The Descriptive Director

The following video clip from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) provides an immense amount of visual and emotional information.  Creepiness gushes from every corner of the screen without a single word of dialogue.  (It’s easy to miss Jesse Eisenberg.  Adrian Brody is almost unrecognizable.)

The Village (scene)

It is often said about movies that “The book was better than the movie.”  But how can all such vibrant visual and auditory information offered by movie scenes be represented on the page?

What professions are required to make an exceptional movie scene?  Are they not the following:

• Acting

• Sound

• Editing

• Casting

• Makeup

• Lighting

• Directing

• Set design

• Costuming

• Story writing

• Screenwriting

• Special effects

• Cinematography

• Location selection

• Musical score composition

The work done by hundreds of people making movies must come across so naturally that the audience is barely aware of it.  Michelangelo is attributed with the following statement:

“If you knew how much work went into it,

you wouldn’t call it genius.”

The more I learn about description in fiction writing, the more I believe that authors must be experts in all the above fields.

Rewatch the video clip, paying special attention to the characters’ facial expressions and hand movements.  How much input did the director have in setting those?  Notice the character at the table on the left, cleaning off his plate.  He is dressed better than the other characters.  We later learn he’s overly conscious of appearance.  Why show that so early in the story when it seems insignificant?

All of this is the result of exceptional film directing.

Who is the “director” in your stories? You are.

How can you possibly compete with Scorsese, Kubrick, Coppola, Eastwood, and Hitchcock?

Technique to write an award-winning scene

May I offer you some help? A way you can learn to create deep, organic, sapid descriptions in your stories is to do the following:

• Find a scene on YouTube from a movie that closely resembles a scene in your story.  There are many thousands of scenes from every kind of movie.

• Write down what you see in those scenes.  The people’s eye movements, postures, clothing, and hand gestures.  Describe the furniture, the walls, and the lighting.

This exercise isn’t to help you plagiarize scenes in movies, but to give you practice in recognizing what the conscious minds of moviegoers and readers often miss.  You, as the author, must provide a rich display of detail that your readers won't recognize consciously. 

All that work, and they won’t even notice it.

You must act as attorneys who cause juries (your readers) to think, feel, and concentrate on whatever you want them to think, feel, and concentrate on.

You are to establish mood, setting, tension, casting, lighting, costuming, and the rest without the readers being aware.  By the time they’re used to the water and have an idea of the depth and breadth of the pool they jumped into, they’re already hooked (and soaked).

Speaking of being in the water, watch the following video from the movie Jaws (1975).

Men in the water

What do you hear in the background?  How is the character speaking?  What is his pace?  What are the expressions of the other characters?  Does the rise and fall of the ocean through the windows match the swinging of the overhead light above the camera?

When you were growing up, your mother taught you not to make up stories or manipulate people.  As an author, that’s what you want to do best.  And your mother would be proud of you now.

And I’m proud of you, too.  But only if you describe your mother in the greatest possible light.