dialogue methods/ overcoming tension between 2 extremes?

Perhaps I don't grasp this idea, but I don't see how you can 'own' your story if you're letting a bunch of unschooled actors write the dialog for you.

So I can understand the 'actor's studio' sorta play where it's different every time, but I don't know if you could sell tickets to that.

The story will change, perhaps greatly, from one performance to the next. Heck, it's gonna change drastically from one scene to the next, and may make no sense at all, plot wise.

It's our job to write the dialog. We set the scenes. We describe the settings. The actors bring life and nuance to the dialog, the director brings the scenes to life, and the CG and prop dept make the settings out of nothing, or Styrofoam and paint.

Sounds fine for a coffee house, but I don't see a script getting sold like this.

If not actual dialogue, then maybe offer general conversation guidelines for the actors? e.g. and just for fun's sake,

Guido complains for 2 minutes about his shoe letting in water, but he's really talking about his father's disappointment in his decision to marry Maria.

-Derek

If you're not sure about the dialogue, and you're OK with actors performing an improv within the boundaries you establish, just write in direction about how you would like the scene to be. As for neo-realism, you're talking about Rossellini and what he did was miraculous and unique to his time and place. (Also, I'm certain he wrote all the dialogue.) Try staging a improv film in today's star-obsessed culture.
Unless you can corral performers who can think like storytellers while performing a scene on the fly. Personally, directing terrifies me and doing something as bold as what you're suggesting? I salute you.

Take a look at a movie called "Smoke" with Harvey Keittel and.... I forget who else was in that. I think Madonna put in a quick character appearance as a singing cigarette messenger girl. That movie was done in the fashion you are speaking of. There was also a sequel for it, but I can't remember the name of it off hand.

If you're going to do this, my advice is not to use untutored actors. Use actors that are schooled in the Sanfred Meisner techniquue that is taught at the Neighbourhood Playhouse, moment by moment repetition games and improv.

You must still know and control your story scene by scene. The best way to work this is to have a very clear idea of what the core of each scene is about and how it fits into the whole. With the actors, give each of them a task that involves something that they want to gain from the other actor. That means you must understand and know whata their needs are in relation to what the core of the scenes are truly about. Give teh actors thier tasks or what it is they are trying to achieve fromm the other actor and then let them work.

Contrary to the idealism of thinking that if you work with inexperienced or niave actors you will get something more genuine, more often than not you get a bunch of nothing.

ATP said:

A script idea has been gestating for quite sometime now. Relatively recently, I encountered the Italian Neorealism ‘school’ and I believe that this ‘style’ would be far more suitable for my piece.

To a certain extent, the Neorealism ‘school’ parallels the ‘Cinema Verite’ school (though one is film and the other documentary) in that there seems to be less reliance on scripted dialogue--certainly in use of naïve or totally inexperienced actors--and unscripted dialogue from these.

If all went according to plan, I would be using naïve actors who would partake in the already-decided set up or story framework.

However, my idea does call for dialogue, and I am particularly sure that I would not like to work without a script. At heart, it would almost seem to be a contradiction in terms. Maybe the answer is staring me in the face, but I can’t seem to see it.

Can anyone here oblige me in guidance to resolve this apparent dilemma--namely how to script dialogue when it seems that one must rely on the very natural dialogue, of-the-moment, provided by naïve or totally inexperienced actors?

Thanks.

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Well, there are a great many movies that are done in this way -- in which the script is not a traditional screenplay as such, but is more of a treatment that lays out what has to happen dramatically within a scene and thus provides a framework for improvisation rather than actually giving specific dialogue for actors to speak.

Mike Leigh "writes" and directs his movies in this way. John Cassavettes also made his movies in this way. "Blair Witch Project" was done in this way.

Larry David's Series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, in fact, is done in exactly this way. The dialogue is all improvised around an outline that lays out where each scene has to go.

But at heart of all this is that it only works if you are *making a movie.*

That is, you can't write a script like this and go out and try to sell it to someone. It is only a methodology available to *filmmakers* who have the resources to actually create a finished product, because that finished product is so dependent upon the actors, in association with a skilled writer/director to shape that final product.

So yes, you can write a script in this way -- if you're planning on finding your own actors and making your own movie.

But it would be difficult for me to imagine how you would write such a script -- because it wouldn't even really be a script as we really think of a script -- and going out and trying to sell it.

NMS

ricetalks said:

Take a look at a movie called "Smoke" with Harvey Keittel and.... I forget who else was in that. I think Madonna put in a quick character appearance as a singing cigarette messenger girl. That movie was done in the fashion you are speaking of. There was also a sequel for it, but I can't remember the name of it off hand.

If you're going to do this, my advice is not to use untutored actors. Use actors that are schooled in the Sanfred Meisner techniquue that is taught at the Neighbourhood Playhouse, moment by moment repetition games and improv.

You must still know and control your story scene by scene. The best way to work this is to have a very clear idea of what the core of each scene is about and how it fits into the whole. With the actors, give each of them a task that involves something that they want to gain from the other actor. That means you must understand and know whata their needs are in relation to what the core of the scenes are truly about. Give teh actors thier tasks or what it is they are trying to achieve fromm the other actor and then let them work.

Contrary to the idealism of thinking that if you work with inexperienced or niave actors you will get something more genuine, more often than not you get a bunch of nothing.

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This is very true. The ability to deliver a believably improvised permance is a skill in itself -- one that is extremely difficult. One just to remember all of those instances at the Academy Awards when really great stars try desperately to "sound" natural in their little interplay and it comes across as just horribly forced -- or you'll be watching a movie and all of a sudden you'll hit a little imrovised patch and it stands out like something from another world because the actors are just not up to it.

It's not "cinema verite" -- where a documentary crew goes and essentially lives hangs out somewhere for weeks or months and eventually they become part of the furniture -- something that often involves shooting thousands of hours of stuff to get an a movie that's a hundred and ten minutes long.

This is going onto a set and having actors who have to know what the intention of a scene is and "acting" toward that intention, adopting an emotional reality -- doing everything that actors have to do, when the director says action.

Only without having the lines.

NMS

Kinda sounds like the way Guest makes his movies, but without the experienced improv actors.

ATP said:

Full details please-there're others here who, for various reasons, don't share the same reference points/framework/body of knowledge...

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http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001302/

Guest has worked on a number of movies, starting with "This is Spinal Tap" many of them in association with veterans of the "Second City" improvisational comedy group.

If you're unfamiliar with improvised comedy, it consists of groups of actor/comics who go on stage, are given situations, with input from the audience, with no other preparation and have to improvise comic sketches based on those suggestions.

That involves a lot of mental and acting muscles. People who can do first class improvisation are few. People who can do first class improvisation *and* be funny are fewer still.

NMS