Logo

What goes into writing a great movie script?

Last Updated: 28.06.2025 06:22

What goes into writing a great movie script?

The DSM 5 is a wonderful character compendium.

Audiences are smarter than you think. Something about turning down the house lights makes their IQs go up.

Outline everything. Use story beats. Keep character’s mouths taped up, until they absolutely MUST speak. Write the script and the dialogue at the last minute, after you’ve revised the hell out of the outline.

Record-breaking cosmic structure discovered in colossal galaxy cluster - Phys.org

Use status to help drive conflict. King Lear/fool. Upstairs/downstairs.

Get up there yourself. Be in a movie. Take some acting (not writing) classes. Learn how a trained actor approaches a text. Learn why actors take roles. They do as much if not more than the writer does.

Learn to tell a story orally and not through writing. Try telling your story to a friend.

Warming climate may flip the script on the amount of CO₂ released by trees, study finds - Phys.org

Leave holes. Write and unwrite. Put it in, take it out.

Maintain a slush pile/idea file. When you are ready to write, choose the best seeds to plant.

A scene should change valence from beginning to end. Up to down, down to up.

Its year 2041, and president Hunter Biden has ordered every republican who sweared at him to be arrested and shot. I am on my way to the death row listening to the cheer of the Liberal mob chanting death death death. How can I escape?

Your primary job is to create situations. Modern actors will fuck up your dialogue, despite whatever your contract says.

Cut everything that is not a payoff, or a setup for a specific payoff. “Omit needless words.” Think about the sparseness of joke telling, or Grimm Brothers.

All rules are made to be broken, but you damn well better know WHY you’re breaking them.

Do you have any opinion on Japanese writer/actor Yukio Mishima?

Research the facts and then throw away the research.

Actors give better feedback than writers do.

To develop a unique voice for each character, try interviewing your characters.

Can machine learning and AI make programmers obsolete? Can AI make software coding and debugging a thing of the past?

Write in reverse time. Major characters need to change polarity; minor characters may remain the same at the end.

Primary characters must change polarities. Secondary characters can change less.

Make sure to pack enough explosives into the rocket.

Should I believe JD Vance's claim that Tim Walz lied about needing medical intervention to get pregnant?

Only God gets it right the first time. Rewrite everything.

Don’t direct from the page. Everyone, from the director on down, wants to be part of the process of making movies. Let them do their work.

Conflict is your power source; without it you have no drama and hence no script.

Has your wife or girlfriend ever been felt up in public by a stranger?

What you leave unwritten is as important as what you write. SUBTEXT.

A critical function of storytelling is wish fulfillment. This is why video games are so popular. “That protagonist is JUST LIKE ME.”

People choose what to see based on the high concept. Make sure to deliver an ending consistent with the high concept -- it is what the audience paid for.

ESPN’s Jay Bilas predicts NIL settlement will end transfers: ‘Players aren’t going to go anywhere’ - NJ.com