What goes into writing a great movie script?

Make sure to pack enough explosives into the rocket.

The DSM 5 is a wonderful character compendium.

Conflict is your power source; without it you have no drama and hence no script.

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Research the facts and then throw away the research.

Write in reverse time. Major characters need to change polarity; minor characters may remain the same at the end.

Maintain a slush pile/idea file. When you are ready to write, choose the best seeds to plant.

What is the most interesting question you can ask to get to know someone?

Get up there yourself. Be in a movie. Take some acting (not writing) classes. Learn how a trained actor approaches a text. Learn why actors take roles. They do as much if not more than the writer does.

Cut everything that is not a payoff, or a setup for a specific payoff. “Omit needless words.” Think about the sparseness of joke telling, or Grimm Brothers.

Your primary job is to create situations. Modern actors will fuck up your dialogue, despite whatever your contract says.

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Use status to help drive conflict. King Lear/fool. Upstairs/downstairs.

Actors give better feedback than writers do.

What you leave unwritten is as important as what you write. SUBTEXT.

What does it mean when your husband comments and likes other women on social media? He has private IG and TikTok accounts that I have no access to. He has saved videos and pictures of women on his phone.

Outline everything. Use story beats. Keep character’s mouths taped up, until they absolutely MUST speak. Write the script and the dialogue at the last minute, after you’ve revised the hell out of the outline.

People choose what to see based on the high concept. Make sure to deliver an ending consistent with the high concept -- it is what the audience paid for.

All rules are made to be broken, but you damn well better know WHY you’re breaking them.

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A scene should change valence from beginning to end. Up to down, down to up.

To develop a unique voice for each character, try interviewing your characters.

Learn to tell a story orally and not through writing. Try telling your story to a friend.

I’m worried I have a bat bite on my hand, I have two small marks about 1 cm apart. I haven’t been in contact with a bat but I’m worried about at night. My fingers have a slight tingling sensation and my arm feels cold but isn’t. Am I ok?

Audiences are smarter than you think. Something about turning down the house lights makes their IQs go up.

Leave holes. Write and unwrite. Put it in, take it out.

Don’t direct from the page. Everyone, from the director on down, wants to be part of the process of making movies. Let them do their work.

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Primary characters must change polarities. Secondary characters can change less.

A critical function of storytelling is wish fulfillment. This is why video games are so popular. “That protagonist is JUST LIKE ME.”

Only God gets it right the first time. Rewrite everything.

How did a computer scientist such as Geoffrey Hinton manage to win a Nobel Prize in physics when computer science already has its own Nobel Prize equivalent in the Turing Awards?