TALKING TO THE SCREEN
AVOID “TALKY” DIALOGUE.
This simply means that unfortunately your characters have become the main purveyors of information about the story to the audience. This is the stuff of daytime drama. In that context, it’s a good thing. But in the context of a major motion picture, it’s not so good
It’s most important that you attempt to entertain the audience with your dialogue, not bore them
to tears. So, keep that in mind when you start giving your characters long, tedious speeches about
the history of the universe or something even less interesting except to Carl Sagan and that one
brain surgeon in the back row of the theater.
A good technique to avoid “talky” dialogue is to “show” the audience what you feel the characters
need to yak on and on about. That might mean creating a new scene or new scenes. That way, the
audience is in on what happened already, and you can now have the characters deal with how they
feel about what happened without repeating it in dialogue.
Another technique of getting necessary exposition into a story is to make the information itself the bone of contention in the scene. That is, the exposition is the reason the characters have a conflicting dialogue.
Still another sneaky way to liven up exposition that you absolutely cannot avoid is to create chaos
in the scene. For example, you could put your characters in a restaurant and someone robs it in
the middle of the scene. Or, you could stage the scene at a dog pound during feeding time.
There’s a wonderful use of this technique in When Harry Met Sally. Harry and his best friend go to a football game and end up discussing Harry’s divorce. It’s all exposition. But to make it interesting and funny, the characters get to participate in the “wave” that rolls around the stadium during the entire scene.
