Script To Screen: “Big Fish”

A scene from the 2003 movie Big Fish, screenplay by John August, novel by Daniel Wallace.

Plot Summary: A son tries to learn more about his dying father by reliving stories and myths he told about his life.

Here is the scene in the script:

Here is the movie version:

There are some interesting cuts in the movie:

• No tear drop. Probably because it seems out of place for Sandra to express that level of emotion for a guy she barely knows, precisely what she conveys in the next line.
• The flashback to the witch’s eyes is cut. Perhaps because it interrupted the flow of the scene between Edward, Sandra, and Don.
• This exchange is gone:

Sandra: How can I convince you to stop?
Edward: Go out with me.
Sandra: Okay.

I suspect two things contributed to this cut. First, the smiles the actors summon up convey the point visually. Second, the following voice-over narration by adult Edward intimates that the couple did go out because they ended up getting married. So the sides were deemed extraneous.

How about that scene description from John August?

• The adult DON PRICE arrives. He’s 230 pounds of football-playing, Skynyrd-loving, fraternity-proud muscle. And he’s pissed.
• Don Price squeezes down hard, trying to shit the unshittable.

A reminder that we can use scene description not only to convey action, but also entertain the reader.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

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