced in the third act, audiences
had to intuit the missing plot based on the new coordinates.
David Mamet is also a fan of this strategy; he suggests the best way to improve any film is to
burn the first reel. Now if you burned the first reel, you’d have a story that started in the middle
of things. And that might be a brilliant place to start.
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#ellipsis
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of something and you have to find your way out of that. So I said to Anthony, ‘Could we just try
cutting out the first 35 scenes?’”
Minghella’s script had a really long set-up, so the editor entirely reconfigured the scenes in a
way that was for the cut, and began the story at the moment of significant action: the break-in.
But Lisa didn’t throw all those earlier scenes away, instead she sliced and diced and made an
opening montage.
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#in medias res
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Montage
In many parts of the world, “montage” simply means editing. In English-speaking countries, it
refers to a particular editing figure — often a short, rapidly cut sequence of images
accompanied by music. The purpose of a montage is usually to condense time, or to conjure up
an era, a place, a relationship, a community, or a backstory.
For many, seeing the word “montage” in a script is a kind of violation — it’s a production word —
so don’t use it ’less you lookin’ get yerself killed.
Manual maven Robert McKee has a different objection:
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“Like the Dream Sequence, the montage is an effort to make undramatized exposition less
boring by keeping the audience’s eye busy. With few exceptions, montages are a lazy attempt
to substitute decorative photography and editing for dramatization and are, therefore, to be
avoided.” (Story)
Clearly “keeping the audience’s eye busy” is a fairly vacuous substitution for dramatized
exposition. But this partly misses the point — the best montages appeal to the eye for sure, but
their primary purpose is to appeal to the emotions. And while the emotions are engaged, a
montage can smuggle in a slice of story by setting the viewer a puzzle. If this is done well, then
this is what Hitchcock would call “pure cinema.” Done badly, and you have a series of musical
postcards.
When you see a montage in a feature film, it may have been written that way. But just as likely
the editor created it to fix a problem. For example, a cluster of expositional scenes were slowing
the film down, so the editor suggests: “Let’s travel light and allow the audience to discover the
story.”
Lisa is cutting Nowhere Boy and —
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“— the way the story was written, there’s a long section about this guitar thing. He’d been given
a guitar by his Aunt Mimi and it was his favorite possession and he misses school and behaves
badly so Mimi confiscates his guitar and then there’s a process of him going to his biological
mother, borrowing the money from her and buying the guitar back and telling Mimi to fuck off.
And this is all about the triangular interplay between the three characters: John and his two
mothers. But in editing, when watched chronologically, it just went on and on. She’s angry and
that thread of the story just lent itself to montage, because then you see this happen and you
see that happen and he gets his guitar back. And using the music from the first Beatles concert
he plays in, using the guitar music from that concert as a sound-bed for those scenes, and
ending at the concert, seemed like a good solution. That’s around 15 pages of script condensed
into a montage that’s two minutes long.”
This is intelligent montage. At its best, montage can be the purest most poetic form of cinema —
it can “show” story by using a cinematic
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shorthand. When professional screenwriters write this kind of montage, they tend to break it
down into scenes, and each scene might contain an important beat. There would be puzzle and
poetry at the scene break. And there may be snatches of dialogue too. They rarely upset
anyone by actually writing the word “montage.”
Film director Karel Reisz calls this kind of construction “script-planned montage.”
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Script-planned montage
In his book Technique of Film Editing, Reisz describes a sequence in Citizen Kane that shows
the gradual and painful break-up of Kane and Susan’s marriage over time. This variety of
montage again deploys music, but uses an elliptical, patterned, and juxtapositional style of
construction. And it uses dialogue and synchronous sound. And that is exactly how it was
written in the script.
Here’s another example of a script-planned montage from a more recent film. Towards the end
of Slumdog Millionaire, our young hero-from-the-slums Amir has reached the finals of the quiz
show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Now fortune hangs on one final
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question:
INT. STUDIO. NIGHT
… the lights dim, the music rumbles. Prem (quiz show host) pushes the button on his
computer. Gets conversational.
