Crafting the Scene

Lessons in Storytelling from the Masters of Cinema

Will Hong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000590579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Bringing together an understanding of cinematic technique and creative choices, this book explores how directors make the technical choices to tell a story in the best and most effective way. Analyzing examples from films throughout, it demonstrates how to practice analysis and application to take your storytelling to the next level through creative choices.

This book provides a model to bridge the gap between theory and practice by analyzing famous scenes and breaking them down not solely for critical value and within historical context, but primarily for practical value and application. Author Hong illustrates how an understanding of dramatic storytelling and the dramatic context behind scenes allows filmmakers to produce impactful and powerful stories. Foregrounding reading film and media to allow you to engage with films in a critical and perceptive way, this book will help you make films to connect with your audience. Through looking at complete scenes as the primary unit of drama, it teaches how to analyze story movement across a scene to build better stories, pulling practical lessons from these famous moments in cinema to enable better work across preproduction, on set, and during post-production.

Serving as a guide through a single semester-long class focused on direction and production, this book is aimed at advanced students and aspiring filmmakers. It is essential reading for filmmakers wishing to build on their creative and technical skills and enrich their storytelling.

1Why Scenes?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003102366-1

Introduction

On November 30, 1961, Alfred Hitchcock wrote a long, detailed memo to screenwriter and collaborator Evan Hunter giving the writer notes on his latest draft of The Birds. Based on a Daphne du Maurier short story, the screenplay had been progressing through discussions Hitchcock and Hunter had had over the previous months, and the duo were hammering out the last changes before committing to the arduous preproduction phase of the movie that lay ahead.

In the memo, after a handful of paragraphs in which Hitchcock offered Hunter some detailed notes, the biggest of which was that the screenplay was on the whole “way too long,” he took a moment to pull back from the specifics of the story and talk more generally about what he called “ ‘no-scene’ scenes.” He wrote:

Evan, would you please permit me to interpose here with an observation that I think we should look out for in this script and this scene in the bird shop is a fair example of what I mean. We run the risk of having in a picture what I call ‘no scene’ scenes. By this I mean that the little sequence might have narrative value but in itself is undramatic. It very obviously lacks shape and it doesn’t within itself have a climax as a scene on the stage might. I remember many years ago when I made the movie LIFEBOAT I got John Steinbeck to do a story outline for me and the script was done by Jo Swerling. …Now, of course, as you probably remember if you ever saw the picture, LIFEBOAT was a group story lasting several days and within the narrative a number of sequences. These were very well written but I found that they were ‘no scene’ scenes—in other words, they lacked dramatic shape and I remember having to have sessions all during the shooting of the picture in order to correct these particular dramatic lapses.¹

Hitchcock goes on in the memo to point out to Hunter those scenes in his script that he felt were no-scene scenes, and I quote the above at length because the great moviemaker, having already directed an astounding fifty feature films and coming off the commercial and critical success of Psycho (1960), models for us quite clearly where a filmmaker’s creative focus must be throughout the production of any film—the scene.

Note that in delivering this instructive anecdote to his prolific, younger collaborator, Hitchcock frames their work together as working squarely within dramatic storytelling. This form of storytelling stands as a subset, ultimately, of all the ways to deliver narrative, and given that Hunter had made his name previously by publishing a series of popular crime novels, it makes sense that Hitchcock first wanted to suggest this different way of approaching characters and events as closer to their joint task at hand, that their work on the screenplay needed to follow guidelines born more of theater than those of literature. Hitchcock tempers his criticism a bit by putting Hunter in the same boat as literary icon (and sometime screenwriter) John Steinbeck and seasoned Hollywood screenwriter Jo Sperling, but he asserts as axiomatic that scenes that are undramatic, those that “lack shape” and don’t have within themselves “a climax as a scene on the stage might,” are to be ruthlessly cut in the name of overall story integrity. Reluctance to do so, he suggests, only delays their inevitable excision and leads to wasted time and, presumably, money. In Hollywood (as elsewhere), this is of course the number one no-no—film remains, after all, the most “expensive paintbox” as Orson Welles famously quipped. Hitchcock says this is where Hunter’s (and our) attention must continually be trained, on those scenes that are working for the overall story while keeping vigilant in identifying those that while perhaps offering some “narrative value” simply don’t.

Why is this approach useful for those of us who aspire to reach great heights in film as screenwriters, directors, and producers? Because it’s only through the constant evaluation and reevaluation of each scene—in the script, on the set, and during the edit—against what we know to be the audience’s expectations and the requirements of drama that we will ever arrive at a finished, “working” story, one that doesn’t bore or annoy but instead delights and enthralls. The scene is what we should view as the testing ground for dramatic necessity so we can effectively make those tough decisions that are a part of any day of filmmaking. This approach guides not only our screenwriting, but also shot design and scene coverage strategies, production design in planning and execution, sound design choices, and the execution of any given craft element. A cinematographer will invent scores of options for lighting and camera coverage of a scene; the director through consideration of the dramatic function and movement of the scene will work with the cinematographer to decide which of the many options he or she has offered is the correct one.

