Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.
I usually write very few stage directions. I think a lot of that is a waste of time. The art of screenwriting is in its terseness, saying a lot with a little. I have no patience when I read a script where the writer describes this guy and what he's wearing and his glasses and his hair.
Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is - or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live.
Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.
When people embrace character, there's latzie. It's the stuffing of a scene that's not written. It's not in the stage direction and it's not in the words. When people embrace character, it informs their living, breathing moments in a scene so well.
Some stage directions you just simply have to throw away.
I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page sunrise over the desert and masses of a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.
You can skim those stage directions and go right to the dialogue. You can almost read the movie in the same amount of time it will take you to see the movie.
All modesty aside, I think I'm good at reading scripts. The way I read a script is as fast as I can, all in one sitting, and I don't read many of the stage directions. I only read enough stage directions to let me know where I am, because they're always so verbose and mostly horseshit. So I only read the dialogue, which allows me to see the movie in my mind's eye in real time.
Writers love to write those idiotic, long stage directions, and some of them worse than others. They have nothing to do with the movie. They're just jerking around.
Oliver [Goldstick] is a very dynamic and imaginative writer, so the stage directions were visceral and very clearly written.
A lot of actors choose parts by the scripts, but I don't trust reading the scripts that much. I try to get some friends together and read a script aloud. Sometimes I read scripts and record them and play them back to see if there's a movie. It's very evocative; it's like a first cut because you hear 'She walked to the door,' and you visualize all these things. 'She opens the door' . . . because you read the stage directions, too.
With everything I've done from "Jackie Brown" on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right, and consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and cut to "Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2."
One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.
or simply:
