Script To Screen: “The American”
The opening incident in the 2010 movie The American, starring George Clooney, screenplay by Rowan Joffe, based on a novel by Martin Booth.
The opening incident in the 2010 movie The American, starring George Clooney, screenplay by Rowan Joffe, based on a novel by Martin Booth.
Setup: An assassin [Clooney] who thinks he is out of harm’s way discovers otherwise.
The scene in the movie:
When Jack shoots Ingrid … that is quite a shock. Notice how the script drives home the point: underlined and italicized scene description.
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 articles in the Script To Screen series, go here.