How to Write Great Dialogue with Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin | SWN

This was a Friday night in New York I'm in the studio there are no friends around the TV doesn't work the stereo doesn't work there's no internet I didn't have three dollars in my pocket what I had was my friend's grandfather's semi-automatic type

write

r which also had paper, so the only way to entertain myself was to put a piece of paper in this type

write

r and I did what I had never done before: write in

dialogue

. and i stayed up all night that was the moment i fell in love with the sound of my own voice um what's it like directing an average

sorkin

script as opposed to others? there's a lot more um that's the most important thing they are usually you know you get a script it's like 100 or 120 pages and half of them will be descriptions of how to do things that you then figure out how to ignore if you can as a filmmaker but in this there is none of that description because there is no room for it there is only 185 pages of

dialogue

dialogue is the least teachable part of writing it is also the most personal part of writing i grew up in a big family everyone in my family is smarter that I everyone in my circle of friends was smarter than I really enjoyed the sound of uh of smart people trying to convince each other of something uh the sound of yeah, but have you thought about it this way, people play devil's advocate and then while that was going on, my parents took me to plays all the time and I was often too young to understand what was happening on stage.

Would you like to take me to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when she was nine or something, but I loved the sound of dialogue. I loved the sound. of these

great

actors and actresses, the fantastic language colliding with each other, it sounded like music to me and I wanted to imitate that sound, it's not just that the dialogue sounds like music to me, it's actually music every time you speak out loud for the simple fact to do it. of interpretation those words what you are saying has all the properties of music the dialogue has rhythm, pitch, volume and meter and it has absolutely all the properties of music, so there are musical rules that apply if you are in 4 4 times There has to be four beats in measure there can't be three there can't be five uh uh so you put beats in your dialogue I don't put them there but they are there, that's why the actor will know that if he or she has eliminated a word from a line or has replaced a two-syllable word with a one-syllable word, it doesn't sound good, uh, it doesn't sound so good, the joke doesn't work, it's the quick response, uh It's not easy when you receive a script for an errand, now whether it's a newsroom episode or a Jobs episode, it's daunting and there's only one way to do it and there's kind of movies that you can paraphrase and you can somehow.

I more or less know, that's not what you do with Aaron, it's like what you do in the theater, you don't change a word, the playwright is king or queen and you forget to improvise, that's what men do, no you can start late before you started. On set, you and David Fincher spent three weeks in a room with the main actors, with Andrew Garfield, Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, and you went through the script word by word, just rehearsing the lines, talking about the meaning behind each word . Was it your impression that Fincher typically follows that process or was it because it was such a dialogue-intensive film that he wanted the actors to spend more time with the words on the page?

It was because it was such a dialogue-intensive movie, you know? There are more people with

great

IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States, that can't be true, that's what would explain that, well, first of all, there are a lot of people living in China, but here is My point, how do you distinguish yourself from the population of people who got 1600 on their sats? Yes, there are 10 lines. Yes, I am very physical when I write, I play all the roles, I talk out loud a lot. One of the things I think helps is that you're less likely to write a line of dialogue that's nondescript.

I love you dear as the stars love. You know, once you have to say it out loud, you'll get the message. I can't ask an actor to try to soften that line when I'm writing. I'm talking out loud. I'm playing all the roles in my head and if it goes well, I'm jumping out of my desk walking. I once broke my nose writing I constantly try to start arguments with myself because you're always looking for where the friction point is two people have to disagree on something for there to be a scene sometimes I make up a dialogue in my head and then I keep doing it that 20 30 minutes an hour two hours I'll realize that yeah, you should really write this down, write down those first two lines of dialogue that I was thinking about, write down the first two lines of dialogue that are energy uh uh at work there really.

I think the energy hits the page and once you're loaded as fast as you can you know you don't know what you're doing if the lines come like you know honey dripping from a jar stop leaving it uh you still don't know what you're doing To get a good idea, your mind has to flip through a rolodex of 50,000 bad ideas to get there, so I go through My Days and Nights Watching Really Bad Movies in my head, I mean, that's it, I'm in that kind of mood. . I do nothing but convey bad dialogue, bad scenes, bad everything, until I accidentally fall, wait a second, uh, that's what I was looking for when I was writing how the words sound are just as important to me as what the words mean. words script every sound you've made every verbal hiccup uh every um and oz jessica has a line in the movie i was a brat but the line is actually that it was a breath and it's written mm m m i was a brat i like it when the people interrupt each other I love overlapping dialogue I love the sound of two people talking at once uh so I'll write dual or even triple dialogue uh sometimes because that's what you told Lt.

Kendrick to do when everything went wrong you left these guys lose your honor, you did it, you ordered the coded ring. I love writing more than anything else. Being able to do what you love is a tremendous gift. Being recognized for something you've already done and that's the icing on the cake.