Save It For the Director

I see advice online sometimes to screenwriters, “Don’t do that, that’s the director’s job.” Most recently, I saw it about putting music in a script. Other times I see it about defining perspective [shots or angles] in a script, or sometimes it’s about setting and defining locations, or describing visuals, or defining characters “too strongly.”

Essentially, that advice is saying don’t write a movie, write some collection of dialogue delivered by undefined characters in undefined locations with undefined sets and visuals and undefined action and undefined perspective and —

That advice is wrong.

[And yes I used an m-dash up there and no I am not an A.I., quit it I shouldn’t even have to justify punctuation you maniacs.]

Sometimes some things shouldn’t be in a script. Like a whole boatload of camera directions that just make a script look like a manual on how to shoot a script instead of like a flowing film story on the page. Or like too much music that’s going to be too expensive and nobody reading the script has even heard the music, and that’s going to bog down a read without contributing to a sense of tone or a film on the page. There are reasons for going easy on some things in a script, or for crafting the script in such a way perspective is achieved without punching a reader in the eye with 2,000 camera directions in big bold caps.

But those reasons are not because a writer must leave things up to a director.

Until a director signs on, the writer is the director. And Location scout. And casting director. And set designer. The writer is the movie architect, creating a movie on the page that someone will experience reading the script and want to sign on to direct, to produce, to cast, to act in. And if everything is left blank in the script, with no sense of visuals, perspective, tone, characters, action, rhythm, place?

There is no movie on the page for anyone to direct.

People don’t sign onto film projects to write the movie for you. You are the architect of the movie on the page. You must write the movie on the page. Then there is something for people to get excited about signing onto to make a reality on the screen. Because it is a reality on the page, that you have directed, and cast, and built plot and place and characters and perspective and tone and action for. Because, right now? Sitting there writing that script?

You are the director.

So direct.

That doesn’t mean nothing will change as more people sign on to make the script a reality as a movie. Things will change.

It does mean, there better be a movie on the page to direct, or no director will ever sign on to make that script into a film.