Long-Winded: Actors and Movies with the Most Dialogue

Charts! Infographics! Numbers!

On July 1, Kaylin Walker posted something on her blog in which she posed this question:

Which movies and characters have the most dialogue?

Last April, Polygraph complied and analyzed 2,000 screenplays to study gender in film dialogue. This analysis uses their summary dataset (for each movie: its characters, the number of words they spoke, their age, and gender) paired with data scraped from IMDb to match characters to actors, movies and directors. To make sure the results were interpretable and relevant, this analysis is restricted to films with a significant number of IMDb rating votes (13,000).

One thing she found was that the average script has about 9,000 words, but as Kaylin discovered, word count can range higher:

And lower:

But the most interesting thing I discovered in her piece was this: Dialogue per genre. Check it out:

These numbers basically confirm my sense of things: Comedy and Drama on the high end of dialogue, Action and Horror on the low end. The latter would typically rely more on visual storytelling (Explosions! Murders! Death!) whereas the former may tend to involve characters interacting (Humor! Revelations! Monologues!).

This is a good reminder that we need to be aware of the genre in which we’re writing. Certainly we can write against conventional wisdom, e.g., a horror film with a lot of dialogue, but we should do so knowing what a reader’s expectations most likely would be.

For the rest of Kaylin’s article, go here.