Script To Screen: “Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)”

So many great monologues in the 2014 movie Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), but this one may be the best.

Setup: Under enormous personal pressure and his Broadway play on the verge of imploding, Riggan (Michael Keaton) busts his daughter Sam (Emma Stone), who has been in rehab, for smoking pot.

RIGGAN: It’s important to me! Alright? Maybe not to you, or your cynical playmates whose sole ambition is to end up going viral and who, by the way, will only be remembered as the generation that finally stopped talking to one another. But to me… To me… This is — God. This is my career, this is my chance to do some work that actually means something.

SAM: Means something to who? You had a career before the third comic book movie, before people began to forget who was inside the bird costume. You’re doing a play based on a book that was written 60 years ago, for a thousand rich, old white people whose only real concern is gonna be where they go to have their cake and coffee when it’s over. Nobody gives a shit but you. And let’s face it, Dad, it’s not for the sake of art. It’s because you just want to feel relevant again. Well, there’s a whole world out there where people fight to be relevant every day. And you act like it doesn’t even exist! Things are happening in a place that you willfully ignore, a place that has already forgotten you. I mean who are you? You hate bloggers. You make fun of twitter. You don’t even have a Facebook page. You’re the one who doesn’t exist. You’re doing this because you’re scared to death, like the rest of us, that you don’t matter. And you know what? You’re right. You don’t. It’s not important. You’re not important. Get used to it.

Silence. Riggan seems devastated, and Sam can see that.

SAM: Dad…

She looks at him sympathetically, but not knowing what to say… exits.

Here is the scene from the movie:

Sam’s monologue in the movie is almost verbatim per the script with a few tiny variations here and there. One notable addition? Instead of “I mean who are you,” in the movie the line is, “I mean who the fuck are you?” Yes, sometimes the F-word packs a punch and as the only F-bomb in this side, it does precisely that.

What I really want to zero in on is the transition in the scene from Sam’s hot anger through all the range of emotions expressed in Emma Stone’s face as she realizes that what she has said, while true in many respects, is incredibly hurtful. Watch that part of the scene starting here until its conclusion. That is what an actor can do with this scene description:

Silence. Riggan seems devastated, and Sam can see that. She looks at him sympathetically, but not knowing what to say… exits.

What if you were writing this on spec? No actors attached. You weren’t set up to direct. And you wanted to convey more specifically what Sam’s character was experiencing in this moment…

How would you write that scene description?

You may read the analysis we did on the Birdman script here.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a series on GITS where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.