Cinema is built on sequences, not scenes

The basic unit of cinema is sequences built of shots, sounds, and behaviour, not scenes.

For good practical reasons, theatre, and some television, is structured in scenes of people talking to each other. Most cinema isn’t.

Writing that starts with dialogue becomes too overtly meaningful.

Unlike theatre and television, where dialogue carries both text and subtext, dialogue in cinema is often simply functional, supporting the action or pulling against the action.

But when the development process starts with writing the dialogue, and early drafts are subject to review, the writer gets pushed towards putting all the meaning into the dialogue.

Too much dialogue undercuts the core principle of cinema: ‘Don’t explain, reveal.’

In the hierarchy of audience information, realisation is the highest level. The audience learns more and engages with the story more deeply by figuring out for themselves what’s happening, rather than having it explained to them. Dialogue can trigger realisation, but if you start your writing process with the dialogue, it often replaces realisation with exposition.

Dialogue wants to solve all your script problems. But it’s bad at it.

It’s like the kid at the front of the class with their hand up saying ‘Me, me, me…’ to every question. It’s a quick fix. But a problem solved with dialogue isn’t solved at all. A script problem solved with dialogue is just a script problem with a band-aid over it.

Don’t make ‘Radio with pictures.’

Most sitcoms are radio with pictures, and could work equally well on radio. In the BBC English tradition, they were often piloted and developed on radio.

Dialogue-heavy scene-based scripts are cheaper to shoot, and perfect for quick turnaround television. A perfectly valid form, with its own strengths and weaknesses, and with a perfectly valid audience.

But it’s not cinema.

It gives the producer the wrong kind of power.

The standard development model, in which the writer writes to the producer, who then hands it over to the director, is creatively bereft.

It collapses critical distance at exactly the wrong time.  Development works best when the producer remains an external interrogator, not an embedded problem-solver.

They already have the power of the purse, which gives them all the power they need to ensure quality and marketability, and to have their voice heard when it needs hearing.

Until then producers should free up the writer and director to find creative solutions.  They would get more interesting movies from asking challenging questions and letting the writer and director come back with solutions, than by placing themselves as a gatekeeper between them.

The standard script format gives information in the wrong order.

A key skill of storytelling is giving the audience only the information they need right now.

Standard script formatting often pre-empts this, misleading the reader, and potentially muddying the journey from script to screen. But if the director and writer have worked together on an extended treatment before the script is written, there is more chance the information will be revealed in the most engaging way.

Standard script format makes it easy to budget and schedule a film. It’s not designed for creative writing and often undermines creative writing.

A Better Development Model

A better model, common in many other cultures, is for writer and director to work together to tell the story cinematically in an extended treatment, structured in sequences not scenes, and with minimal dialogue.

Only then, once this extended treatment is ready to go to market, does the writer add the remaining necessary dialogue during the process of converting the story into standard script format.