Talking Heads?

AFS said:

I've had a script of mine refered to as "talking heads". While I'm not too bothered by that, as dialogue is my favorite part of writing, I was wondering how to combat this feeling.

Do I just need more trivial action in between lines? How could I do that without over padding the script?

Click to expand...

Tough one to answer without seeing a sample, since talking heads can mean a few things... yappy characters... not enough visuals... dialogue not interesting enough... characters don't emote enough feeling via action, they're too busy talking... scene feels static... story feels as if it's not advancing... all or none of the above. The comment might point at a much bigger problem. I'd be bothered.

-Derek

Movies are about moving- doing things.

Radio is about dialogue.


It means your characters are standing still and talking to each other.

A lot.

Change that.

AFS said:

I've had a script of mine refered to as "talking heads". While I'm not too bothered by that, as dialogue is my favorite part of writing, I was wondering how to combat this feeling.

Do I just need more trivial action in between lines? How could I do that without over padding the script?

Any suggestions would help. Thanks.

Click to expand...

Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with heaps of dialogue. Look at Clerks, 90% of the film is two guys standing round talking.

But you could give it what I believe is referred to as 'scope'. If you're gonna set something in a kitchen, why not set it on a rollercoaster. That kind of thing. Maybe.

Just a suggestion.

Or it could also mean your readers can't visualize your characters - no hints as to physical characteristics, mannerisms, etc. Puma

AFS said:

I've had a script of mine refered to as "talking heads". While I'm not too bothered by that, as dialogue is my favorite part of writing, I was wondering how to combat this feeling.

Do I just need more trivial action in between lines? How could I do that without over padding the script?

Any suggestions would help. Thanks.

Click to expand...

As DP says, hard to tell without seeing the script.

If your characters' dialogue is mostly expositional, then the term 'talking heads' is often used to describe a script that tends to tell the audience the story rather than let them see it unfold for themselves. In this instance it's also referred to as 'lazy writing'.

If the dialogue is insightful and relevant to the development of the characters, then you might get away with talking heads (just don't have them sitting down in every scene). Keep in mind, though, this term is rarely used in a complimentary sense -- unless you're Alan Bennet.

no lines of dialogue (or action for that matter) should be more than 3 or 4 lines. there are no hard rules though. if your story is more cerebral and character driven (as opposed to an action script) then of course there is more dialogue.

however:

Do I just need more trivial action in between lines? How could I do that without over padding the script?

Click to expand...

nothing you write should be trivial. action/behavior should be relevant to the character.
probably much of what you have in your dialogue is more trivial than you think. come in late to conversations and just give the audience the core of the scene. and don't be redundant. ie - if one character just experiences something and/or tells someone something then none of that coversation should be repeated but, you can come into a scene (late) after the exchange has just been made between them. clear as mud or what?!

find a script that is similar to what you want to write and compare. notice how short the dialogue is and the scenes are in length. notice the minor action and movement made during longer conversations.

what a dialogue heavy movie and turn on the mutt button. just absorb the action.

but you should also know that talking heads can be acceptable. check out My Dinner with Andre or Tape w/Ethan Hawke -- they're all talking heads. but notice the content must be absorbing. and know that talking head scripts are made as "actor" pieces and only made by small independent producers.

The movie The Day After Tomorrow had a lot of scientific information about ice and snow and heat and flooding, etc., that needed to be conveyed to the audience via scientists who talked and talked and talked about all this scientific stuff.

Intellectally interesting.

But kinda boring to watch.

The director had the scriptwriter rewrite a lot of these admitedly critical info-dumping scenes so that the same dialogue was being delivered by the same characters, but while they were walking down streets or driving in cars, etc.

So get rid of the "drawing room scenes" where the President of the United States is in the Oval Office sitting behind his desk while the scientist tells him about the upcoming end of the world. And rewrite it so that the President is briskly waking toward his awaiting helicopter in the midst of a bunch of aides and body gaurds, and the scientist has to desperately keep up with the pace to tell the President about the upcoming end of the world.