PREM
Big reader, are you Amir? A lover of literature?
Amir just shrugs.
AMIR
I can read.
Nervous laughter from the audience.
PREM
Lucky! In Alexander Dumas’ book, The Three Musketeers, two of the musketeers are called
Athos and Porthos. What was the name of the third musketeer? Was it A) Aramis, B) Cardinal
Richelieu, C) D’Artagnan, D) Planchet.
An involuntary laugh comes out of Amir’s mouth.
INT. SCHOOL. DAY.
A flash of Mister Nandha the
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SALIM
(conversationally)
Athos.
Amir is suddenly alert. Slows
AMIR
Porthos?
Salim nods. Big smile. Puts his hand on Amir’s shoulder.
SALIM
When I say.
PUNNOOSE
(glancing back)
Come on.
INT. ROADSIDE SHACK. NIGHT
In the shack, sitting on an upturned oil drum, surrounded by puzzled Indians in rags, a slow
smile comes to Latika’s face.
EXT. STUDIO. BACKSTAGE. NIGHT.
The Inspector and Sergeant Srinivas get out of the police car and run to the backstage door.
The inspector opens it and stands, file in hand, watching Amir on stage through a gap in
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the set.
INT. STUDIO. NIGHT
Camera on Prem
PREM
The million-rupee question: and he’s smiling. I guess you know the answer.
AMIR
Would you believe it? I don’t.
This is montage: It mimics the agility of the mind under pressure to process a great many
thoughts very quickly. And it is also “dramatized exposition.” Simon Beaufoy is writing for the
cut.
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be.
The convention of titles at the start of a movie is interesting because it tends to fragment the
opening, and this in turn gestures towards a montage / overture approach. Here’s Lisa Gunning
again:
“Once you see ‘produced by’, ‘directed by’ that gives you license for fragmentation … I’d say the
title sequence was an opportunity at the script stage to really think about how you can use that
language of fragmentation … An awful lot of the time the script totally ignores the presence of
any titles. If you’re lucky it’ll say ‘credits’ and move on quickly. And that’s a wasted opportunity
… you could be showing very simple images in vignette form and then intercut with captions.
That gives you this sentence structure that’s very different, it’s like bullet points …”
At the London Screenwriters’ Festival in 2013, the film editor Chris Dickens gave a master class
at an event called “Your Script in the Cutting Room.” He showed the opening sequence of
Slumdog Millionaire as it was originally written and cut. He explained that at test
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screenings audiences found it raised false expectations about the film. Then he showed the
nonlinear recut version that now opens the film.
“Those scenes — overlapping dialogue, making it nonlinear, out of real time — was actually like
the structure of the film itself. Essentially it was preparing you for this experience … once you’ve
set that up and the audience is prepared for it, you can go anywhere.”
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2. Open your screenplay and cut the first 20 pages (or however many it takes before you get to
significant action). Now create an opening / title sequence using some of those scenes from the
first 20 pages. Do it quickly. Reconfigure. Do it again.
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Parallel Action
Kinesis is the force that animates all film genres, but as a viewer, we feel it most keenly in
suspense and action-thrillers. Parallel action is one of our favorite rides.
Parallel action is a pattern that writers have known about since we first started cutting film
(Eisenstein finds parallel action in the pre-cinema literature of Charles Dickens). The thrill of
parallel action derives from the rapid zigzag motion of the story. It usually plays out as a
sequence of crosscuts between scenes occurring simultaneously in different locations, which
often converge into one.
One of the earliest examples is the 1907 short film The Fatal Hour, written and directed by the
first “master of suspense,” D.W. Griffith. Here we see a masked fiend tie and gag a maid. In
front of her is a gun that is attached to a clock whose hand is set to pull the trigger at noon. This
scene of the helpless maid is crosscut with another showing the good guys apprehending the
villain, then galloping to the rescue in a horse-drawn carriage. Seconds before the fatal hour,
they jump
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through the window of the villain’s lair, untie the maid, and save her. The film finishes with a
bang.
