How To Write A Screenplay…came about at the end of a three hour murder mystery.
It was about a nanny who had murdered two children in her care, and had eventually been tracked down and brought to book. She had lied and deceived, and wept, and seduced, and distorted, and it seemed like she was innocent, or that she was going to get away with it over and over again.
In the end she had been found guilty, and sentenced to umpteen years in prison for the murder of the two young children in her care.
Myself as writer, the script editor, the producer, the researcher, the Exec Producer, the guy in accounts, the courier who had dropped in and out of the office, we’d all been discussing how the script should end for months. We could not get it right.
We knew the girl was going to be in prison, but we just couldn’t get to the thought at the very end of the show, the idea the audience were going to take away with them.
We had tried what seemed like a million different endings: she denied it to her cell mate and protested her innocence to the last, she laughed about the murders, admitted her guilt finally, she wept for her own lost chances now she was inside, she’d been chirpy and happy and psychotically untouched by the whole thing.
All of those were fine for different reasons – and none of them really did it.
By which I mean none of those endings really gave the audience one last kick, one last injection of the Wow factor.
We widened our scope. We tried different images. For a while we ended on the families who had suffered the loss. We even tried going out by lingering on the tombstone of the murdered baby.
Nah. All cosy, predictable. Functional, of course, but unsurprising.
In the end it was the director, Tristram Powell, who gave us the thing, very close to him actually beginning the shoot.
He suggested a single line of dialogue that, when I heard it, made me shiver.
He wanted the murdering nanny to turn to her cell mate, and say words to the effect of:
‘When I have my babies I’m going to look after them properly.’
To my mind that is a simply STUNNING line.
As with all great lines of dialogue it’s to do with the pure compression of the huge thought behind it.
In this one sentence, at the last possible minute of the script, Tristram had opened a door through to a deep, dark evil at the heart of the nanny that none of us had ever suspected before.
First of all, the line paid off in a flash the debate that had run through the script about whether mothers should work and hire a nanny, or stay at home to look after their children. It showed that this murderer blamed the mothers of the dead children for hiring a nanny in the first place. It showed a MONSTROUS denial from her about what she had done, a total lack of repentance, which I still find utterly chilling.
And in the second place, well, the nanny was young.
Of COURSE she was going to get out of prison at some point.
And OF COURSE she was going to have her own children.
And those children were going to love her, and she would be able to love them, which is more than the mothers in the story would ever be able to do because of her. This on its own seemed monstrously unfair.
But of course there is the suggestion, you can’t get away from it, that even, maybe, at some point, her psychosis was going to surface again, and she was going to murder more children – her own children – too.
So while she faced 15 years or more in prison, all closure was just blown apart, and the script ended with what felt to me like the detonation of a bomb.
Like I said, the best line of dialogue I never wrote.
[...] word count and Phil Gladwin posted an awesome example on the Screenwriting Goldmine in his post, THE BEST DIALOGUE I NEVER WROTE . . . We really hope you check it out. It is so effective, it will give you [...]
Dialogue is something that I have constantly beat myself up on. Trying to make sure that my chracters are speaking correctly and in the correct timeline they are in. Currently my story is set in British/London era of years between 1500-1700 A.D. I’m not british or have an english accent, but from most of the movies I watch with sets of this time is a good learning tool for Dialogue. My co-writer wrote a dialogue that was too 21st century and I have to re-write the dialogue to fit the timeline. This is a hard task, however, we have come up with some outstanding lines…some that may be memorable.
Hey Phil,
Maybe this is something you can go over…Dialogue and Timelines….making the speech correct for the century or time the story is in. (western,english accents, chinese, forklord, american traditional language, ect) This would be great information!
What do you THINK?
Thanks for that outstanding link, Purple Hearts – I’m honoured!
And that’s a good idea for a future article Storyditto, but I’d have to give it a lot of thought. Casting my mind back I don’t think I’ve ever written a period story. I’m not convinced I wouldn’t struggle to get the voice.
I would set off to be as minimal as possible – on the basis that the simpler the English was the less likely it would be stand out as being dodgy. (Not a hugely positive approach, but a start!)
After that, well, I guess I’d spend a lot of time reading books from the period and seeing what soaked in. There would be a balancing act after that – old literary patterns of speech can make terrible dialogue.
(Humm. The other approach would be to be meta textual about it – deliberately using modern slang because that’s effectively how the characters would hear each other’s speech. Can be truly terrible if you dont get it right.)
Interesting question – glad I don’t have to solve it right now!
very nice work phil.
solid advice.
and from experience i can tell you writing in period language, some of it translated to english, is a bear.
that means difficult;
in idiomatic american english.
you’ve illustrated again what mark twain said about wordsmithing: “the difference between a word and the right word is like the difference between a lightning bug, and lightning”.
thanks phil.
m.
Excellent dialogue indeed to end the script…it shows the power of dialogue to give depth to a story and characters in it. It reveals a lot and give viewers many choices to make their own inferences about the character.
It is a revelation to me that so much discussion goes to find the right way to end the script…I have always been thinking the script writing with dialogue is basically a solo exercise and many re-writings finally brings the best solutions to reveal the essence of your story and your vision.
Phil, I do visit the blog but was really very busy for the last three months..problem related with shifting of residence and related issues…and was keeping myself to just very essential in the net..and now I am back to catch up with lost time…
M. Night Shyamalan makes a living off of finding those ending lines/moments. I love it when I see a film and the climax happens and you think “wow…that was good” and then suddenly Carrie’s hand pokes up out of the dirt and grabs the other girl – scares the shite out of you – but my point is that sudden “left turn” at the end can be the difference between walking out feeling that you’re “done” or walking out feeling like the story still lives and breathes. Think about it – unless the character dies at the end, time still marches on for them – they still have a future – like Phil said, the girl’s going to get out of prison in 15 odd years and THEN what? I love it.
jw
Reading that made me feel a little bit sick. That’s the kind of dialogue that stops you in your tracks. I WISH I could write like that!!!