The Scene That Starts The Film Process & Writing For Actors

In my case, there is usually one scene that starts the process of making a film.

I may not know the film yet. I may not know the ending. I may not know if the idea is strong enough to survive all the practical humiliations of making a film.

But there is one scene I keep seeing. The process is more violent than the visualization, which is not neat or polished - it's a prima need to understand what I'm seeing and feeling intense curiosity towards that one scene that keeps circling my internal visuals.

(P.S. while writing this post, some AI functions in my computer were acting up - seems like it's not a great fan of my English writing structure. I have asked the AI politely several times to go out and play. Even though it's raining, it shouldn't stay inside - I got it out of the house when I told it could actually feel the rain, mine it for more processing, and now it's just out there, chasing raindrops around a tree).

It comes back when I am walking. It comes back when I am supposed to be thinking about something else. It has a pressure around it. A private electricity. I don’t fully understand it, but I want to see it happen.

That is usually where the film begins for me.

Not officially. Not in the funding application. Not in a neat synopsis.

Privately.

In the mind’s eye.

I have been calling this the dominant scene. I don’t know if that is the perfect phrase, but it is close enough for now. It is the scene that dominates the project before the project knows what it is. It is more violent than “the scene that wants to exist.” It is not asking politely. It grabs the film by the neck and says - you are going to write your way toward me.

That has happened in all my films, I think.

If you asked me about each one, I could probably point to the scene that started it. Not necessarily the first scene in the finished film. Not necessarily the biggest scene. Just the first scene that had real force.

The baby version of the film.

Small, strange, unfinished - but alive.

There is a feeling when this happens. It is not only visual. I see something, but I also feel the scene pulling at me. A person in a situation. A room. A silence. A gesture. A collision between people. Sometimes I know the emotion. Sometimes I only know there is an emotion hiding there and I want to find out what it is.

That curiosity is important.

If I am not curious, there is nothing.

I can admire an idea. I can think something is clever. I can understand why a story might work. But admiration is not enough. Cleverness is not enough. I need the scene to bother me a little. I need it to keep returning.

When that happens, I start writing around it.

I write toward it.

Sometimes I write scenes only because I am trying to build a road to that one scene. Later those scenes might be cut. That does not make them wasted. They were scaffolding. They helped me climb close enough to see what the film was asking for.

And then, after some time, I return to the script and see what has to go.

Distance is useful.

Distance removes the perfume.

When I am inside the writing, everything can feel necessary. A line can feel necessary because I like it. A scene can feel necessary because it explains something. A moment can feel necessary because it solved a problem three drafts ago.

But when I come back later, I usually see the extra weight. I see what is too much. I see where the writing is trying to make the audience understand something that should be felt instead.

This is where I don’t really think in rules.

I don’t have a list of scene types I refuse to write. People talk about exposition scenes, apology scenes, phone calls, arguments, people explaining themselves. And yes, all of those can become dead very quickly.

But I don’t think I avoid a type.

I distrust deadness.

If the scene belongs to the film, it belongs. If it doesn’t, it has to go. The problem is that the scene does not always tell you immediately. Sometimes it pretends to belong because it is useful. Sometimes it carries information, but no life.

That is a dangerous little creature in a script: the useful dead scene.

It helps the plot but does not breathe.

Then the actors arrive.

This changes everything.

Once I start to know the actors as human beings, the script begins to move again. I adjust dialogue around them. Not to make it casual. Not to make it easier. But because I begin to understand what they can carry.

Some actors can carry silence.

Some actors can carry contradiction.

Some actors can carry one line and make it feel like ten years of private history.

Some actors need fewer words, because their face is already doing the work.

This is one of the strange privileges of being a writer-director. You write something alone, and then another person arrives with a body, a voice, a nervous system, a past, a rhythm. Suddenly the writing is not only yours anymore. It becomes something that has to pass through them.

And if you listen carefully, the script tells you what it no longer needs.

I think emotional truth in a scene is often physical.

A position.
A gesture.
A tone.
A silence.
A rhythm.
Something avoided.
Something touched for too long.
Something not looked at.

I often know the emotion I want to come across, but I don’t want to place it directly in the words. I want to hide it to a certain degree. Not to be clever. Not to confuse the audience. But because emotion becomes more alive when the audience has to find it.

Maybe this is where the child in me still likes detective stories.

You plant the clue.

You place the evidence.

You let the audience sense that something is moving underneath the surface.

Then, if it works, the emotion appears without announcing itself. There is a small metamorphosis. Something that was hidden becomes felt.

I don’t want the character to say, “I am ashamed.”

I want shame to pull the eyes down.

I don’t want the character to say, “I am afraid.”

I want fear to make the body approach something like it is an opposite magnet.

I don’t want the character to say, “I want this.”

I want desire to leak through the eyes, or through the body leaning slightly toward what it should not touch.

Habit is different. Habit can be almost mechanical. A person doing something without looking inward. Repeating a motion. Cleaning a cup. Opening a drawer. Checking a phone. Folding something. Continuing an old ritual after the meaning has gone out of it.

That is where writing and directing start to become the same thing for me.

I am not only writing what people say.

I am writing what they hide.

I am writing what their body fails to hide.

And maybe that is why the dominant scene matters so much. It has a secret inside it and it arrives as a primal pressure of curiosity.

There are moments when an idea/scene grabs me with such force that my curiosity becomes almost obsessive (calmly so with experience). It pulls my attention (partly, again, experience has taught me to keep a certain distance to the filmmaking process) away from everything else. For years, I can find myself returning to the same images, the same questions, the same emotional pressure, trying to understand what it is asking of me.

During that time - I am not really trying to invent the film - more, trying to catch up with it.

The work becomes an attempt to give that curiosity a body. Little by little, it stops being something that exists only in my imagination and becomes something I can touch, hear, and eventually stand inside. It becomes a real place, with real actors, real locations, real light, and real silence.

Looking back, many if not all of my films began this way. As a curiosity that refused to let me go until I had given it a three-dimensional life.