We love this kind of ride, which is why over a century later we keep coming back for more.
Here’s a closer look at another example of parallel action — the famous baptism scene from
The Godfather. This sequence comes towards the end of the film: Michael Corleone has just
succeeded as mafia godfather and while attending a baptism his men are all over town rubbing
out the competition. The sequence runs to six pages and climaxes with:
CHURCH
The ceremony continues.
PRIEST’S VOICE
Michael Francis Rizzi, do you renounce Satan?
While the church music continues:
CUT TO:
HOTEL ELEVATOR
Revealing Stracci, a Don, and the elevator operator. The door opens and Clemenza fires two
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shots.
CUT TO:
CHURCH
MICHAEL CORLEONE
I do renounce him.
While the church music continues:
CUT TO:
MASSAGE ROOM
Gunman opens the door, Moe puts glasses on, gets shot in one eye.
CUT TO:
CHURCH
PRIEST’S VOICE
And all his works?
CUT TO:
HOTEL
Cicci ascending steps. Then follows Don Cuneo into a revolving door, locks it, then shoots
four times through the glass.
CUT TO:
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TO: CHURCHMICHAEL
I do renounce them.
CUT TO:
MOTEL ROOM
Rocco kicks open the door and he and another gunman fire. The girl screams, “Oh God! Oh
God!” as she and Tattaglia are riddled by bullets while in bed.
CUT TO:
CHURCH
PRIEST’S VOICE
And all his pomps?
MICHAEL
(nodding) I do renounce them.
CUT TO:
COURTHOUSE
Neri shoots Barzini’s bodyguard twice, and his chauffeur once, as Barzini turns to run. Neri
drops to one knee and carefully fires at Barzini, who topples after two shots. Neri gets picked
up.
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Although Peter Zinner must be credited for the editing, it was principally Coppola who both
wrote and directed this sequence. Notice how he does away with conventional scene headings,
uses the transition “Cut to,” spills the church music across the murder scenes, and the brutal
brevity of the action lines. This is parallel action, this is juxtaposition, this is great cinema.
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#parallel action
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When it comes to a fight scene the screenwriter might be expected to give just a short
descriptor like, “Seconds later, Hit Girl is all over them” (Kickass). But for many big-budget
action films, particularly those involving visual effects, writers might be expected to punch it out,
blow by blow. So here again, the writer must write for the cut:
BOURNE — the lightbulb — he’s tossing it across the room — over her head — into that
frosted window and —
As she ducks down —
As it SHATTERS —
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of an eyewitness ducking bullets. It looks chaotic, but close up it’s highly structured. Again, this
is parallel action, but now the writers entirely dispense with the clutter of scene breaks. The
cutting pattern is signaled in the line breaks, em dashes, and ellipses. Motion is suggested in
the breathless tumble of exclamatory, present tense action lines. A sense of sequence and
continuity is indicated by the repetition of “and” at the end of lines. And the focus of each “shot”
is capitalized or placed at the front of the line; and where there are two in the same shot, the
writers are happy to shuffle words out of order: “BOURNE — the lightbulb — he’s tossing it
across the room.” There’s even some sound design going on here — the phft-phft-phft of
automatic gunfire.
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#formatting
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We’re going to look in some detail at the opening sequence of City of God because it features
an Oscar-winning performance from a rooster, and because Bráulio Mantovani’s screenplay so
clearly shimmies to the music of the cut. Specifically it demonstrates: substitution splice,
suspense, parallel action, in medias res, and script-planned montage.