Culling weaker material and refining stronger material make a sort of obvious intuitive sense—it’s what we already know is the bulk of the work—but why not drill down even further and focus on individual shots? Especially during preproduction (say, during the storyboarding phase) and then during production as you look at your shooting schedule and proceed take by take, wouldn’t it make sense to keep your attention squarely there, on that smaller unit of storytelling? Of course, focusing on the technical elements that go into each camera setup is important, but remember that, in general, no single shot, no matter how gorgeous, thrilling, or spectacular, can tell the story all on its own. Like a single word or phrase placed aside others in a sentence or a paragraph, its capacity to communicate meaning to a viewer is contingent upon how it operates with those other units, those edited around it to form a specific context. Short of a single master shot that gets you through an entire narrative sequence, shots always rely on other shots to convey story because in even the simplest scene, there is generally too much going on to show the audience every key detail in a single frame—the power of film is centered on its ability to have our perspective move and change as required. It’s only by pulling back and seeing a group of shots together to form a larger section of a movie that we can start to have a real sense of what the story is doing, how it’s moving, whether it’s breathing or whether it’s on life support and in need of immediate help.

What we are most concerned with, after all, is the story, and the dramatic scene is large enough a unit to be able to track those story elements that are the most difficult to get right—progression of character via the crucible of conflict, reversals of fortune, decisions to act and then watching that action take place as well as its consequences. In short, we want to see a character in flux, undergoing significant change. A shot is generally not where we see that happening; as Hitchcock suggests, the filmmaker shapes the story across the duration of a scene, and then in a much larger sense, across an entire film, which you could look at as the aggregate of all the shifts and changes in the scenes that the film comprises. In theory, then, if we learn how to craft an effective scene by focusing on dramatic fundamentals satisfied through technique, we should be able to apply those acquired skills to the story in its entirety—it’s just about applying the same principles and processes to a much larger amount of material, the sum of finished scenes that themselves function well, scaling up.

Thinking critically about entire films in this manner is, of course, an option, too, but then we’re really getting into the realm of cinema studies, away from the nuts and bolts of production. Think of it this way: when we study specific shots, we’re mostly asking technical questions (how did the camera move? how were the actors blocked? where were the lights and what was the nature of the light quality? what is in frame and what’s excluded?), and when we study entire films, we’re primarily asking much broader thematic, theoretical, or historical questions (what was the director’s message? how does a film fit into the era in which it was made? what would a theoretical analysis of the film yield?). Scenes sit between these two poles and so can pull from both lines of inquiry, giving us practical knowledge that we can apply when marrying the technical and the dramatic. And the advantage of studying some of the great scenes from the history of cinema is that they tend to be digestible units, being shorter than the films that contain them, and yet they offer the complexity of form to allow deep investigation into techniques, methods, and directorial approaches that can yield invaluable lessons for us young practitioners. The greatest film school is simply the history of film, and any good scene can be a wonderful, effective instructor.

If we accept that the scene is the unit of storytelling that we must keep foremost in our thinking, a question remains: what is meant by a “good creative decision”? When director David Fincher says, “There are a thousand ways to cover a scene, but really there are only two and one of those is wrong,” what is he suggesting? If he’s claiming that there is, in fact, a single, right way to present a scene to an audience, what guidelines are we to use in our search for those proper craft decisions? If there really is a definitive, authoritative framework for thinking about cinematic storytelling, what exactly is it and, more importantly, how can we learn those guidelines and put them to use as we study those great scenes? Finally, how might we develop the chops to take what we observe and learn to make good creative decisions under pressure and quickly?

Read/Write Capability

In learning any craft, young practitioners need to do two basic things to develop mastery: they must continually practice the craft, get their hands dirty with the media at hand, and they must regularly and purposefully engage with the most successful work of the past.² This is hardly news. Without developing an intimate knowledge of the history of the medium in which one works, what has worked and what—if one can suss it out—did not, the fledgling artist works in a contextless bubble. A young filmmaker might stumble upon genuine formal innovation on his or her own, in relative obscurity, but it’s unlikely that the resulting work will reach an audience and have any impact unless the artist takes that innovation and pursues a kind of placement within the larger conversation presented by the history of the art form. More to the point, the audience has done extensive relationship-building with the great works of the past and evaluates all new work in that context whether the artist likes it or not. Art, at heart, is communication, an ongoing, eternal conversation between human beings. It’s how we speak to ourselves about matters of emotional complexity, how we make sense of the parts of life that can’t be easily quantified, those problems that in many cases can’t be definitively solved. This is a social enterprise, then, one with a history as long as civilization itself, so it pays to know what people have already put out there and how they did so.

