Script To Screen: “Blood Simple.”

The Coen brothers first feature-length film Blood Simple. (1984) is arguably one of their best.

Setup: Ray has been having an affair with Abby which hasn’t made her husband Julian too happy. But the tables get reversed as Ray has set about to dispatch Julian.

Here is the scene from the movie:

The Coen brothers are famous for storyboarding every shot and that’s reflected in their screenplays. Check out this video and see how elaborate their planning process is:

Now go back and compare the script to screen translation in Blood Simple. Even then in their very first feature film, the Coens established a filmmaking approach in which they worked out almost everything in advance through the scripting process.

I’ll see you in comments for a discussion of this scene from Blood Simple.

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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For more articles in the Script To Screen series, go here.