If you just have two people sitting around talking a lot - write a play. Movies are visual. People can talk, but it has to be visual. Are they doing something? Is the camera doing something? Try a different location, have them get interrupted, have them moving, give them some business -- something to make it more dynamic.

When a director is looking at potential scripts, they want to see it. Dialogue scenes can be visual depending on how you write them. The setting and action of the scene can speak to the subtext or the theme, it doesn't have to be 'padding'.

I wouldn't necessarily be more descriptive just to be descriptive. Most people skip description while reading, but if you have pages of talking with no action in between, that's not very attractive to a film director.

And there's no shame in writing plays....

AFS said:

I've had a script of mine refered to as "talking heads". While I'm not too bothered by that, as dialogue is my favorite part of writing, I was wondering how to combat this feeling.

Do I just need more trivial action in between lines? How could I do that without over padding the script?

Any suggestions would help. Thanks.

Click to expand...

I've never bought into this idea that "movies are visual" and that if you have a lot of dialogue it ought to be a play. The "Maltese Falcon" is virtually all dialogue. So is "All the President's Men". So, for that matter, is "Sex, Lies, and Videotape." Very little happens in any of those movies except people talking.

But the fact that your story is conveyed through actors' speech doesn't alter the basic rule of movie story-telling -- which is sparseness. Scenes should do their story work efficiently, and when the story work of a scene is done -- the scene is over.

If the story is compelling, and every scene is doing its story work efficiently -- and is thus the right length -- no one should be bored or have the sense that a scene is too talky.

That's the impression that people get when a scene just seems to be running on and on and on, which means that it either isn't getting to the point, or it's gotten to the point and is still going on.

And it isn't only "talkie" scenes that can suffer from that. You can have purely visual scenes that are capable of doing exactly the same thing.

NMS

Blake Snyder calls this the "Pope in the Pool" rule. If you have an expositionary scene to wade through, put it somewhere interesting to distract the audience. The rule is based on a script I believe Snyder was working on in which the Pope was involved in a particularly long dialogue with some Vatican dudes and to make it visually interesting, the Pope delivered his lines while swimming lanes in the Vatican pool.

AFS said:

...[D]ialogue is my favorite part of writing...

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This might have something to do with it. I might suggest going through the dialogue and trying find ways to convey the same information through action instead. Even if you keep it 90% the way it is, exploring that might help you see alternative approaches to conveying information.

As far as the rest of the comments, my take as always been that film is a unique medium, in that the entire experience contributes to the story. The dialogue is supported by the action, which can take place anywhere you choose. That's what differentiates it from other forms of drama, in my mind. A movie is the only medium where you have complete control over time and space. To not use any of those elements is to leave half your tools in the toolbox.

Blow something up. That seems to work.

nmstevens said:

I've never bought into this idea that "movies are visual" and that if you have a lot of dialogue it ought to be a play. The "Maltese Falcon" is virtually all dialogue. So is "All the President's Men". So, for that matter, is "Sex, Lies, and Videotape." Very little happens in any of those movies except people talking.

Click to expand...

It's amazing to me that anyone would ever say that any movie shot by Gordon Willis is 'not visual'. In Goldman's book 'Adventures In The Screen Trade' he says one of the hard parts of adapting 'All The President's Men' was that there was almost no dialogue.

I'll only take issue with that, although I think all of your examples are bad ones, because it's the movie I've seen most recently. I think Sex, Lies is plenty visual and certainly does so in subtextual and thematic ways, but I haven't seen in it a while so I don't want to get into it at the moment.

But in All The President's Men, there's a lot of action and business going on during the dialogue in that movie. There's action in the newsroom. There's dynamic locations for some scenes. There's like one line of dialogue in the first 5-plus minutes of the film (if I remember correctly, there's the break in, Woodward getting the call and introing of the Post).

