Congratulations You've Accidentally Written a Radio Play

If everything the audience needs to understand about your film is carried in the dialogue you might as well shoot your film with the lens cap on because you haven’t written a screenplay, you’ve written a radio play.

I’m sure you’ve watched films where the dialogue is laughable. Characters tell other characters important information about the story or other characters, they signpost what is likely to happen, or re-cap previous events.

It feels artificial, we can sense the presence of the writer and in that moment the suspension of disbelief -the essential magic that enables great narrative fiction films to defy the laws of gravity- is lost and the film plunges earthward to its insipid doom. Yes, we're talking about overly expositional dialogue... we've all been there haven't we?

This isn’t to decry the radio play, I’m a man of a certain age, I listen to Radio 4. It’s more a question of knowing the medium you’re working in and enabling your reader and future audience to actively engage in your screenplay rather than being passively spoon fed the entire story in dialogue.

There is no point in filming moving images if they don’t advance the audiences understanding of character, the story or the theme. A good film is a dance between what we see and what we hear. Showing your audience an event or action requires them to think and feel their way through your screenplay, to question and interpret what they're being shown whereas if they are simply told something in dialogue you’ve created very little space for their active engagement, and the consequence? Your screenplay and subsequently your film will be made up of scenes that are boring and forgettable.

So how can we ensure our dialogue is not doing too much of the heavy-lifting?

Try reading a scene to someone. Remove the scene headings and all action and description lines. Ask them what they understood about the scene. If they understand the entirety of the scene from the dialogue alone, you have work to do.

Search for cinematic devices or actions that suggest intended meaning. What can be pushed into the subtext? What can be left unsaid at this point?

As a screenwriter ambiguity can be your friend, but confusion rarely is. Know what the intended meaning is and then decide how and when that meaning needs to be revealed.