Watch older movies and they tend to be slower and often close with a whimper instead of a bang. Then you watch newer, good movies and notice how they end with a huge bang at the end that’s bigger than anything that came before it. In the original “La Femme Nikita,” the hero faces her […]
Here’s how most people write a screenplay. They come up with an interesting idea and start writing. Then they run out of gas less than halfway through and have no idea how to finish it. The end result is an uncompleted screenplay. If they do manage to finish it, the end result is a mediocre […]
In the beginning of your story, your hero is in a dead end life. The more awful you make this early introduction to your hero’s life, the more the audience will understand the motivation of the hero to change. Within the first segment of your story (the first 15 minutes), you need to introduce the […]
The biggest mistake novices make with dialogue is that they use dialogue to provide information to the audience. Don’t do that. Instead, make the audience work for that information by watching the action on the screen. In “Django: Unchained,” there’s a scene where the villain has just cheated the hero and his mentor out of […]
The most popular (and expensive) screenwriting program around is “Final Draft” ($249) along with its most popular rival “Movie Magic Screenwriter” ($249). However, don’t think you absolutely need either program when you’re first starting out. Paying for the screenwriting programs used by professionals is like learning golf by buying the expensive golf clubs the professionals […]
William Goldman has written some of the best movies in the past few decades that you can learn much about screenwriting structure by reading some of his screenplays for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Marathon Man,” “The Princess Bride,” and “Misery.” “Misery” is particularly interesting because the story is basically about one crazy woman […]
Take a two hour movie (120 minutes) and break it into eight 15-minute segments where each 15-minute segment tells an interesting story. If you study the first 15 minutes of any good movie, you can see how it tells a mini-story that movies the story forward. In “Ex Machina,” a man discovers he’s the winner […]
One of the biggest problems with most novice screenplays is that the screenwriter buys an expensive screenwriting program like Final Draft or Movie Magic and starts typing away. Buying and using a screenwriting word processor won’t make a decent screenplay any more than buying an expensive bottle of wine will make you knowledgeable about liquor. […]
One fallacy about writing is that you need to come up with an original plot. That’s basically impossible because humanity has been around for so long that nearly every type of story has been told already. Don’t waste your time trying to be creative with a plot. Spend your time trying to be creative with […]
Before you write a single word of dialogue, focus on telling a story through actions alone. Visual actions make far more of an impact on an audience than any amount of dialogue could ever do. In “Age of Ultron,” one of the biggest visual moments occurs when all the superheroes are jokingly trying to lift […]