Script To Screen: “Flight”
A scene from the 2012 movie Flight, written by John Gatins.
A scene from the 2012 movie Flight, written by John Gatins.
Plot Summary: An airline pilot saves almost all his passengers on his malfunctioning airliner which eventually crashed, but an investigation into the accident reveals something troubling.
Here is the final scene in the movie:
Here is the scene from the movie:
This is a great example of something we see quite often in comparing script to screen: How what they shoot pulls back on the degree of overt emotion in the screenplay. Compare these moments to the scene:
WHIP chokes up. WILL nods. It’s intense.
Again WHIP has to tamp down his emotions.
WILL nods, both men are struggling to keep it together.
He begins to alternately laugh and sob as there is great relief in the promise of a connection with his son.
In addition, some sides of dialogue get cut from the film version: “This is a real surprise; a great surprise. I haven’t seen you… Listen Will, it means everything to me that you came here. You are an amazing kid and you deserve great things…”
The emotion on the page is played very much up top, the two characters barely able to transact the moment without breaking down. On screen, the emotion is there, but it lies under the surface. And by pulling back, the scene plays really well, not veering toward melodrama — the potential is there on the page — but giving the scene room to breathe.
And then there is one final great touch in the movie version right at the very end. Watch the scene and listen to the audio accompanying Whip’s last line. See if you catch it.
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.
For more Script To Screen posts, go here.