Script To Screen: “Inception”

A nifty video from Legendary Pictures.

Over at the Zero Draft Thirty Facebook group, one of our members Richard Desjardin found something cool. Evidently Legendary Pictures is doing a recurring Script To Screen series. Here is a scene from the movie Inception.

Interesting to note how the four lines describing the destruction of the dreamscape is equivalent in screen time to all of the dialogue preceding it. This serves as a reminder that the ‘one page per minute’ formula is imprecise. If you write a script with a lot of action description, the page count may end up considerably less than the screen time. Likewise if you write a script with a lot of dialogue, it may end up significantly more (for example, The Social Network which clocks in at 163 pages with a runtime of 120 minutes.

More important note the strong verbs and vivid descriptors compared to the action in the Inception scene: reeling, braces, fragments, exploding, imploding, flying, mayhem, whirling, shields, debris. The words we choose in scene description is critical to convey the action. It’s a visual medium. We need to embrace that fact whenever we write.

Finally while I doubt Legendary Pictures was inspired by the GITS Script To Screen series, I have been doing that since 2008. And if you go here, you can see over 150 posts comparing a movie’s script to what ended up on the screen. We learn a lot by studying the transition from written word to filmed image. Indeed, reading the movie’s script while watching it is an excellent learning exercise and highly recommended.

For the Legendary Pictures Facebook page, go here.