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WRITING THE SCREEN PLAY 2H
every filmic element, the short speech, in the main, should be adhered to.
That does not mean, however, that the dialogue should consist of short, curt, pithy one-word and one-line speeches throughout. Nor should the short speeches be written solely with words of one syllable. But the preponderance of lines should be worded economically, and should be as pithy as possible unless, of course, the character of the person talking is one who is being portrayed as verbose.
Long speeches can be used, but not to describe events and situations that could otherwise be told in action. Rather, they should be used mostly to describe emotional states, thoughts, and other material that cannot be portrayed by action.
Ingrid Bergman was given a thir teen-minute peroration in Hitchcock's Under Capricorn. As usual, this long speech was part of the picture's climax. And to prevent the story action from bogging down to an inevitable stop, action was simulated by camera movement, character movement, change of image size, change of angle, reaction cutaway shots from onlookers, and the like, all of which tended to give some sort of continuous movement to what was, at best, a tour de force.
Speech length regulates tempo. The tempo of the picture as a whole can be regulated by the length of the individual speeches. Thus, in scenes that require a quickened tempo, the speeches must be short, the lines incisive, the words choppy, and the rejoinders immediate and sharp.
Conversely, for scenes designed for a slower pace, the speeches should be longer, the lines more leisurely, and the words less concise than in the faster paced shots.
Stream of consciousness
At certain times in a screen play, it may be necessary to supplant spoken dialogue with unspoken thoughts. The most effective method of depicting thought processes in motion pictures is by means of pictorial action. A person's thoughts can be determined to a great extent by the manner in which he acts. But there is still