Screenwriting Tips: Creating Flow Between Scenes

Interesting discussion in comments involving our analysis of Hanna. It began with this observation by jem drawing on the Scene-By-Scene Breakdown of the movie script:

Two examples of the “off screen movie”(from Wordplayer)?

http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp40.Off-Screen.Movie.html

First:
Page 55: Erik emerges from the water at a Danish dock. Two policemen approach him.

Page 56: Marissa and Lewis watch as the two Danish policemen’s bodies are pulled from the sea. Lewis has called Interpol. Marissa dresses him down, telling him to regain control of the storyline, and that “I’m the first and last person Erik Heller will see.”

Second:
Page 70: Danish hotel. Erik is getting civilized with a hot shower. Afterwards, we see him reading a postcard sent by Hanna from the Morocco hotel: “Mission Accomplished.”
(*we never do see Hanna write this)

Here is a sequence more of “this…to that… to this… to that”:

Page 80–85: France, night, the mini-van stops next to a shipping container storage depot. Isaac’s car stops behind them. Hanna tells Sophie not to follow her and she bolts out of the mini-van into the container facility. Isaac, Titch and Razor chase her, almost nab her. Hanna escapes across the tops of the containers. Drops down, is about to get away when she sees Sophie HAS followed her and is in danger. Hanna kills Razor, Isaac shoots and hits Sophie. Hanna drags Sophie away, then sprints toward a scrap metal yard, dives into a canal. She boards a scrap barge motoring away.

Page 86A-D/90: Marissa interrogates individual members of the hippy family about Hanna and where she may be going. The parents are clueless, Sophie clams up to protect her friend, but Miles tells Marissa what he overheard Hanna tell Sophie: That Hanna’s going to the “Grimm’s house” in Berlin.

Page 91–93B: Hanna jumps off the barge, now in Berlin. Cut to an abandoned amusement park. Hanna slips through the fence into the surreal playground. She goes to the “Wilhelm Grimm’s House” — a “Fairytale theme ‘Fun House’ being slowly digested by nature.” She knocks on the door, and an old man in clown face opens the door. This is KNEPFLER. He knows Erik, tells Hanna he’s been waiting for her for a very long time. He gives her an envelope with new identity papers, passport and money.

Page 93B-93F: Isaac’s car and a second pulls up. It’s Isaac, Titch and Marissa. Knepfler sends Hanna upstairs, where she hides under a bed with “The Big Bad Wolf” dressed like Grandma in it. They tie up and beat Knepfler. We see a picture of him, Erik and Johanna together. He tells them that Erik is suppose to meet Hanna here tomorrow. Marissa goes upstairs to make a phone call to her boss, Walt. Listening under the bed, Hannah hears two surprising things during the call: that Erik is not her father, and that the woman making the call is the real Marissa Wiegler.

The “off screen movie” and the “this to that”, the first being more of a surprise and the second more of Hitchcock’s bomb under the table, had me thinking what are the relationships, the different dramatic effects. I’m not really sure, just an observation I noticed. Are there any takeaways?

My reply:

Jem, good catches on both fronts and thanks for the link to Wordplayer. Still a valuable online resource for screenwriters.

Re “off screen movie”: In my view, this has become more of a feature of screenwriting in the last ten years or so. I can virtually guarantee that if I had turned in a draft of Hanna in 1987 when I broke into the business, and it did NOT show Erik dispatching the two policemen, that would have warranted a development note: “Must see policemen killed.”

Something has happened over time whereby the filmmaking community has deduced — rightly, I believe — that the audience can make those jumps. Erik intersects with cops… next scene, cops dead… therefore Erik killed cops. This type of off screen storytelling does several things:

* It engages the audience on a different level. Instead of sitting there passively watching EVERYTHING unfold, by NOT showing certain events, the filmmakers invite the active participation of the audience’s imagination. How did Erik kills those cops? It’s a fleeting experience in the moment of watching the film, however it does cause the audience to engage mental possibilities.

* It speeds things along. Obviously if the screenwriters had to show Erik dispatching the cops, that would require at least a half page, probably more. Obviously there are times in an action movie where you DO want to show… you know… ACTION. But my guess the editorial choice here was in part informed by this simple fact: Erik is not the Protagonist. Hanna is. Better to save page count with Erik so the script could spend it with Hanna and her various fights.

* It helps to avoid redundancy. Remember in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy did here? At some point, even in an action movie, the question becomes: How many fights can you have? Too many and they lose their effect on the audience.

Another good example of off screen story is in The Dark Knight. Do you realize we never actually see Rachel and Dent get kidnapped? Joker tells Batman, cut to the victims tied up in their respective sites. Again the audience can make the logical jump: If Joker SAYS they have been kidnapped and we SEE them tied up, then we can assume they were, indeed, kidnapped.

One more example: This scene from No Country for Old Men. Chigurh tracks down Carla Jean. Yet another coin toss. Yet her death happens off screen. All we see is Chigurh exit the house, then — chillingly — check the bottom of each of his shoes, presumably for blood or body matter. And that raises a fourth benefit from off screen storytelling:

* It can be clever. The Chigurh-Carla Jean bit of business does all three things noted above, but also is just a head-nodding cool editorial choice. Everything about that moment — with the pre-lap of the boys bicycles over Chigurh’s determined face, to the long shot of the house, to the boys cycling by in the f.g., to Chigurh quietly exiting, then checking his shoes — the mundane nature of those visual only heighten the horror of what just transpired inside the house… what we did NOT see.

Takeaway: Characters exist in a story universe. That universe exists 24/7/365. The choices we make of what to include of that raw narrative material are key. And sometimes, the best choice is to NOT show something happen. Carry that awareness with you as you craft and writer your stories.

Following up, jem, on your example from Hanna of “this to that” writing, in reality most of the time, we want to try to create that seamless flow of events in a screenplay. This leads to that, which leads to this, which leads to that. There should always be some logical flow of WHY one scene follows another.

But what you’ve identified with the Hanna scenes is also about the question HOW.

P. 85: Hanna escapes on a scrap barge.

P. 90: Marissa discovers from the boy where Hanna is headed.

NOTE: There is an off screen story at work here as they don’t show Marissa intersecting the hippie family, rather enter the interrogation in media res.

P. 93D: Hanna in Berlin at the abandoned amusement park.

NOTE: We barely see any of Hanna’s trek to Berlin.

P. 93F: Marissa and her goons show up at the amusement park.

NOTE: We see NONE of the Bad Guys’ trek to Berlin.

That is seamless action and we understand why it all happens, but the how involves much use of off screen storytelling. The transition from France to Germany happens almost like *THAT* because the filmmakers skipped the transition scenes.

Takeaway: Track the logic of going from one scene to the next answering the question WHY do these scenes abut each other. But also ask HOW, as in how can I make this the best, most interesting flow of scenes, possibly even making use of off screen storytelling.

Final thoughts: If you don’t do this, you run the risk of suffering from The Dreaded Episodic Curse. That’s when a reader says, “Your story felt episodic.” The why and how of scene transitions is a big part of that issue. Another is the reader isn’t engaged by the characters, especially the Protagonist. But that’s for another post.

Can you think of other good examples of either “off screen story” or “this to that” in movies? Any other takeaways?

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