Watch 'All The President's Men' and you'll see scenes like this:

CUT TO:

WOODWARD TYPING LIKE MAD, makes a mistake, corrects it, types
on muttering to himself, and--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD IN HIS OFFICE munching a handful of Maalox tablets
and--

CUT TO:

WOODWARD taking a sheet from his typewriter, hurrying off
and--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD taking the sheet from WOODWARD--

WOODWARD
Here's the first take--

ROSENFELD nods, shows him out and--

CUT TO:

WOODWARD BACK AT HIS MACHINE typing faster then before, makes
another mistake, starts to correct it, glances around and--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD IN HIS OFFICE gesturing to somebody but not WOODWARD
and--

CUT TO:

WOODWARD watching as BERNSTEIN appears in view from behind
the wide pillar by WOODWARD's desk, heads toward ROSENFELD's
office. WOODWARD shrugs, goes back to his typing, makes a
typo immediately, glances over toward ROSENFELD's office,
freezes as we--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD handing some papers to BERNSTEIN. They look, from
this distance, suspiciously like WOODWARD's story.

CUT TO:

BERNSTEIN hurrying out of ROSENFELD's office, and--

CUT TO:

WOODWARD watching BERNSTEIN until he disappears out of sight
behind the pillar. WOODWARD hesitates, finally goes back to
his typing, makes another mistake, fixes it, makes still
another, his temper is shortly to make itself known--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD as WOODWARD hands him another sheet of paper.

WOODWARD
This is all of it, Harry.

ROSENFELD NODS, takes it, immediately starts to read as we--

CUT TO:

WOODWARD AT HIS DESK watching as ROSENFELD gestures again.
There is a pause. Then BERNSTEIN appears from behind the
pillar and--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD handing BERNSTEIN another sheet of paper. BERSTEIN
nods, takes it, walks back toward his desk, disappears behind
the pillar again. WOODWARD is starting to steam. Now--

CUT TO:

BERNSTEIN AT HIS DESK typing magnificently, his hands rising
and falling like Rubinstein's. Behind him is the pillar and
for a moment there is nothing--then, very slowly, a figure
peers out from behind the pillar--it is WOODWARD.

He watches. BERNSTEIN continues to type, then after a moment,
rests, thinks, shifts around in his chair and as his glance
starts toward the pillar--

CUT TO:

THE PILLAR. WOODWARD is gone.

CUT TO:

BERNSTEIN typing madly away.

THE PILLAR. WOODWARD is visible again, eyes very bright...
now--

CUT TO:

BERNSTEIN finishing typing, his hands moving majestically.
WOODWARD comes up behind him, stands looking a second.

Then--

WOODWARD
We have to talk.

BERNSTEIN nods, grabs the papers both that he's been typing
and that he's been copying from.

And as he rises--

PAN TO:

WOODWARD AND BERNSTEIN walking silently out of the newsroom
then turning left down a darker corridor, passing bulletin
boards and wall lockers and it's all nice and quiet as they
amble on, nodding to the few people they pass on their way
and after a while they turn right and enter the coffee lounge
which is empty; the walls are lined with Norman Rockwell
reproductions and various kinds of vending machines are
visible, selling coffee or milk or fruit or sandwiches and
there are some plastic tables and chairs and the minute they
are alone, the silence ends.

WOODWARD
What the hell were you doing rewriting
my story--

--

Not visual????

Now do His Girl Friday.

clock_work9 said:

Now do His Girl Friday.

Click to expand...

His Girl Friday is a play =)

zeprosnepsid said:

His Girl Friday is a play =)

Click to expand...

Watch 12 Angry Men. One room (two if you count the bathroom), and no talking heads in that thing.

nmstevens said:

I've never bought into this idea that "movies are visual" and that if you have a lot of dialogue it ought to be a play. The "Maltese Falcon" is virtually all dialogue. So is "All the President's Men". So, for that matter, is "Sex, Lies, and Videotape." Very little happens in any of those movies except people talking.

But the fact that your story is conveyed through actors' speech doesn't alter the basic rule of movie story-telling -- which is sparseness. Scenes should do their story work efficiently, and when the story work of a scene is done -- the scene is over.

If the story is compelling, and every scene is doing its story work efficiently -- and is thus the right length -- no one should be bored or have the sense that a scene is too talky.

