The Crying Game [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION I tend to write Scripts as sparely as possible, fór two reasons. Firstly, the barer the language is the easier it is to concentrate on the essentials when directing what you've written. And those essentials I would define as what is seen, what happens, and what is said. Secondly, because elaborate visual, psychological, or visceral description tends to confuse those you have to work with- designers, cinematographers, and, most importantly, actors. The kind of sentence that may be appropriate in a növel or a short story would be nőt only inappropriate, it would be misleading. To take an example from Kafka: 'As Gregor Samsa awoke one moming from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed intő a gigantic insect.' One of the most beautiful and succinct sentences ever written, bút one belonging to a world of realities that is most unhelpful to the filmmaker. The number of questions it raises are légion. It implies, fór a start, a multitude of prior days on which Gregor Samsa woke up to find himself a humán being. And assuming one could construct the insect that does justice to Kafka's imagination, how does one convey that this insect once was Gregor Samsa? How on earth does an insect wake up? This is nőt to say that these problems are insurmountable, merely that the linguistic realities with which Kafka deals are light-years away from those the scriptwriter must handle. Which again, I would define as what is seen, what happens, and what is said. There are, however, linguistic pleasures to be gleaned from scriptwriting-apart from those one reads about in screenwriting manuals about dramatic structure, the 'arc' of the character (whatever that is), the first, second, and third act (why only three?), and so on. And those pleasures are to do with the application of language towards a quite specific purpose. When you strip it bare of all psychological implications and metaphoric weight, as you must, you are left with the heart of the matter: the accurate, succinct, and unduttered description of what you