Dialogue. Die-a-log. Dya-log.

Ian Hubert's thoughts on movie dialogue

       Dialogue for movies. It's not really needed, now that I think about it. Heck, even visuals aren't needed. But you need at least ONE of them, 'cause otherwise it'd be silent black, and you'd think your TV was broken. That, and it'd be pretty darn hard to tell your story, just as it'd be pretty darn hard for me to get a point across to you by having black text on a black background (unless, of course, you were to highlight it, you sly dog you).
       You know what Dialogue is, right? It's people talking, a conversation between people, in the case of movies, it usually serves to progress the plot along, perform some sort of character development, or deliver some other engaging (or disengaging, depending on your taste) emotional tidbit. Or something unrelated. The thing is, it's words, and they generally serve a purpose.
       The thing is, though, that these words are almost always preplanned. Scripted out. Written down beforehand. Scratched onto a notepad. Whatever. And how do they do this? By writing one line of dialogue, then another, then another. Generally.
       Now, my point (yes, I have one, but it's not very good), is that that's not how people talk. I mean, not usually. Unless you communicate with some sort of decided verbal hierarchy, you're gonna have some overlap... or gaps.
       Watch a real conversation some time. Notice how people talk. It's crazy! So much coordination and split second decision making. It's insane!

"So we strapped the wheels onto the bottom of the board"                    "Yeah, let him tell it. He's good."
             "Wait, where did you get the wheels?"                     "We took 'em off of the bottom of- oh."
    "You know those roll around office chairs? We took em off that."    "Haha! I remember that."
"Wait, but don't those roll any direction?"                          "Remember what?"     
            "Yeah, they do, which is the point of the story..."                      "When we picked up the chair!"
"Picked up the chair?"         "Cause once we started going down the hill, it would rotate"
                            "Yeah! From the side of the road that one night."                "Wait... which hill?"

       Now, that's slight hyperbole... maybe. In fact, it's a horrible example. Totally non-realistic.

       That's my point.

       Constructing realistic dialogue is difficult. Very difficult. But the MOST difficult part is getting the actors to say it as intended. The first instinct is to say it as written (as most writers prefer it), first one line, then another, then another. But real people don't talk like that. Two people may start at once, then the person with vocal dominance continues, while the other backs down, to maybe try again once the dominant speaker finishes, assuming they don't change the topic.
       Now, we're no expert writers, so we're trying another technique. We've given each character a clear understanding of their character in SBFP. Then, when the scene comes, we give each of them key points, in order, if need be, that must be brought up at least once in the conversation.
       Assuming the points make sense for the characters to bring up, this allows us to simulate a fairly natural conversation. Generally, it takes a few tries, each one generally being, "Half the time, maybe a third" of the previous, in an effort to keep the pace up, and eliminate pointless, long, or non-impacting adlibs.
       Of course, this only works because hard work went into all the characters, and  to make sure that the actors and actresses, for the most part, have a good understanding of their character. All of the people who play main characters are good at ad-libbing to begin with, we just gave them the framework to adlib in character, or something like that.

       So that's it, really. SBFP dialogue is kinda an experiment. We don't do this for ALL scenes, of course, because eventually there will always come a point when you just HAVE to plan out what people are going to say. But the adlibs give it an energy that would normally not be there...

And heck, they come up with WAY better ideas than we ever could.