Can a screenplay be heavy on dialogue? I come from a live theatre back ground where most of the story depends on what the actors are saying. I'm working on my first screenplay right now and I've noticed that it has a lot of dialogue. Is this a bad thing? When I watch movies I see that there isn't a lot of speaking, but the older movies had a lot more. I was just wondering about this. Should I try to add more discribtion and tell more though action? I tend to like people talking to each other but I'm not sure how it would look on screen.
As a rule, there is a much heavier reliance on dialogue on stage for conveying the full range of story information than you generally need when you are creating a comparable scene on screen.
Much of that is simply due to the fundamental difference in the way that a stage presentation delivers information to an audience as opposed to a movie.
Say, for instance, you have a scene with four people sitting around a table playing poker and the back and forth of the fortunes of the game are critical to the scene.
On stage, you're have certain fundamental problems with how you can construct and present such a scene. First, you can't place people naturally around a table. You have to turn two of them out so that the audience can see them. Second, nobody in the audience can see the cards in any natural way, so you have to find a way to try to convey that information, if it's necessary in some sort of way either implied through dialogue, or through asides, or through voice over.
But at any rate, what you're going to end up with is a scene that, while it may be dramatically interesting, is going to necessarily be very different from the way in which you would approach the same scene if you were to shoot it on screen, where you could show what cards people were holding, show how much money people were putting in the pot -- and because you could show it, you have a much greater flexibility about what your characters may say, or choose not to say.
That is, on stage, you're bound to use the dialogue to convey that story information -- what the cards are, what the bets are, because the audience can't get that information any other way. On screen, we're seeing the bets and the cards, so that frees you up to let your characters be silent, if that's your choice, or to talk about other things -- so that the dialogue can play "against" what's happening, instead of being bound to describe what's happening.
But in any case, because you have the freedom of being in close, of showing detail, of showing expression, of showing "action" you will find that you simply don't need to have characters say as much as you do when they're on stage.
Someone mentioned Tarantino and his dialogue but what is often instructive about Tarantino's use of dialogue is that the substance of the scene is often not what's being said in his dialogue. That is, his characters are often talking about something - maybe something funny, or odd, or about something that's going to come up later on in the movie -- but the scene is actually about something quite different and it's about the contrast between the two that makes the scene interesting.
And that is the freedom that the screen gives us -- to allow us to *show* the action as it unfolds, freeing the dialogue to act as counterpoint, instead of the dialogue always bearing the full burden of moving the story forward.
NMS