That's the impression that people get when a scene just seems to be running on and on and on, which means that it either isn't getting to the point, or it's gotten to the point and is still going on.

And it isn't only "talkie" scenes that can suffer from that. You can have purely visual scenes that are capable of doing exactly the same thing.

NMS

Click to expand...

This poster has been here over six months and racked up only 8 posts. Judging by this one, I suspect the other 7 are probably worth digging for.

One word from this post jumps out at me here: "sparseness"

Seems to be his/her overall style.

AFS said:

OK, my fault. I should have elaborated more.

The script in question is a concept script. It all takes place in one setting, so the whole "scope" thing doesn't work, with the possible exception of a flashback, maybe.

It's based around dialogue, not action. It's people talking to people. You could say "write a play, instead", but I don't want to write a play. I want to write a film.
Upon hearing some of these comments, I've come to the conclusion that the "talking heads" comment I received was in reference to the fact that almost everyone is sitting down. Easily correctable.

Thanks for the help, and keep posting if you have anything else to say.

Click to expand...

Maybe you should post an excerpt in the SYW forum then.

The script in question is a concept script. It all takes place in one setting

Click to expand...

i'll repeat this because it's definitely worth checking out
Tape http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275719/
rent it, watch it, read it

zeprosnepsid said:

His Girl Friday is a play =)

Click to expand...

No. The Front Page is a play. "His Girl Friday" is most definitely a movie, and one of the fastest paced screwball comedies you're ever likely to see -- but also one that is very much dependent on dialogue.

That's not to say that it doesn't have visual story-telling -- but most of it's story-telling is dialogue dependent.

NMS

zeprosnepsid said:

It's amazing to me that anyone would ever say that any movie shot by Gordon Willis is 'not visual'. In Goldman's book 'Adventures In The Screen Trade' he says one of the hard parts of adapting 'All The President's Men' was that there was almost no dialogue.

I'll only take issue with that, although I think all of your examples are bad ones, because it's the movie I've seen most recently. I think Sex, Lies is plenty visual and certainly does so in subtextual and thematic ways, but I haven't seen in it a while so I don't want to get into it at the moment.

But in All The President's Men, there's a lot of action and business going on during the dialogue in that movie. There's action in the newsroom. There's dynamic locations for some scenes. There's like one line of dialogue in the first 5-plus minutes of the film (if I remember correctly, there's the break in, Woodward getting the call and introing of the Post).

Watch 'All The President's Men' and you'll see scenes like this:

CUT TO:

WOODWARD TYPING LIKE MAD, makes a mistake, corrects it, types
on muttering to himself, and--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD IN HIS OFFICE munching a handful of Maalox tablets
and--

CUT TO:

WOODWARD taking a sheet from his typewriter, hurrying off
and--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD taking the sheet from WOODWARD--

WOODWARD
Here's the first take--

ROSENFELD nods, shows him out and--

CUT TO:

WOODWARD BACK AT HIS MACHINE typing faster then before, makes
another mistake, starts to correct it, glances around and--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD IN HIS OFFICE gesturing to somebody but not WOODWARD
and--

CUT TO:

WOODWARD watching as BERNSTEIN appears in view from behind
the wide pillar by WOODWARD's desk, heads toward ROSENFELD's
office. WOODWARD shrugs, goes back to his typing, makes a
typo immediately, glances over toward ROSENFELD's office,
freezes as we--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD handing some papers to BERNSTEIN. They look, from
this distance, suspiciously like WOODWARD's story.

CUT TO:

BERNSTEIN hurrying out of ROSENFELD's office, and--

CUT TO:

WOODWARD watching BERNSTEIN until he disappears out of sight
behind the pillar. WOODWARD hesitates, finally goes back to
his typing, makes another mistake, fixes it, makes still
another, his temper is shortly to make itself known--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD as WOODWARD hands him another sheet of paper.

WOODWARD
This is all of it, Harry.

