1000 Dollar Film

If it doesn’t sound natural, cut it. If your character is a teenager from a small town in the Midwest, it’s likely that he’s not going to walk around speaking in lengthy scientific phrases. Unless it’s part of your plot (perhaps he’s River Phoenix’s character Wolfgang in The Explorers?), change or cut the dialogue.

Make sure your dialogue is easy to understand. It’s one thing to have a character with a weird accent or feature to make him interesting; it’s another to make him incomprehensible. Unless he’s supposed to be that way (like Farmer Fran in The Waterboy, for example), either change the dialogue or the actor’s delivery so audiences don’t get frustrated.

Don’t underestimate the power of monologues and narration. Though you may find them dull, they have done wonderful things in movies like The Shawshank Redemption and Of Mice and Men.

Make the dialogue interesting. If it’s slow, be sure it has a stirring point (such as Tommy Lee Jones’s lines in No Country for Old Men). Nobody wants to watch a movie where a girl sits around talking about eating toast all day. Unless your characters are detectives, make them stumble upon revelations the way real people do–not directly question their family and friends. Beat around the bush to create drama, but not to the point where it gets tiresome.

Let your characters lie–particularly if they are liars! Average people lie–mostly little lies–every day. If your character is really depressed in a scene, he may lie about it to a parent, saying he feels fine or even great. This will provide a very realistic element to your film.

Tags: character dialogue, dialog, dialogue tips in filmmaking, film dialogue, making cheap movies, movies on a budget