Antoine, I appreciate your question, but you might as well be
saying, "I'm a very good cook, but I have no idea how to make
separate meals." Scenes are the heart of the film.
Without them, what do you got? Credits. (And that would
be odd to see only that when you go to a movie to lose yourself in
one heck of a good story. "How was the movie?"
"Wonderful. I loved all the names of people who did all
this stuff that I never saw.") Here's another way to put
it: Why do you watch a really good movie that you absolutely
can't watch enough and you do so over and over again? To get
to that answer, here's a scenario: You're just about to turn
off the television (you haven't been outside for three weeks, a
storm's on the way and you know you need to shovel the newspapers in
front of your door) and on comes That Movie You Love and -- and
here's the salient moment -- you just want to watch this one scene
that you love. This one scene. Now, this-one-scene
watching can often spread to watching-the-next-scene watching, and,
before you know it, you've watched so many scenes that you're
actually watching the rest of the movie again (the soggy
newspapers be damned!).
If you did have time for only one scene (Say a cyclone was headed
directly towards your house and you convinced yourself that it was
important to take shelter -- although not until you watched that
great scene where Al Pacino tells -- uh, you better get going.
Right.), you'd still be looking for some reward, some kind of
emotional satisfaction, even from that one scene. It
would be like sitting down for a very, very (very) short
movie. But sit we do. Thousands of us. Maybe
millions. Myself included (I've been late for meetings -- I'm
not boasting here -- because I found myself saying, as many of have
said so many times, "I love this part.") That
"part" is most likely a scene or a part of a scene from a
film somebody cherishes. If you think about it, you usually
watch that part, that scene, until it concludes, needing that
mini-emotional catharsis before heading off into your real
"unmovie" life (where there are real consequences for
being late after staying too long, watching movies, which makes you
late. Sort of existential and Sartre-esque, wouldn't you
agree, mon ami?)
That's a good place to begin in order to write good scenes:
recognize their importance. True, each scene is supposed to
inform the overall story and provide information, revealing the
journey of the protagonist, and many more tasks that you can find
out about in any screenwriting primer. Those technical
qualities are all good to keep in mind, but I encourage writers to
go much deeper than the conscious foundation of story and plumb the
depths of their own, unique and individual recesses of their
creative souls. Deep, huh? And one way to do that in
terms of scene writing is to initially take out all the stops and
(and I know this may sound simplistic at first) let yourself
write. Give yourself permission to write the scenes that
you've always wanted to write, that nobody has before, and those
that YOU would like to see up there on the screen.
You can think of your scenes as mini-movies. Give them
purpose, flair, emotion, conflict (ah, conflict. Have you
noticed how effective scenes usually have conflict, either overt or
covert?), action, tension, relief of tension and then more
tension. Twist us in our seats and call us "pretzel
people." Make us beg for release and don't give it to us
until we've earned it (whatever that means). Surprise us;
shock us; electrocute -- I mean "electrify" -- us; agonize
us; soothe us and confuse us (maybe not in that order). If the
director is going to do another setup and the crew is going to light
it (or not light it if it's outside. But even Apollo up there
doesn't want to waste his time making sure the sun is in the right
position in the sky if he isn't going to enjoy the spectacle down
below.), then you better give them something that will make it worth
everybody's while (including the investors. Those are the
creepy people who sneer at people taking long lunches and look at
their watches every few minutes. Not really. Some of my
best friends are investors. Not really. Which might
account for why I haven't sold a screenplay recently.)
What I'm trying to get across to you is that your scenes aren't
just bridges and connecting points to the final destination of the
screenplay. They ARE the screenplay. Maybe I should come
up with some pithy saying like, "The screenplay is the
scenes," -- grammatically incorrect, yet so provocative in its
stark rebelliousness -- (wherein I'll catch the conscience of
the... producer. Okay, I never said I was another
Shakespeare.) that will resound throughout literary history as a
watermark of screenplay wisdom. How about that?! I could
-- "watermark"! I forgot about those newspapers!
DcH