ROSENFELD NODS, takes it, immediately starts to read as we--

CUT TO:

WOODWARD AT HIS DESK watching as ROSENFELD gestures again.
There is a pause. Then BERNSTEIN appears from behind the
pillar and--

CUT TO:

ROSENFELD handing BERNSTEIN another sheet of paper. BERSTEIN
nods, takes it, walks back toward his desk, disappears behind
the pillar again. WOODWARD is starting to steam. Now--

CUT TO:

BERNSTEIN AT HIS DESK typing magnificently, his hands rising
and falling like Rubinstein's. Behind him is the pillar and
for a moment there is nothing--then, very slowly, a figure
peers out from behind the pillar--it is WOODWARD.

He watches. BERNSTEIN continues to type, then after a moment,
rests, thinks, shifts around in his chair and as his glance
starts toward the pillar--

CUT TO:

THE PILLAR. WOODWARD is gone.

CUT TO:

BERNSTEIN typing madly away.

THE PILLAR. WOODWARD is visible again, eyes very bright...
now--

CUT TO:

BERNSTEIN finishing typing, his hands moving majestically.
WOODWARD comes up behind him, stands looking a second.

Then--

WOODWARD
We have to talk.

BERNSTEIN nods, grabs the papers both that he's been typing
and that he's been copying from.

And as he rises--

PAN TO:

WOODWARD AND BERNSTEIN walking silently out of the newsroom
then turning left down a darker corridor, passing bulletin
boards and wall lockers and it's all nice and quiet as they
amble on, nodding to the few people they pass on their way
and after a while they turn right and enter the coffee lounge
which is empty; the walls are lined with Norman Rockwell
reproductions and various kinds of vending machines are
visible, selling coffee or milk or fruit or sandwiches and
there are some plastic tables and chairs and the minute they
are alone, the silence ends.

WOODWARD
What the hell were you doing rewriting
my story--

--

Not visual????

Click to expand...

There seems to be here, and in some of the other posts, what I consider to be a basic misunderstanding of what it means when we talk about a scene being "visual" as distinct from being "dialogue-based."

Hitchcock made this point very succinctly when he distinguished between doing things like "opening a scene up" -- taking a scene that could be shot at a table and shooting it on the side of a mountain or while the characters gallop on horseback -- as if that made somehow made the scene "visual." This is what Hitchcock called merely "photography." It didn't, as he considered it, have anything to do with the medium of film.

That's because whether the characters are talking while on horseback, walking, climbing a mountain, or on the backs of humpbacked whales -- none of that is conveying the *story information* of the scene. It is all simply decoration.

If the characters are walking and the fundamental "action" of the scene -- the stuff that's in the scene that is advancing the story -- is happening in what the characters are saying -- then that's a dialogue scene. And it would be a dialogue scene if they were shouting it at one another whilst skydiving or whispering it to one another across a kitchen table.

And that is the real test of whether you are dealing with what is, fundamentally, a dialogue movie. As you move through the story, are the key story points, from scene to scene to scene, being conveyed mostly through actors talking to one another. If the answer is yes -- it's a dialogue movie.

Now -- it's still action -- because in dramatic terms "action" is anything that a character does to advance his objective, or an antagonist does to impede it. And that can all happen though people talking (as clearly it does in something like 12 Angry Men).

All movies today are a combination of both. Some, like Die Hard, convey much more information in strictly visual terms. You can turn off the sound and watch that movie and you'll know pretty much what's happening (not everything, but you'll get most of it).

A lot of movies -- including All the President's Men -- you turn off the sound, you are simply not going to have any idea what's going on in a majority of the scenes in that movie. On the other hand, you turn on the sound and look away from the screen -- you'll find that you will be able to follow that movie perfectly well.

Does that mean that it is, in essence, sort of a filmed radio play?

Not really -- because clearly there's much more to a movie than simply following the plot.

But I really think that the time has come to accept that movies are *not* simply a visual medium, that they are, and have actually been for almost eighty years -- an *audio-visual* medium in which both speech, sounds and images work together to produce a cohesive finished whole.

Some movies, by virtue of the stories they tell, will rely more on visuals to tell their stories, others will rely more on speech.

But they're both movies and each is just as much a movie as the other.

NMS