Pure self-expression (where all of us typically start) generally only travels so far because a reader or audience can’t know how to place and contextualize what it is that you have to say unless you do some work to understand and anticipate what the reader/audience will actually need. We all know what it is like to watch a movie or read a novel and get the sinking feeling that the author doesn’t really care about us beyond extracting some form of payment, be it monetary or in the form of praise/awards/likes/subs/whatever else. It’s not about a conversation so much as an attempted transaction, and it’s ultimately disheartening, even if we play along. The essential dynamic of art works more like a gift—akin to the Greek agape if we want to get technical about it, the purported highest form of love, that which is essentially charitable. “I’m going to work really hard on this thing, put all I can into it and then offer it to you, hoping that you’ll like it. If you don’t, well, that’s OK, and maybe the next thing I make will please you a bit more.” Think about your favorite movies and you’ll likely recognize this in action, that after the movie ended, it felt like you received something from the experience, on some crucial level, and you were not really asked for anything in return. Even with something as seemingly lowbrow as an instructional YouTube video, we can tell when the person who made it did so out of a genuine desire to share something they know in an effort to help other folks and when they did so just to up their number of views and maybe attract some more lucrative sponsors. We like the former, grow wary of the latter. Doing the work, then, of thinking through audience reaction, knowing what you will need to supply in the piece for there to be sufficient context for your work to be received as you hope it will, this is much of the job at hand. This is what Hitchcock is alluding to in his note to Hunter. The no-scene scenes have to get nixed because they aren’t what the audience ultimately wants. Hunter may have liked those scenes personally but keeping them in the film as written would simply kill the conversation between him/Hitchcock and their audience who instead would be sitting there in the theater thinking, “Let’s get on with it.” It ends up being a very practical matter: instead of focusing on trying to impress the audience with what we are giving, we should respect the audience by considering the value of what they’ll be receiving.

As you invest time in reading great movies, you will over time develop a cache of impressions that won’t exist so much as pure knowledge as more an accumulated, living experience with really good work. One way to think about this is that by learning to read films well and doing it regularly, you will develop your intuition for the medium in which you work, for us, film. “Feed your eye,” said photographer Walker Evans, and that is exactly the task. Research tells us that developing intuition requires one to pay attention, over a long period of time, to an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable.³ The environment of chess is an example where with prolonged practice, the patterns become ingrained, memorized beyond conscious memory, and then called upon in the present during games where moves might be made by a Grandmaster without him thinking much about it consciously. There is no conscious decision—just the understanding of the next best move. The history of film is, of course, a much less regular environment to study, but there are enough consistencies if one is prepped with a solid interpretive framework to make useful sense of the playing field. The better and more you can extract and tuck away excellent creative solutions from work that has already succeeded, the stronger your film intuition will be and the better equipped you will be to make good creative choices when the heat is on (which is pretty much always).

Learning how to read works effectively and then to do the actual reading is a fully conscious endeavor. Yes, there are moments with any film (or book, or painting), usually upon first encounter with the art, that feels unconscious in nature. You simply absorb, and the experience can be transporting, transcendental. This is you as audience member, and it’s the first step. But a good reader of work has to go back after that first emotional experience and, purposefully, look again, through a slightly different lens, as a creator. Yours is not the luxury of the lay audience who can enjoy a movie, throw out the popcorn bucket, and go home. You now must return to the work and ask, How did they do it? It is only through reconstructing the history of the creation, parsing the creative decisions, and ascertaining how and why those decisions were made, noting the effect of those decisions on the audience, including ourselves, that we can bring the lessons of the great work to our own process and become better problem-solvers and creators ourselves. Reading for enjoyment and reading for understanding are two wholly separate endeavors, different parts of the mind being activated, and it’s this second type of reading that this book will concern itself with.

We’ll do our best to look closely a handful of really good scenes—from movies you may already have seen or maybe they’ll be new to you—and approach them as might an evolutionary biologist to their subject. Where did this thing come from? If there’s historical context for the story, can we figure out what that is? Once the filmmaker stumbled on the story, how did it evolve over time? What forces might have been behind some of the steps in that creative evolution? Might any of this inform some of the changes that I see in my own projects, those stories that I want to tell? Were those changes in direction forced by technical concerns? Dramatic concerns? Both? In summary, how did the filmmakers create the scene? The more research we can do into the production of the movie, the more we’ll learn about the process of making a good scene, and the better we’ll be able to make those intuitive creative decisions that we want very much to get better at, and this way we’ll have the confidence of knowing how really good filmmakers dealt with similar problems before us.

But finally, why is it, you might be wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Why Scenes?
• 2 The Rules of Enchantment—Aristotle’s Poetics
• 3 The Playground Scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963)—Believing Is Seeing and Constructing Subjectivity
• 4 The Death of the Thief Scene in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954)—Space, Time, and Efficient Exposition
• 5 The Dôme Café Scene in AGNÈS Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)—Real Time and Real Life in the Service of Fiction
• 6 The Wall of Fame Scene in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989)—Shaping the Scene for Complexity and Payoff
• 7 The Roadhouse Slaughter Scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987)—Invigorating Genre Through Subversion and Making the Familiar Strange Again
• 8 Why Bother?
• Bonus Chapter: Taylor Swift’s Music Video for “Shake It Off” (2014)—Micro Behaviors, Macro Humility, and Moving Toward Real Inclusion
• Appendix: Where to Watch the Scenes
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Texts
• Index