This week I decided to read the screenplay for The Revenant, a film I found personally very engrossing and influential. It is written by Mark Smith and Alejandro G Inarritu, who is also the director of the film. As I brought up in a blog post last week, we discussed in class how the guidelines for screenplays can be bent or broken, especially if a director is writing a screenplay for his own film.

Firstly I noticed that the screenplay contains a lot of camera direction, for example in the opening page:

This is one of the things that last week’s reading told us not to do, but in this screenplay it is abundant.

I also noticed that there is hardly any dialogue in the screenplay. As many joked at the time, Leonardo DiCaprio won the Oscar just for grunting in pain a lot – which is what drew my curiosity to want to read the script in the first place: how do you write a screenplay with minimal dialogue but still advance the story and create a clear visual blueprint for the director? I feel like as a writer with little screenwriting experience, aka yours truly, it would be easy to fall into a creative writing trap and begin to write the script as if it were a novel instead of a screenplay. I imagine you’d have to be very careful with choosing words that are appropriate and tell the story visually.

I think this a good thing to keep in mind whilst moving forward through the studio and thinking about the final project. Dialogue can easy be a cheap and easy way to advance the story and create exposition, but it is more difficult to do this skilfully through visuals alone.