Scene Description Spotlight: “Unforgiven”

The folksy narrative voice in sync with the movie’s Western genre and a clean read with bursts of imagematic writing.

I remember reading the script to Unforgiven (1992) and being struck by two things: It was a clean read and it was a compelling read. This scene, which takes place in Act Three, is a great example of both.

Feels like the transcript of someone telling the story orally. And how about some of the descriptors:

A real folksy feel in the language. And to really drive home the narrative voice:

“Those Easterners” — as compared to the narrator who is not from the East. All of that adds to the compelling nature of the story.

Each line in the shoot-out suggesting a camera shot, you can just see the action right there on the page.

Here is the movie version of the scene:

Unforgiven, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for screenwriter David Webb Peoples, is a great example of a writer using scene description to the story’s benefit: The folksy narrative voice in sync with the movie’s Western genre and a clean read with strong bursts of imagematic writing.

Comment Archive

For more Scene Description Spotlight articles, go here.