The film opens with a frightened ro
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oster. How do we know the rooster is frightened? David Mamet explains how this works by
reference to natural history documentaries:
“Documentaries take basically unrelated footage and juxtapose it in order to give the viewer the
idea the filmmaker wants to convey. They take footage of birds snapping a twig. They take
footage of a fawn raising his head. The two shots have nothing to do with each other. They are
not a record of what the protagonist did. They’re basically uninflected images. But they give the
viewer the idea of alertness to danger when they are juxtaposed. That’s good filmmaking.” (On
Directing Films)
Otherwise known as the Kuleshov Effect. Now let’s look at how Mantovani wrote the opening
sequence of City of God.
SECTION 1: SUSPENSE
A big KNIFE being sharpened.
Super: 1981
The murmur of HAPPY voices is heard, voices
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The HANDS of black women pluck the feathers of DEAD CHICKENS.The ROOSTER reacts.
He tries to escape but his leg is tethered.A black HAND beats a tambourine.The ROOSTER
seems to understand his end is near.A big KNIFE being sharpened.The ROOSTER is
desperate — it struggles —The film drops us into the middle of things; we’re in a sudden world
of fiesta, music, and food, and we’re see
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ing this world in fragments from the anxious point of view of a rooster. Our hero is tethered,
visibly frightened, and heading for the cooking pot.
This is what Mamet was talking about. On the day of the shoot, they tethered the rooster and
they filmed it doing what roosters do; the usual head jerking, pecking, scratching stuff. By
placing the camera at rooster-height, and using POV juxtapositions with images of knives,
cooking pots, and dead chickens, the rooster’s plight is anthropomorphized; the viewer believes
the rooster really understands its own peril and is showing signs of mounting anxiety. “I’m very
scared — how do I get out of here — I’m going to die!” Mamet might call this “uninflected
acting,” allowing the cut to signal the meaning, the emotion, and subtext. Think Ryan Gosling.
So the hero has been tied up, and is made to watch his comrades die a ghastly death knowing
that he too will go the same way: this is a classic suspense sequence. Every line of the script
signals a cut, and every cut ratchets up the suspense: the tether, the knife, the cooking pot, the
vegetables, the knife again, the slaughter of chickens. This rhythmic cutting pattern —
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rooster-watching > POV of impending doom > rooster-reacting — is the “ticking” of the clock.
Mantovani even gives us a signature “jump” moment with the beating of a tambourine.
And this rooster-world is presented as a puzzle; the usual orientation descriptors of who and
where are deliberately withheld — “we can’t see the people” — they are initially only revealed
through close-ups of their busy hands. We’re given a wealth of sound cues: samba music, the
murmur of happy voices, the rasping of knife on stone, chopping and peeling.
SECTION 2: THE CHASE — PARALLEL ACTION — AND WELCOME TO THE CITY OF GOD
The ROOSTER is desperate — it struggles —— and escapes.ALMEIDINHA, the guy holding
the knife, sees
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EXT. NEARBY STREET — DAY ROCKET, the narrator of the story, holds a professional stills
camera in his hand. He’s black and maybe 18 years old. Next to him is his friend STRINGY.
They walk down the street together.
STRINGY
Hey Rocket, do you really think they’ll give you the job at the paper if you take that photo?
ROCKET
I have to risk it.
STRINGY
Bro, you’d risk your life just for a photo? Forget it!
PARALLEL ACTION
We interweave the conversation between Stringy and Rocket with images of the bandits
chasing the ROOSTER down the alleys of the City of God.
With the rooster’s escape, suspense is over, and the chase begins. Now the information
withheld in the first secti
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on is revealed — we’re no longer in the world of the rooster, we’re in the world of men.
Mantovani gives brief orientation descriptors about the location, the people, and the party. This
section is clearly more about setup than the cut. Though these descriptors run to over 70 words,
in fact there is no break in the action — the rooster has escaped, the shout goes up, and the
gang rush after it.
