A Script Is Not A Film

(As students get ready to take "Visual Systems" and "Production Studio", and as I develop a new class – tentatively titled "Experiments in Cinematic Narrative" – a few comments about scripts and filmmaking.) 

A script is a starting point. It is where one begins to work out one's ideas, where one begins to organize one's thoughts. It is where one begins to plot out a movement or trajectory. Because it is language based, because it consists of what Peirce would call symbolic signs (in this case, words written/typed on a page, on a computer screen), it should not be mistaken for the "content" of the film. A film consists of images drawn from the world; images of people, places, and things. Thus, the filmmaker's job is to translate the script into a film, to translate the ideas/emotions expressed in words into ideas/emotions expressed in images and sounds. The revision of a script as one moves into the production phase should thus involve a parring away of all that is inessential to the expression of cinematic ideas/emotions, so that the themes once signified through words can now be experienced through images.  Everything important that one wants to say should be said through the idiom of film. (Of course, this doesn't mean that a scriptwriter shouldn't approach writing a script as though it were the film. It is the filmmaker who must understand the difference, and especially so when the filmmaker also happens to be the scriptwriter: understand what is called for at each stage, and proceed accordingly.)

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If the early stages of pre-production are concerned primarily with the what – what is the film about? – the production stage shifts its focus more to the how: how to realize the film (its primary content) in a series of images. As Michelangelo Antonioni once said, each line of dialogue in a script will "take on a different meaning" according to the location and according to the position of the actor in relation to the camera: "a line spoken by an actor in profile doesn't have the same meaning as one given full-face." The decision to shoot a line of dialogue in a medium-long shot, instead of a close-up, or, say, against a brick wall, instead of in a car traveling down a road, will all impact the viewer's understanding of the scene as well as its emotional resonance (which in cinema may be one and the same thing). These are the types of decisions that the filmmaker must make – alone, or in consultation with his/her DP, etc. Where should the camera be placed, and what perspective on events should it take? How should the camera see the things it shows us? 

It is the accumulation of all these choices that becomes the viewer's experience of the film.

S I-G