Daily Dialogue — September 6, 2012

Scott Myers

06 Sep 2012 • 1 min read

MCKEE: Anyone else?

Kaufman timidly raises his hand.

MCKEE: Yes?

KAUFMAN: You talked about Crisis as the ultimate decision a character makes, but what if a writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens, where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies. They struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved. More a reflection of the real world —

MCKEE: The real world? The real fucking world? First of all, if you write a screenplay without conflict or crisis, you’ll bore your audience to tears. Secondly: Nothing happens in the real world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! There’s genocide and war and corruption! Every fucking day
somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love! People lose it, for Christ’s sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know much
about life! And why the fuck are you taking up my precious two hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it!

— Kaufman (Nicholas Cage), McKee (Brian Cox), Adaptation (2002), screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, based on the book by Susan Orlean

http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=VMjSt

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is riffs, suggested by churnage. Today’s suggestion is by Teddy Pasternak.

Trivia: The credits include Donald Kaufman as the co-writer. He is also featured as a character in the movie, and the movie is dedicated “In loving memory” of Donald (at the end of the credits). But Donald is just a fictional character himself.

Dialogue On Dialogue: This is one of the greatest moments in cinema history related to screenwriting, just a brilliant blast and an incredible delivery by Brian Cox.

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