Friday, November 25, 2005

Sub-text


"People don't talk in full sentences. There's subtext in real dialogue. I would cite something like this: You're in a restaurant, you're waiting for a guy who's really late and you're pissed. When they walk through the door, you don't give them a big speech about how late they are. Usually they say, 'Oh, sorry I'm late,' and you just say, 'It's OK,' but it's not OK. In a movie there are a lot of ways of showing that subtext. You have an opportunity to use people's faces, details, and visuals to counter the dialogue to actually have dialogue that's full of subtext and not put the subtext in the dialogue. That's very important. You have to know how to do that."
– Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal

Taken from Creative Screenwriting Daily:

Creative Screenwriting