There is a scene break, we cut to a nearby street, and we’re suddenly in the company of two
young men in the middle of a casual conversation. In a blink, we’ve jumped from a noisy, wild
chase to a quiet, ambling scene: two friends talking, and the first real dialogue of the film. And
the audience is playing catch-up. Who are these guys? Are they talking about photography? Did
he just say, “Risk your life for a photo”? This abrupt juxtaposition (mob rush, shouting / couple,
ambling dialogue) has an intentionally jolting effect on the viewer.
And then with the words “parallel action” Mantovani makes it clear this jolt is not a one-off but is
the beginning of the fairground ride he’s building.
For the sake of brevity I have omitted
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several more “catch that rooster” scenes that are exciting in themselves but also cunningly
serve to introduce us to the favela (“simple houses, very poor streets”) and the locals (“most of
the residents are black, poor, and scared”). These for-the-cut scenes are a familiar movie
device; they recall the chase scene near the beginning of Slumdog Millionaire where the two
kids Salim and Amir are chased by a cop through the slums of Juhu — again serving as a
“welcome to the world of the slums.” In City of God, they are interwoven with further dialogue
scenes with Rocket and Stringy where they’re still discussing taking a photo of a dangerous
gangster.
SECTION 3: PARALLEL ACTION, A NEW SUSPENSE SEQUENCE — THE STAKES ARE
RAISED
As L’il Zé rounds a corner, he bumps into a PAN SELLER and falls on top of the pans.
He gives a loud, high-pitched laugh, gets up, and violently BEATS the PAN SELLER.
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the back of his shorts. It looks like he’s going to kill the poor guy. Instead, he points it in the air
and shouts:
L’IL ZÉ
Drill that rooster!
Immediately all the bandits get their guns out and run after the ROOSTER who’s now at the far
end of the street.STREET — ROCKET AND STRINGY
STRINGY
Fuck this — let it go. If you find the guy, he’ll kill you.
ROCKET
Stringy — the last thing I want is to come face to face with that hood.
Here’s an obvious difference between reading the script and watching the film: the reader has
been told about
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L’il Zé, and we’ve seen the word “gang” and “bandit” several times. But a viewer watching the
film at the cinema can know very little of this, and so far the chase has just looked like high-
spirited fun. Mantovani now sets a bomb ticking in three quick moves; L’il Zé bumps into a pan
seller and beats him (aw — bit harsh); he then takes out a gun and it looks like he’s going to
shoot the guy (woah!). And then he shouts to the mob, “Drill the rooster,” and in a blink the
whole mob are toting guns (wtf!). From here, this parallel action sequence takes on the
trappings of a second suspense sequence. When we cut back to Rocket, Stringy, and their
“innocent conversation,” we feel the electricity of doom bearing down on them. In fact their
conversation is innocent in both the Hitchcockian sense of, “Get out of there. You don’t know
the danger you’re in!” and ironic in that L’il Zé is the very gangster Rocket and Stringy have
been talking about.
SECTION 4: THE BOMB IS STILL TICKING, AND THEN A SECOND BOMB SHOWS UP
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At that moment, the two parallel actions meet — the ROOSTER goes around the corner.Behind
it appear L’il Zé and his gang.Stringy opens his eyes wide. Rocket lifts his camera but stops
halfway. He’s paralyzed — L’il Zé points the gun at Rocket and shouts:
L’IL ZÉ
Grab the rooster!
Rocket crouches down like a goalie. Awkwardly he tries to grab the ROOSTER, but it runs
between his legs.
A WOMAN walking with her pram sees the scene and quickly moves away.
L’il Zé walks forward. Rocket looks scared. Stringy is paralyzed.
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L’il Zé suddenly stops. All the bandits point their guns to someone behind Rocket.Rocket looks
behind him and sees a PATROL of 6 policemen. In front of the patrol is Detective Cabeçao —
northern and evil looking.Rocket is still in the same pose of clumsy goalie. The picture freezes.
ROCKET (V.O.)
