Clarity

Clarity. You should always be searching for clarity in your writing. I read a script the other day where two characters had very similar names, which of course made them easily confused. For me, I don't even usually give two characters the same first letter of their name, but that's because I'm lazy and I just like to hit "B" and let MovieMagic fill in the rest. It won't do that right if there's more than one B. But I always try to make sure my names are very different from each other because you don't have an actor's face to help you differentiate.

It's not just names, though. Take a war movie. All those white brown-haired men with helmets on and dirt on their face get really tough to tell apart. Give each one a personality trait we can all cling to and somehow they become individuals. Saving Private Ryan does an excellent job of this.

That extends sometimes to production stuff as well. I was watching The Eagle Has Landed the other day, and the cast consisted of Americans, British actors and probably some real Germans, and they were all playing Nazis. Robert Duvall wore the stereotypical German uniform, had an eye patch and spoke with a very clear German accent. Okay, he's German. But then another guy came in with a very distinct British accent dressed in a uniform most people are unfamiliar with - I believe it was a German naval uniform but wasn't sure - and they discussed kidnapping Winston Churchill.

Winston Churchill is British. This guy was British. I was confused. Is he a spy? It took me like four minutes of careful listening and thinking to realize he was supposed to be German as well. Then we got a scene of Michael Caine, who is also British, with some kind of hybrid accent and wearing a completely different unfamiliar uniform, and he's saving Jews from concentration camps. Then Donald Sutherland shows up and speaks with an Irish accent. But he's actually playing an Irishman.

It took a good while for me to sort this mess out in my head. That's casting and the actors more than the screenwriter, but I think one of the big problems I had with this mix of characters is that the beginning of the film was so talky. They keep naming characters who aren't in the scene so when we finally meet those characters I'm not sure - is this the guy they were talking about? Is he German too? I don't know because he has a British accent. This is something the writer can head off.

We can't always control the cast but we can control, to some degree anyway, what comes out of their mouths. We need to make sure it leaves no room for confusion.