Hello!
My screenplay takes place in two different English speaking countries. Each country has it's own slang and colloquisms. The dialogue hints at this - for specificity/realism and for humor.
Some of the characters start out in one country but move to the other country for the duration of the screenplay.
In the character descriptions for the "two-country" characters, should I mention the character's nationality?
If so, should I mention the nationality of all the characters, for the sake of consistency?
Thanks -
One generally wants to place any screenplay in a particular time and a particular place. Once you've done that, the reader will tend to presume, unless you indicate otherwise, that all of the people are of that time and place and will speak accordingly.
So once you identify a story as taking place in the hills of Kentucky, you'd tend to write the dialogue of the various characters in a way consistent with people who live there (obviously, you want to get carried away with writing accents but you get the idea).
But if somebody comes from somewhere else, whether it's another country or another part of this country, then you'd certainly want to indicate as such -- because you've pretty much already identified, simply by indicating the place, the "base line" of how people ought to be talking.
It would be the same thing in your story. If you start off in New York with someone who comes from New York, everyone is going to assume that he speaks like an American who comes from New York -- obviously, there'd be more to it, because you'd have to tell us more about him -- his background, what part of New York -- to give us a sense of him.
But when you know where someone comes from, geographically and socially, you're going to have a sense of how he speaks.
Now, if he gets on a plane and flies to the Outback, and meets up with somebody whose grown up in the Outback, we also pretty much know how he's going to speak. We also know how everybody else in the Outback is going to speak.
And likewise, if somebody from the Outback shows up at his doorstep, we're also going to have a pretty good idea of how he's going to speak -- but you can't simply trust to the phrasing of the dialogue to get this across.
You'd better let us know that this guy is speaking with an Aussie accent. That's not cheating, because were it actual movie and our New Yorker opened the door on a perfect stranger and he started to talk and he had an Aussie accent, it would be perfectly obvious to him and to the audience that he did as soon as he started talking.
Not necessarily as obvious to someone reading the dialogue on the page. Those kinds of subtleties of language, while they can be expressed through slang, etc., also come out in the way that every word we say is pronounced, and you simply can't write dialogue that way.
So when do you identify who's talking with an accent?
When it's a new, previously unidentified character, and when that character is a "fish out of water."
If I go to the Outback, the presumption is that everybody there is going to have an Aussie accent. If I'm in New York and a stranger shows up at my door, the presumption would be that the stranger is a New Yorker -- unless you tell us different.
NMS