In the City of God, you can’t know what’s worse: dealing with the bandits or the police. If you run
away, they get you. If you stay, they get you too. It’s been that way ever since I was a kid …
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to Rocket by a guy pointing a gun, you know it’s not an invitation to come and play. Rocket
crouches in the pose of a goalie, but the rooster runs through his legs.
Then that coil of suspense gets three more twists: L’il Zé moves forward, Rocket looks scared,
and Stringy is paralyzed. And then a puzzle: L’il Zé stops in his tracks, and the mob seem to
have refocused on another target.
We turn with Rocket to discover the cops lined up at the opposite end of the street. The action
lines here suggest a wide shot of the police squad, to mid-shot of an individual, finishing on a
close-up of the detective’s face. The police have arrived, but we can tell this is definitely not a
yay-it’s-the-cavalry! moment: the symmetry in the lineup of L’il Zé’s gang and the police
intentionally equates the two. The clumsy goalie is trapped in the middle of a double doom. And
just as this second bomb starts ticking, all goes silent: Mantovani uses a postproduction device:
a freeze-frame. Now this victim-in-the-middle image becomes a kind of emblem, a pause to
allow us to listen to Rocket’s thoughts in voiceover. And as Rocket refers back to his childhood,
so in a blink we’re tran
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sported back to a football pitch in the ’60s. Adult goalie > cut > child goalie: a substitution splice.
In these first three pages, the images, sounds, and cutting pattern of the movie jump off the
page. Mantovani has written a for-the-cut overture that clearly states the style, structure, and
mood of the entire film. It also metaphorically and literally states the theme of the film: “You’re
dead if you run away, you’re dead if you stay.”
This is a bravura piece of writing and filmmaking. It may seem that many of the examples I’ve
given so far are all similarly show-boat-y. And it’s true to say writing for the cut shouts loudest at
these moments; but be in no doubt, this is the animating force of the entire screenplay.
Exercises
On YouTube, find the opening sequence of Don’t Look Now (up to the scream).
Now, write that sequence as a kind of “beat poem” (the story beats of the sequence).
For example, this is my beat poem for City of God — I’m trying to capture the rhythm and
pattern of what I’m seeing:
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Black
Knife rasps across a whetstone
Black
The rooster is watching
Knife rasps across a whetstone
Festive music, someone shaking maracas
Black
Hands peeling carrots, feet dancing
Knife rasps across a whetstone
The rooster is tethered — no escape
Knife slits chicken’s throat
The rooster is frightened
Fire lit under a huge cooking pot
Chicken plucked and butchered
Feathers fall — the rooster knows he’s next
A hand swipes across a guitar, beer flows
The rooster so anxious
Chicken pieces thrown in the cooking pot
The rooster strains at his tether.
Once you’ve written the beat poem, see to what degree you can now write the opening scenes
of Don’t Look Now using the conventional screenplay format without losing any of the
suggestive, puzzle, kinetic qualities of your poem.
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#example
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Writing for the cut means writing in images and sounds with editing in mind. It aligns the
screenplay with the way movies are actually made, captu
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ring the dance of the edit in the writing. We have identified a number of for-the-cut strategies
screenwriters can use. However, what we’re describing is probably more a sensibility than a
method.
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This juxtapositional way of writing both animates and “tells” the story. It obliges the viewer to
make sense of the cut and, in so doing, contribute to the unfolding of the story. In this way, the
film does not explain the story, but rather we “discover” it for ourselves.
Juxtapositions prompt the viewer to contribute to the story in different ways. This juxtapositional
effect can be thought of as axes:
Suggestion > Statement
Puzzle > Exposition
Kinesis > Stasis
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From this, I’ve shaken out a number of cut strategies for screenwriters: substitution splice, split
scene break, nonlinear shuffle, ellipsis, in medias res, script-planned montage, opening / title
sequence, action, parallel action, suspense, and dialogue.
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#writing for the cut
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